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In areas of the country that experience all four seasons, such as Pennsylvania, summer can be a season of road construction. Of the different types of construction workers’ accidents that occur, road construction workers’ accidents are among the most common. It’s estimated that as many as 700 fatalities occur in road work zones each year and 150 of those deaths are road workers.
Workers in road construction areas are at risk for accident and injury because cars and commercial trucks zoom through construction sites. Even though drivers are supposed to slow down and face increased penalties for not obeying lower speed limits, many drivers continue to speed through road construction areas. Moreover, the areas that road construction workers perform within are narrow and can become even tighter when heavy machines are present. The narrow work area when coupled with heavy machinery can compound the risk of injury. Finally, when an accident in a road construction area occurs that involves traffic, the worker often suffers serious injury or death.
A number of road construction accidents have occurred over the last month around the United States. In California, a state construction worker was killed when a car spun out of control on a freeway near Los Angeles. Only a few days before the road construction accident, another occurred on a different freeway in the L.A. area. Last week, a road construction worker in Florida died after he was hit by a pickup truck in a road construction site. The 56-year-old man was working on the center lane of a multi-lane road that was coned off when a truck driver veered out of his lane and struck the man. At the beginning of August, a construction worker in Kansas died on impact when a driver struck the worker. The worker was standing near the outside of the construction zone when the accident occurred.
Drivers in Philadelphia and the rest of Pennsylvania should be aware of road construction sites and pass through the areas with caution and at appropriate speeds to avoid the chance of injuring a construction worker. An experienced personal injury attorney can help an injured worker enforce his or her legal rights.
Source: weartv.com, “ABC 3 Top Stories,” August 15, 2012