Investigation into Road Construction Safety Management Techniques

Abstract

Rwanda is undergoing rapid development in transportation through constructing new roads and upgrading existing ones. During implementation of these projects, many accidents for road workers, road users and environment issues are raised due to unsafe road construction management techniques. This existing problem was carried out within the City of Kigali for three ongoing road construction projects namely road Ruliba-Karama-Nyamirambo, Kigali Urban Road Upgrading Projects of Agatare and the Sonatube-Gahanga- Akagera road, in order to investigate about the road construction safety management techniques. From the findings, 64.28% results showed that the maintaining of health and safety policy in the road construction sites is applied and there exist different means of maintaining safety, such as the provision of PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) to the workers at the level of 57.14% as per the project managers; but from the field observations, it is alarming, and many workers do not wear as required. It was also found that 50% of accidents occurring in excavation works among all work performed during road construction are due to lack of adequate safety measures. The paper indicated that 85.71% of the concerned workers do conduct training and induction in their road safety construction sites, but on the other hand the level of accidents due to lack of safety recorded in the road construction sites is still high at the level of 78.57%. The mostly affected are unskilled laborers and this observation begs the question about the training and induction of workers in road safety and its effectiveness of on the concerned workers. The paper suggests some different safety measures to apply for providing safe road working environment according to the standard and gives some key recommendations for Rwanda.