Stay Safe: ETH researchers, together with the IFRC, co-develop a guide for safety and health on reconstruction sites
Researchers from the Chair of Sustainable Construction, together with colleagues from the IFRC-Shelter Research Unit, developed guidelines for safety and health on small post-disaster reconstructions. The guide covers a diverse range of information, addressing project managers, professional staff, local staff, and volunteers, and it aims to provide the basic knowledge to protect the workers on site.
In the building sector, workers are continuously exposed to the risk of accidents, resulting in one of the highest fatality rates among sectors. Especially in low-income countries, where regulations are less likely to be enforced and resources for full personal protection equipment are scarce, working on construction sites involves health and safety risks. All those risks are intensified during a post-disaster reconstruction process, due to the extreme shortages of resources caused by the emergency combined with the challenging coordination of workers, staff, and non-skilled volunteers on the building sites. Most of the accidents, however, could be avoided.
To contribute to worker safety, Giulia Celentano, a doctoral researcher at the Chair of Sustainable Construction, together with her student Caroline Sieger and colleagues from the external pageIFRC-Shelter Research Unit, designed a guide to assist managers on construction sites, which provides a set of basic rules for the establishment of an effective operational security framework. The guide addresses many of the issues that the informal construction and self-construction sector faces daily and it can be easily adopted by all individuals involved in reconstruction works, as well as in construction projects in contexts of scarce resources.
It also includes icons, packaged in thematic posters to facilitate print and distribution, serving as non-verbal communication means to overcome potential language barriers. The document can be of use for any building operation in the post-disaster context and all agencies, NGOs, and grassroots groups that are operating in the construction sector.
Find the full report Downloadhere (PDF, 11.9 MB).