The NJSP Construction Unit

Partners in highway safety

First published in Law Enforcement Technology, September 2002

In 1998, responding to constituents’ concerns about the aging 163,000 miles of highway on which more cars were traveling more miles, Congress passed the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century (TEA-21), earmarking over $200 billion for road, bridge, and other highway repair. As a result, highway construction has increased in the United States over the last few years – and so have highway construction-related injuries and fatalities. Steady decreases in both motor vehicle-related fatalities and injuries occurring in highway work zones had taken place between 1994 and 1997, but after 1998, significant increases occurred - in both cases to above the previous high points.

Highway construction is also a hazardous occupation. Between 1992 and 1993, 39 heavy/highway construction workers per 100,000 died, compared to 19 deaths per 100,000 among all other construction workers and 6 deaths per 100,000 in all American industries. Injuries to highway and street construction workers between 1992 and 1993 occurred at a rate of 12.6 per 100 workers. Some of these injuries and fatalities resulted from traffic crashes; others occurred because of falls, overexertion, or workers being struck by objects.

State transportation- and safety-related agencies in New Jersey, one of the most traffic-congested states in the nation, designed a unique and aggressive approach to these trends: the New Jersey Work Zone Safety Partnership, a voluntary cooperation among the New Jersey State Police (NJSP), the New Jersey Department of Transportation (NJDOT), the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), Rutgers University, the Utilities and Transportation Contractors Association of New Jersey (UTCA), and several labor unions. The partner agencies each fulfill a specific role to ensure safety to motorists, pedestrians, and workers who use the state’s highways.

The NJSP Construction Unit

The partnership’s linchpin, in its members’ opinion, is the NJSP Construction Unit: full-time, NJDOT-funded state troopers who specialize in work zone safety. Sergeant Raymond Glowacki, a Construction Unit supervisor, describes the unit’s twofold mission: traffic enforcement and worker protection.

New Jersey legislators, like those in other states, have reduced work-zone speed limits and doubled fines for speeding, racing, and reckless or careless driving in work zones. Thus, the Construction Unit’s traffic enforcement duties don’t differ much from those in other states, except that its troopers are assigned only to work zones, not an entire segment of highway. Always maintaining a high level of visibility, the troopers either position themselves in strategic, stationary spots on the work zone, or patrol its vicinity, routinely stopping and citing drivers who violate work-zone laws.

When speaking of the unit’s effectiveness, Anker Winther, Supervising Engineer in the NJDOT Office of Capital Project Safety (OCPA), refers to a recent NJDOT project study. In the project’s six months on a heavily traveled commuter route, 200 crashes occurred – but, says Winther, “Ninety percent of those crashes involved fender benders: people tailgating or merging into lanes without really paying attention to what they were doing. The other ten percent consisted of problems like flat tires.” To Winther’s knowledge, no fatalities occurred in NJDOT work zones in 2001 – a record for a state that has seen between five and ten work-zone fatalities per year.

Worker protection, the other part of the Construction Unit’s mission, is grounded less in traditional law enforcement and more in community policing. This aspect of the troopers’ job involves preventing injuries through presence. Glowacki provides examples:

• In cruisers, the troopers follow workers as they set up and maintain temporary signs and signals. The cruisers provide a buffer between workers and traffic.
• Opening and closing roadways, and directing and/or escorting traffic through lane closures.
• Educating workers on site about state and federal safety regulations, such as wearing protective equipment like orange vests or hardhats. The five most common hazards Construction Unit troopers encountered between 1995 and 2001 were:
  
  - Missing/failure to maintain barricades (855)
  - Missing/failure to maintain signs (784)
  - Employees not wearing high-visibility vests (512)
  - Employees working in or crossing active traffic lanes (370)
  - Unsafe vehicle operation in construction zone (327)

The Construction Unit, like other specialized NJSP units, recruits troopers who have completed all required academy and on-the-job training. 32 troopers currently staff the unit’s round-the-clock shifts, though Glowacki anticipates that the unit will be at its full, authorized strength of 40 troopers by the start of construction season. As for why the partnership doesn’t rely on officers working overtime, as other states do, Winther says it’s because a full-time, fully trained officer assigned to a specific project is most effective to the partnership’s overall mission. “We’re trying to make work zone setup and operations completely uniform,” says Winther. “We want travelers to know what to expect when they enter a work zone. The best way to achieve that is to have troopers who are fully trained and dedicated to consistency.”

The Partnership

“[The NJDOT] had always worked with the State Police,” Winther says. “But [in the mid-1990s] we were enhancing our work zone safety measures, so we wanted to formalize our agreement.” Worker feedback to the NJDOT had shown that where officers were present, construction workers felt safer - in fact, preferring officer presence to any other traffic control method - because drivers were traveling slower. This finding, however subjective, would appear in the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA)’s October 2001 “Study on the Use of Uniformed Police Officers on Federal-Aid Highway Construction Projects,” which cites studies showing that officers’ presence in work zones significantly reduces speeding and other hazardous driver behavior.

However, traffic enforcement wasn’t the only thing the NJDOT had in mind. “As part of the bidding process, contractors are required to create a Traffic Control Plan, a blueprint of the roadway that will include the work zone,” says Glowacki. Based on Part 6 of the federal Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD), and the stricter NJDOT work zone requirements, the TCP details the signs, signals, and their placement measurements that will most effectively control traffic. “The troopers were in a position to see problems with work zones’ traffic safety setups,” Winther says, so the NJDOT decided to train the troopers to help NJDOT resident engineers implement the TCPs.

This arrangement was in place by 1995, when OSHA heard about it; the troopers were, however, still concentrating mainly on traffic safety in and around work zones, unable to monitor workers’ safety because they didn’t know what to look for. OSHA’s Parsippany (New Jersey) office saw an opportunity. Says OSHA Area Director David Ippolito, “We’d had logistical problems getting compliance officers to so many sites around the state. We realized that using the troopers, who were already there, was a nontraditional way for OSHA to make a positive impact on an industry that’s otherwise very difficult to reach.”

Both Ippolito and Glowacki stress that the troopers deal only with egregious, immediate hazards; they don’t conduct the full site inspections that OSHA compliance officers perform. “We can pick out a [safety] violation,” says Glowacki, “but we’re not deputized to enforce it. For instance, if I see workers in a trench that needs to be reinforced so it won’t cave in, I talk to the workers and their supervisor about the problem and how to fix it. If they don’t resolve it after a reasonable period of time, I shut down the site and take it up with our OSHA counterparts.”

Glowacki says that site shutdowns are infrequent. “Everyone on the work zones knows we’re there,” he says. “They know we know what to look for.” Should a problem remain, however, Ippolito says that OSHA informs the contractors’ top executives of the fines that could have resulted had OSHA conducted a formal inspection. Says Ippolito, “When the company’s owners see the potential, unnecessary cost of unsafe operations, they address it.”

Another partnership tool is the Safety Improvement Report, the quadruplicate form troopers fill out when they encounter violations. One copy each gets filed with the Construction Unit, OSHA, the site’s resident NJDOT engineer, and the contractor. OSHA uses these reports primarily to compile statistics, not to start enforcement actions. Between 1995 and 2001, OSHA completed the following interventions:

• Total companies cited (266)
• Total number of items identified and corrected (6,260)
• Total number of NJDOT hazard interventions (5,129)
• Total number of OSHA hazards identified (4,001)
• Total number of employees removed from hazards (estimate-15,000)

Kevin Monaco, Director of Legislative and Regulatory Affairs for the UTCA, says the partnership helps level the bidding process for all contractors. “In a low-bid system, safety is traditionally the first to go when contractors try to cut costs,” he says. “We eliminated this problem when we started requiring the contractors to submit detailed safety programs with every bid.” The safety program includes a TCP as well as plans for trenching, confined-space operations, fall protection, electrical hazards, and other common work zone hazards. The UTCA represents management during labor contract negotiations, “so we have a vested interest in work zone safety,” says Monaco. Also actively involved in the partnership are Construction and General Laborers Locals 172 and 472, and International Brotherhood of Laborers Local 427.

Partnership training became more formal and consistent when Rutgers University’s Center for Advanced Infrastructure and Transportation (CAIT) stepped in. CAIT sponsors a four-day training course for all partnership members. CAIT Program Associate Dr. Claudia Knezek outlines the training: “In the first three days, a trainer from [North Carolina State University’s] Institute for Transportation Research and Education talks to the attendees about basic work zone safety, intermediate skills like solving problems with work zone setups, and dealing with work zones at night or on trickier parts of the highway, like ramps.” These items are all outlined in Part 6 of the MUTCD. The fourth day builds on the MUTCD by becoming more specific to New Jersey’s state work zone requirements. Trainers include:

• an NJDOT engineer who outlines the differences between the MUTCD and NJDOT requirements;
• a lawyer who talks about each agency’s rights and responsibilities on work zones;
• an OSHA representative who discusses basic hazard recognition and current work zone safety trends for Standard Industrial Code (SIC) 1611, the “heavy and highway construction” group;
• a Construction Unit trooper who outlines the unit’s role and what workers can and cannot expect; and
• a municipal police officer who talks about local roads’ differences from state roads.

Attendees then take a test. If they pass, they obtain a certificate of completion; more importantly, they’re qualified to work on NJDOT sites. Since the training is tailored according to the actual trends that NJDOT and OSHA inspectors encounter, CAIT attendees must update their training every two years in order to cover any legal, technological, or other changes.

The training currently takes place on location at Rutgers, but Knezek says a soon-to-be-released CD-ROM will enable distance learning. The CD-ROM contains an interactive course that allows users to apply its rote lessons to practical case histories. Eventually, says Knezek, users will be able to take an online test in order to receive a certificate of completion.

In 1998, the partnership won a Hammer Award: then-Vice President Al Gore’s recognition for innovative government regulatory reinvention. At the award ceremony, presenter Bob Stone spoke of the effort to “[change] the game from ‘gotcha’ to ‘helpya’ – otherwise known as partnership.” Partnership representatives, says Monaco, meet regularly; even outside of meetings, “we network with each other to relay information when and to whom it’s necessary.” Says Ippolito, “This coalition runs on goodwill only. Nothing in writing says we have to do this. We just recognize the need for it and go from there.”

Reaching out

As the partnership strengthens, its influence grows. For instance, the Construction Unit, in conjunction with CAIT’s Local Technical Assistance Program (LTAP), trains county and local police officers to handle work zones on their levels. More recently, says Glowacki, they’re trying to reach out to other at-risk workers in New Jersey, like utilities crews. “Their projects aren’t as large as NJDOT’s, so they don’t create aggressive safety plans,” Glowacki says. “They might have minimum equipment, like a single orange cone in the road and no signs. That doesn’t comply with state or federal regulations, so when we see it, we address it.” Additionally, he says, the partnership is encouraging the small entities to attend CAIT-LTAP training.

Partnership members further make themselves available to advise other agencies on how to set up their own programs. OSHA’s Region 5 office has contacted state police in Wisconsin and Illinois, and Glowacki has talked to other states interested in setting up their own programs. Using federal grant money for this express purpose, he also attended the American Road and Transportation Builders’ Association’s annual National Work Zone Safety Conference in St. Louis last year to talk about the Construction Unit.

The partnership is also reaching out to the public. “The people who need to know the most – the drivers – are the hardest to reach,” says Winther. “We got the signs in the driver’s manual changed from the outdated words-only signs to the signs with icons we’re actually using, and eventually I hope to see a work-zone unit in driver’s education and defensive driving educators.” According to Monaco, the NJDOT has also placed “Safety Tips to Live By” posters, which describe common work zone hazards, at roadside rest stops.

Glowacki says that the Work Zone Safety Partnership’s success lies less in following procedure, and more in ensuring a safe work and travel environment. In doing so, it has moved the Construction Unit away from traditional, reactive policing and closer to modern, proactive policing. “Plans don’t always work the way they’re supposed to,” he says. “Emergencies happen. We still have to think on our feet, because everyone looks to us. But on the work zone, we know immediately where to turn for assistance, and we get it. That’s what the partnership does for us.”