Development of an observational checklist for falling risk assessment of high-voltage transmission tower construction workers

Falls from elevation have been reported to cause the highest number of fatalities in the Taiwan construction industry, accounting for 43.53% of all construction worker fatalities for the period from 2006 to 2015, inclusive. High-voltage transmission tower construction is a high-risk operation due to the construction site locations, extreme climatic factors, elevated working surfaces, and narrow working space. However, the factors contributing to the risk of falls in high-voltage transmission tower construction work have not been characterized. This paper describes the development and application of an observational checklist for assessing exposure to fall risks. Three contributing factors, movement, stability, and fall protection measures, were characterized based on the suggestions of ergonomic experts, interviews of supervisors and workers, and on-site observations. Inter-observer reliability test results showed that inter-observer reliability of the observational checklist was acceptable to excellent. A pilot study assessing five primary construction operations suggested that position shifting, wherein workers were found to have frequent exposure to the whole-body movement level and spent the least time in a tied-off full body harness, was the operation with the highest fall risk. These results demonstrated that the observational checklist can be used to identify specific construction operations with fall hazards.