Respond: A Construction Safety Week Technical Bulletin
Construction Safety Week’s new technical bulletin series is designed to highlight this year’s All In Together theme focusing on the pillars of Recognize, Respond and Respect. Recognizing hazards is a cornerstone of safety planning in the construction industry, and it’s critical to build on this by implementing direct controls to actively prevent serious injury and fatalities—or SIFs.
This second technical bulletin introduces a powerful framework known as the hierarchy of energy control, designed to provide a cohesive way for jobsites to respond to high energy hazards. This emphasizes the overarching goal of creating a common framework for hazard recognition and response, making it easier to build it into the project from day one.
The U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that construction fatalities accounted for nearly 20% of all workplace deaths in recent data. This highlights the need for a systematic, robust framework that will help mitigate high energy and high hazard situations. The hierarchy of energy control is a structured method for managing high energy hazards by ranking controls from most effective to least effective. It prioritizes direct controls that remove or physically protect people from hazards rather than relying on human behavior alone.
Direct controls are critical because they continue to protect workers even when fatigue or human error occurs. When hazards are eliminated or isolated, the jobsite becomes inherently safer.
Direct controls work best when they are not treated as one-time fixes, but instead embedded into every phase of a project:
- Design: Eliminate hazards before they exist by designing safer structures and access points.
- Procurement: Select vendors and systems that prioritize engineered safety solutions.
- Execution: Use physical barriers, automation, isolation systems and smart sequencing to keep workers out of harm’s way.
- Operations: Maintain controls, verify their effectiveness and empower workers to raise concerns when conditions change.
The hierarchy of energy control remains the most effective way to systematically prevent and eliminate SIFs in the construction industry.
To learn more about the bulletin series and Construction Safety Week 2026, visit https://www.constructionsafetyweek.com/technical-bulletins/.
SEE ALSO: RECOGNIZE: A CONSTRUCTION SAFETY WEEK TECHNICAL BULLETIN
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