The Guest Editor is inviting submissions for a Special Issue o f Safety on safety performance assessment and management in construction, a subject that requires special attention from scholars and practitioners. Each year, hundreds of thousands of construction workers are seriously injured, and thousands lose their lives. Because of these tragic events, the lives of countless family members are changed forever. Therefore, there is a dire need to provide innovative methods and insights to effectively assess and manage safety performance in construction projects. Research featured in this Special Issue will reflect and explain how upper management and safety personnel within a construction firm can prepare, monitor, and respond to safety risks in a practical manner during the design and construction phases. Accordingly, this Special Issue aims to provide practical, data-driven insights into how we can assess and manage the safety of construction projects.

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Lawrence Technological University and a group of industry partners are launching a Construction Safety Research Center to make construction workplaces safer across Michigan and the nation.

The need for the center is obvious, said center director Ahmed Al-Bayati: 1,061 construction workers were killed in 2019, the largest total since 2007, and more than 200,000 more workers suffered injuries.

Al-Bayati, assistant professor of civil and architectural engineering at LTU, is a nationally recognized expert in construction safety. He said the center will continue and strengthen national efforts to reduce fatal and non-fatal injuries through innovative research studies—and turn that research into industry best practices, and then turn those best practices into training materials that can be easily used by construction companies and workers.

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Ahmed Al-Bayati, assistant professor of civil and architectural engineering at Lawrence Technological University, has been named a winner of the Thomas Glavinich ELECTRI International 2021 Early Career Award.

ELECTRI International was founded in 1989 as the nonprofit research arm of the National Electrical Contractors Association. It sponsors research that leads to a safer and more efficient electrical industry. The early career award recognizes young researchers doing work deemed important to the industry. Only two awards are granted per year in the entire country.

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Excavation in the United States happens thousands of times every day.

Underground Utilities for Construction Practitioners and Homeowners discusses the use of utility location services for the millions of miles of underground utilities and how to protect this infrastructure while working around or replacing it.

Authors Al-Bayati and Panzer provide an overview of the location process that is generally followed across the United States, as well as a summary matrix of key differences with links to individual state laws. The responsibilities of all participants including homeowners, landscapers and nurseries, fence companies, agribusinesses, and digging and demolition companies are described.

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Safety is an international, peer-reviewed, open access journal of industrial and human health safety published quarterly online by Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI). 

The construction industry is known for its disappointing safety performance. Therefore, rethinking current safety management frameworks is crucial. This study assesses a newly proposed construction safety culture and climate framework that aims to overcome the present ambiguity in the definitions and measurement of construction safety culture and construction safety climate. The goal is to provide a practical construction safety culture and safety climate framework that fits the construction industry’s needs. 

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