Thesis is submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of M.Sc. Building (Project Management in Construction) to the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment, University of the Witwatersrand, 2017 / The construction industry plays an important role in our lives, more specifically the residential sector, which serves to help people access their basic human right to housing. Housing is a basic human right which most South Africans are yet to realise. The high demand for housing and other forms of infrastructure by both the private and public sectors have attracted entrepreneurs who fall under the small and medium contractor categories, to venture into the residential construction mostly as sub-contractors. The construction industry is predominantly constituted of small, micro and medium enterprises. The construction industry is also unfortunately widely known to be a hazardous and accident prone sector; whereby workers are exposed to health and safety hazards on a daily basis, some which lead to loss of life. Literature has found that small and micro enterprises (SMEs) experience more occupational health and safety problems in comparison to their medium and larger counterparts. A positive safety culture is considered as an essential contributor to improved occupational safety performance in construction. Due to the highly reported health and safety challenges faced by construction SMEs, the study seeks to determine the existing safety culture of small and micro enterprises operating in private residential construction sector. The researcher explores the safety perceptions, attitudes, and behaviour of construction workers and management safety practices on small residential construction sites and therefore determine the existing safety culture. An existing safety climate assessment questionnaire was administered to workers employed at the Waterfall Country Estate, Midrand and the findings indicated that there generally exists a good safety culture on the affluent residential construction site. Unsafe worker behaviours have been blamed as the lead cause of accidents on construction work sites, but the current health and safety status of industry calls for more accountability instead of blame shifting amongst stakeholders. Interventions and strategies that seek to address the occupational health and safety of the construction industry should not be reactive, but should rather be a proactive and anticipatory process. It is therefore crucial to begin exploring proactive approaches towards the establishment of a positive health and safety culture, whereby more commitment and accountability is shown from all key stakeholders who collectively have the means to influence and contribute towards the creation of a positive safety culture in residential construction. / XL2018

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Engineering, 2016 / Eskom is a state owned enterprise that generates, transmits and distributes electricity to various sectors. Hence, it supports South Africa’s growth and development aspirations by constructing new electricity infrastructure. This can be achieved by adopting safety, health, environmental and quality (SHEQ) management as a business imperative. Presently, there have been a number of incidents and accidents at some construction sites of the Eskom distribution sector in the Mpumalanga province, which are mainly due to non-compliance with construction health and safety. This research project aims to determine the compliance of contractors servicing Eskom. This is achieved by checking the compliance of the health and safety file of contractors with the Safety, Health and Environmental specification checklist of Eskom. The study aims to investigate if the use of the checklist has improved contractors’ compliance by 2014. In order to achieve these aims, factors are addressed relating to the current state of construction health and safety legislation; the impact of construction health and safety on the economy; project parameters; roles and responsibilities of parties involved on construction sites; performance of small and emerging contractors. The study shows that established contractors always achieved higher compliance when compared to the emerging contractors. In 2014, 90% of contractors complied with the checklist, hence in 2015/16 the contractors can be expected to meet the 100% requirement, therefore complying with the Eskom value of “Zero Harm”.

Thesis (MTech(Environmental Health)--Cape Peninsula University of Technology, 2011 / Coke ovens may occur in the aluminium, steel, graphite, electrical, and construction industries. In the work area coke-oven workers may be exposed to various chemical compounds. Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), as human carcinogen, are primary compounds in coke oven emissions (COEs) generated in the coking process. Coke oven workers are often exposed to PAHs and can lead to a variety of human diseases.The primary routes of potential human exposure to coke oven emissions are inhalation and dermal contact. Occupational exposure may occur during the production of coke from coal, or while using coke to extract metals from their ores to synthesize calcium carbide, or to manufacture graphite and electrodes. Workers at coking plants and coal tar production plants, as well as the residents surrounding these plants, have a high risk of possible exposure to coke oven emissions.It is known that coke production could be carcinogenic to humans (Group-1) by IARC. There has been sufficient epidemiological evidence suggesting an etiological link between carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAHs) exposure and lung cancer risk among coke-oven workers. Lung cancer among coke-oven workers has been classified as one of the eight prescribed occupational cancers in China, and its incidence rate was about 10 times that of the general population. Therefore, lung cancer of coke-oven workers is still a critical issue in the field of prevention and control of occupational cancers in China.This thesis explores the various exposure levels of workers to PAHs at a steel plant in China. The measurement will focus on the exposure difference of personal sampling among workers in selected job classifications given the job descriptions and the coking process. The Benxi Steel Industry in Liaoning province of China (BXSI) was selected as the research location. Liaoning province is in the North of China and the location of various heavy industries in China. The measurements will be done two separate coke ovens in Benxi Steel Industry. One new coke oven was built in the 90's last century (coke oven N) and the other older coke oven was built in the 1940's in last century (coke oven O). In this research, the total number of employees that were selected in the sample for both coke ovens are 64 samples included 54 coke oven exposure workers and 10 non-exposure administrative workers working at the plants.

published_or_final_version / Politics and Public Administration / Master / Master of Public Administration

Dissertation submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Master of Technology: Construction Management Department of the Built Environment in the Faculty of Construction Management and Quantity Surveying at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology 2014 / The construction industry contributes significantly to national economic growth and offers substantial opportunities for job creation; however the industry has continually been plagued by workplace accidents. Moreover, employers may not realize the economic magnitude of workplace injury and ill health arising from construction activities. These accidents represent a considerable economic and social burden to employers, employees and to society as a whole. Despite governments and organisations worldwide maintaining an on-going commitment towards establishing a working environment free of injury and disease, a great deal of construction accidents continues to frequent our society. Given the high rate of construction accidents experienced, employers are not entirely mindful of the actual costs of construction accidents, especially when considering the hidden or indirect costs of accidents. Various safety research efforts have attempted to quantify the true costs of worker injuries, however localised systematic information on cost of construction accidents at work is not readily available from administrative statistical data sources, therefore this study was carried out in order to estimate the costs, like lost workdays or lost income, are clearly visible and can readily be expressed in monetary value; for a large part however, economic consequences of accidents are somewhat hidden. Indirect costs following an accident may be disregarded, damage to the company image is difficult to quantify and pricing human suffering and health damage is subject to discussion. Nevertheless, it is possible to get an adequate insight into the costs of accidents and the potential benefits of accident prevention.

The construction workforce in South Africa is one that is ageing. This is a global phenomenon and necessitates research into how the older cohort of the construction work force can be optimally engaged. Optimum worker productivity, high quality products that meet the specifications required, and high levels of occupational safety and health are integral factors in achieving a sustainable workforce. The purpose of the research was to quantify the injury rates among older construction workers as well as to determine the events leading to these injuries, the nature of the injuries and the bodily locations affected. The costs associated with these injuries were investigated to understand whether there were any discernable differences between injuries to older and younger workers. Apart from the literature review, two statistical construction injury databases were analysed. Qualitative questionnaire based interviews were designed to gather information related to older construction workers. Questionnaires were sent to construction site managers to gauge their perceptions of older construction workers. The statistical data was collected from the Western Cape region and was for the period 1998 through 2005 while the interviews and questionnaire data were collected during 2008. xv The potential benefits to industry are a consolidation of injury information relating to older construction workers. This should assist construction managers with developing policies and implementing strategies to prevent or at least minimise injuries and minimise the related costs, with the aim of more effectively utilising their older workers and ultimately achieving a more sustainable construction industry. The study found that older workers sustained less injuries in total compared with younger workers. No discernable variances occurred between younger and older workers when it came to events leading to injuries (causes) and the type/nature of injuries. It was, however, found that for the body parts affected, older workers were more prone to certain injuries. Older workers sustained less severe injuries compared with their younger counterparts but the injuries were more costly. The research findings supported the notion that older workers receive less training than younger workers.

We are seeing a revolution in computing and artificial intelligence; intelligent machines have become ingrained in and improved every aspect of our lives. Despite the increasing number of intelligent devices and breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, we have yet to achieve truly intelligent environments. Audio is one of the most common sensing and actuation modalities used in intelligent devices. In this thesis, we focus on how we can more robustly integrate audio intelligence into a wide array of resource-constrained platforms that enable more intelligent environments. We present systems and methods for adaptive audio filtering that enables us to more robustly embed acoustic intelligence into a wide range of real time and resource-constrained mobile, embedded, and cyber-physical systems that are adaptable to a wide range of different applications, environments, and scenarios. First, we introduce methods for embedding audio intelligence into wearables, like headsets and helmets, to improve pedestrian safety in urban environments by using sound to detect vehicles, localize vehicles, and alert pedestrians well in advance to give them enough time to avoid a collision. We create a segmented architecture and data processing pipeline that partitions computation between embedded front-end platform and the smartphone platform. The embedded front-end hardware platform consists of a microcontroller and commercial-off-the shelf (COTS) components embedded into a headset and samples audio from an array of four MEMS microphones. Our embedded front-end platform computes a series of spatiotemporal features used to localize vehicles: relative delay, relative power, and zero crossing rate. These features are computed in the embedded front-end headset platform and transmitted wirelessly to the smartphone platform because there is not enough bandwidth to transmit more than two channels of raw audio with low latency using standard wireless communication protocols, like Bluetooth Low-Energy. The smartphone platform runs machine learning algorithms to detect vehicles, localize vehicles, and alert pedestrians. To help reduce power consumption, we integrate an application specific integrated circuit into our embedded front-end platform and create a new localization algorithm called angle via polygonal regression (AvPR) that combines the physics of audio waves, the geometry of a microphone array, and a data driven training and calibration process that enables us to estimate the high resolution direction of the vehicle while being robust to noise resulting from movements in the microphone array as we walk the streets. Second, we explore the challenges in adapting our platforms for pedestrian safety to more general and noisier scenarios, namely construction worker safety sounds of nearby power tools and machinery that are orders of magnitude greater than that of a distant vehicle. We introduce an adaptive noise filtering architecture that allows workers to filter out construction tool sounds and reveal low-energy vehicle sounds to better detect them. Our architecture combines the strengths of both the physics of audio waves and data-driven methods to more robustly filter out construction sounds while being able to run on a resource-limited mobile and embedded platform. In our adaptive filtering architecture, we introduce and incorporate a data-driven filtering algorithm, called probabilistic template matching (PTM), that leverages pre-trained statistical models of construction tools to perform content-based filtering. We demonstrate improvements that our adaptive filtering architecture brings to our audio-based urban safety wearable in real construction site scenarios and against state-of-art audio filtering algorithms, while having a minimal impact on the power consumption and latency of the overall system. We also explore how these methods can be used to improve audio privacy and remove privacy-sensitive speech from applications that have no need to detect and analyze speech. Finally, we introduce a common selective audio filtering platform that builds upon our adaptive filtering architecture for a wide range of real-time mobile, embedded, and cyber-physical applications. Our architecture can account for a wide range of different sounds, model types, and signal representations by integrating an algorithm we present called content-informed beamforming (CIBF). CIBF combines traditional beamforming (spatial filtering using the physics of audio waves) with data driven machine learning sound detectors and models that developers may already create for their own applications to enhance and filter out specified sounds and noises. Alternatively, developers can also select sounds and models from a library we provide. We demonstrate how our selective filtering architecture can improve the detection of specific target sounds and filter out noises in a wide range of application scenarios. Additionally, through two case studies, we demonstrate how our selective filtering architecture can easily integrate into and improve the performance of real mobile and embedded applications over existing state-of-art solutions, while having minimal impact on latency and power consumption. Ultimately, this selective filtering architecture enables developers and engineers to more easily embed robust audio intelligence into common objects found around us and resource-constrained systems to create more intelligent environments.

Text in English / The study, which considers that the construction industry is a high risk one due to the physical work demand and nature of the working environment, was conducted to develop practical guidelines for workers and employers that promote occupational health and safety (OHS) in the construction industry in Namibia. The study, conducted at 13 study sites in Windhoek, Namibia, used a quantitative descriptive study method to gather data regarding the OHS status of the construction industry. Data was collected from the 13 study sites using a site interviewer-led questionnaire for 549 construction workers. In addition, both a site inspection checklist and document review checklist were used to collect the data from ten construction sites. A review of documents concerning occupational accidents, diseases and injuries encountered at construction sites that were held by the Ministry of Labour, Industrial relations and Employment creation for the five-year period from April 2011 to March 2016 was carried out. Data was analysed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) software version 23. The study findings show that most of the workers at the study sites were young and male, with most participants lacking awareness of OHS issues, which may hinder accidents and injuries prevention. It also emerged that occupational hazards are prevalent at the study sites and yet there were poor mechanisms for hazard prevention or mitigation measures. The study notes that there was a high rate of occupational accidents and injuries, as well as a few incidences of health hazards, as indicated by few participants, although there was no documented occupational disease. It is also noted that most study sites do not comply with OHS legislations, such as having OHS policies that indicate the employer’s commitment towards OHS, which placed workers at risk of hazard exposure, occupational accidents, injuries and diseases. Practical guidelines to promote OHS in the construction industry of Windhoek, Namibia are developed as the primary output of this project. / Health Studies / D. Litt. et Phil. (Health Studies)