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The 6th International Conference on Construction Engineering and Project Management (ICCEPM 2015)
Oct. 11 (Sun) ~ 14 (Wed) 2015 • Paradise Hotel Busan • Busan, Korea
www.iccepm2015.org

Construction Workers Fall Accidents from Scaffolding

in Gaza Strip
Adnan Enshassi 1* and Sobhi Shakalaih 2

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to identify and rank the main causes of fall accidents from scaffolding according to their relative
importance as perceived by project managers and site engineers in construction projects in the Gaza Strip. A total of 50
questionnaires were distributed to project managers and site engineers, 35 questionnaires were received yielding 70% response rate.
A total of 33 factors that cause fall accidents in scaffolding were identified through a literature review and consolidated by a pilot
study. These factors were categorized into six groups: factors related to erection, factors related to the staff (Scaffolders), factors
related to loads, factors related to the personal safety, factors related to the workers behavior, factors related to the personal
competencies. The results indicated that factors related to the workers behavior are the major factors that caused fall accidents from
scaffolds. The results revealed that the top ranked factors which caused falls accidents from scaffolding were: absence of personal
protective equipment (PPE), missing ladders, wind loads, disguised the design code, lack of proper assembly or inspection, overhead
tools and materials, climbing and neglect using ladders, lack of guardrails, missing bracing and working during fatigue. These
findings would help contractors to understand the top factors that caused fall accidents so that they can take them into consideration
in safety planning in order to minimize the possibility of their occurrences.

Keywords: safety, construction, workers, fall accidents, scaffolding

paper is to identify and rank the main causes of fall

accidents from scaffolding according to their relative
I. INTRODUCTION
importance as perceived by project managers and site
Scaffold erection has been defined as a variable that engineers in construction projects in the Gaza Strip.
combines all components related to scaffolding safety.
Scaffolding is a dynamic process, during the design phase
through the construction [1]. Some studies have dealt with II. LITERATURE REVIEW
the bodily injuries caused as a result of non-occupational
accident such as falls from ladders and scaffolding [2]. Chi The safe scaffolding should be of adequate strength to
et al [3] stated that the falls through roof surfaces were support the weight and stress which the processes and
linked with lack of complying scaffolds. workers will place upon it, and should be designed to
prevent the fall of workers and materials [8]. Many
In Hong Kong, Wong et al [4] reported that most of the fall construction accidents are caused by deficiencies in the
accidents were caused by falling from ladders, scaffold, project design phase [9]. Heavy moving equipment,
working platforms and opening roofs. The most common overhead tools and materials, lack of proper assembly or
accidents types in Kuwait were tools accident, falls from inspection, wind, heights, and worker fatigue causes
ladders and falls from scaffolding which happened during scaffolding accident [7].
normal working hours in the summer season [5]. In
Pakistan, Farooqui et al [6] stated that workers fall from OSH Academy Course 714 Study Guide [10] reported that
heights were due to weak scaffolding and the lack of workers fall from scaffolds when components fail,
safety. Paul [7] mentioned that scaffolding accidents have handrails give way, planks break, and scaffold supports
many causes, falling objects, electrocution, falls during collapse, while most scaffold accidents can be traced to
assembly or disassembly, falls while working, overturns, untrained or inappropriately trained workers. The main
falls while climbing, and construction deficiencies. factors causing the scaffolds accidents are inappropriate
According to the Occupational Safety and Health work practices; inappropriate construction of scaffolding
Administration (OSHA), construction deficiencies were including planking; safety equipment not used and
responsible for 30% of all scaffolding accidents [7]. unexpected force shifted scaffolding [11,12]. Heckmann
[13] concluded that scaffold accidents generally concerned
The construction industry became a major industry in the tubular welded frame type associated with masonry
Palestine during the past few years. Although it contributes construction. Halperin [14] reported that scaffold injury
around 19% to GDP, it still lacks the consideration for incidents occur in two ways, falls from scaffolds, or
safety of workers. Safety in construction industry is one of scaffold collapses.
the major factors that affects the field and should be
studied and integrated as an inherent culture of each
member of the project. Behavior of workers on job site is a
reflection of the safety culture they gained. The aim of this
‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬
¹ Distiguished Professor, Gaza Palestine, [email protected] (*Corresponding Author)
² Project Manager, PRCS, Gaza Palestine, [email protected]

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 The 6th International Conference on Construction Engineering and Project Management (ICCEPM 2015)
Oct. 11 (Sun) ~ 14 (Wed) 2015 • Paradise Hotel Busan • Busan, Korea
www.iccepm2015.org

The failure chain of the component can be explained by IV. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION OF FACTORS CAUSING FALL
three different phases or events: initial crack formation, ACCIDENTS FROM SCAFFOLDS
brittle propagation, final failure [15]. The accidents
happened as a reason when ladder used in all construction A. Group 1: Factors Related to Erection
sites doesn‘t match to standards. Inadequate provision of
PPE or their absence in addition to inappropriate training As illustrated in Table (1) the erection group consists of
of workers, are frequent causes of fall accidents [16]. It 11 factors that may cause fall accidents from scaffoldings.
was revealed that personal factors particularly worker Ladders are not used or installed for movement between
behavior are main factors leading to fall accident the platforms was ranked the first position with RII of
causation in high rise building projects occurring in the 0.893. There is a high possibility for fall accidents if
scaffolding area [17,18]. Romero et al., [19] demonstrated ladder are not used. This result matched with [13] finding.
that the standardization of scaffolding equipment had a Guardrails are not erected for each platform to protect
direct and positive impact on work safety conditions at workers from falls was ranked the second with RII of
construction sites. 0.862. This result is considered important because it is
necessary in the erection of scaffolding to erect handrails
III. METHODOLOGY in order to avoid falls. This result is in agreement with
Heckmann [13] who concluded that guardrail
A questionnaire was developed to elicit the perception of requirements is the first important factor from the top six
site engineers and project managers regarding the factors factors of fall accidents from scaffolding. Braces will not
causing fall accidents from scaffolding in construction be erected to prevent the movement of scaffolds body was
projects in Gaza Strip. The initial intent was to utilize the ranked third factor with RII of 0.842. The importance of
data already available in literature review as identified by this factor is related to collapse of scaffolds as results of
[7,9,10,11,12,13,14,16,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27]. A total missing braces, the braces are considered essential
of 50 factors were identified from literature but 33 factors component of scaffolding structure. Scaffold is not tied to
were used in this study according to the result of the pilot the building was ranked the last with RII of 0.537. The
study. majority of contractors in the Gaza Strip tied normally the
scaffolds to the buildings.
The respondents were asked to indicate their response on
33 well recognized causes of scaffolding fall accidents. TABLE 1
RII AND RANKS OF FACTORS RELATED TO ERECTION GROUP
The questionnaire was divided into two parts. The first
Factor RII Rank
part requested general information about the respondent. Ladders are not used or installed to movement between
The second part of questionnaire focused on the causes of 0.893 1
the platforms.
scaffolding fall accidents in construction projects in Gaza Guardrails are not erected for each platform to protect
0.862 2
Strip. A total of 50 questionnaires were distributed to workers from falls.
Braces will not be erected to prevent the movement of
construction managers and site engineers in contracting scaffolds body.
0.842 3
companies, 35 questionnaires were returned with 70% Metal plates are not erected in the bottom of the legs of
0.831 4
response rate. the scaffold.
Soil is not examined or where scaffolding will be
0.812 5
The respondents were required to rate the importance of erected.
Scaffolding components are not inspected prior to
each factor on a 5-point Likert scale using 1 for not erection.
0.800 6
important, 2 for of little importance, 3 for somewhat Wood planks erected in the platforms are inadequate,
0.721 7
important, 4 for important and 5 for very important. Then, or do not close all the holes.
the relative importance index was computed using the Scaffolding platforms are erected with width
0.713 8
unsuitable for the movement of workers.
following equation [28,29]:
Use inadequate number of ties in the erection of
Relative importance Index = ∑w = 5n5 + 4 n4 + 3n3 + 2 n2 +1n1 planks.
0.663 9
AN 5N Scaffolding components manufactured from several
0.582 10
Where W is the weighting given to each factor by the factories and more than one source.
Scaffold is not tied to the building. 0.537 11
respondent, ranging from 1 to 5, (n1 = number of All factors 0.751
respondents for strongly disagree, n2 = number of
respondents for disagree, n3 = number of respondents for B. Group 2: Factors Related to the (Scaffolders)
do not know, and n4 = number of respondents for agree,
and n5 = number of respondents for strongly agree. A is Table (2) shows the RII and ranks of 3 factors related to
the highest weight (i.e 5 in the study) and N is the total staff (scaffolders) group. Scaffolding is erected without
number of samples. The relative importance index ranges the presence of a competent engineer factor was ranked
from 0 to 1 [30]. first with RII of 0.827. This result reflected the
importance of the presence of the competent engineer in
the site to reduce fall accidents. This result is in line with
[14] findings who stressed the significant of the
scaffolding safety training of the competent person

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 The 6th International Conference on Construction Engineering and Project Management (ICCEPM 2015)
Oct. 11 (Sun) ~ 14 (Wed) 2015 • Paradise Hotel Busan • Busan, Korea
www.iccepm2015.org

present on the site. Workers experience certificates are not

examined in the pattern of scaffolding before
implementation was ranked second with RII of 0.80. The TABLE 4
RII AND RANKS OF FACTORS RELATED TO THE PERSONAL SAFETY GROUP
inappropriate number of employment is choosing by each
Factor RII Rank
project was ranked the last factor with RII of 0.593. Do not be disposed of material accumulated at the end
Halperin [14] found that there was no statistically 0.866 1
of each working day.
significant difference between scaffolds being used by one The workers lift heavy materials with their hands up
0.793 2
or by many workers. between platforms.
Shrouds are not installed to prevent the fall of objects
0.742 3
TABLE 2 from highest.
RII AND RANKS OF FACTORS RELATED TO THE STAFF (SCAFFOLDERS) Does not use the appropriate jacks to lift up tools. 0.661 4
GROUP All factors 0.765
Factor RII Rank
Scaffolding is erected without the presence of a E. Group 5: Factors Related to the Workers Behavior
0.827 1
competent engineer.
Workers experience certificates are not examined in As shown in Table (5), this group comprised 6 factors that
0.800 2
the pattern of scaffolding before implementation.
The inappropriate number of employment is are related to the workers behavior. Workers do not take
0.593 3 personal protective equipment (PPE) that prevent slipping
choosing by each project.
All factors 0.740 was ranked in the first position with RII of 0.897. This
result revealed inadequate provision of PPE. Workers
C. Group 3: Factors Related to Loads moving between the platforms by jumping and they do
not use ladders was ranked second with RII of 0.897. This
The RII and ranks of the 3 factors included in this group result is agreed with Saurin and Guimares [20] who
are illustrated in Table (3). The results revealed that does indicated that unsafe acts were a commonplace. Workers
not take into account the wind loads effects on the working on the scaffolding during fatigue, stress and
scaffolding, was ranked first with RII of 0.882. In Gaza illness, was ranked third with RII of 0.837. This result
Strip scaffolding erection procedure did not take into elucidate that there is no chick list for the workers before
consideration wind loads especially in high building working in scaffolding and inadequate rest breaks for the
which increase the probability of scaffolding collapse. workers to reduce fatigue.
Actually, there is no design for scaffolding to any building
in the Gaza Strip due to non-existence of regulation. It TABLE 5
was of the scaffolds, even if the safety of the scaffolds RII AND RANKS OF FACTORS RELATED TO THE WORKERS BEHAVIOR
GROUP
was implied by the design code [22]. Does not take into
Factor RII Rank
account the live loads was ranked second with 0.791. This Workers do not take personal protective equipment 0.897 1
emphasized the importance of this factor in this group. (PPE) that prevents slipping.
Workers moving between the platforms by jumping 0.863 2
TABLE 3 and they do not use ladders.
RII AND RANKS OF FACTORS RELATED TO LOADS GROUP Workers working on the scaffolding during fatigue, 0.837 3
Factor RII Rank stress and illness.
Does not take into account the wind loads effects on 0.882 1 The work is continued during bad weather like rain and 0.792 4
the scaffolding. severe heat.
Does not take into account the live loads such as 0.791 2 The work is continued during the movement of 0.696 5
movement of staff and materials on the scaffolding. suspended scaffolding.
Does not take into account the dead loads that are 0.477 3 Are not taking into account the electrical connections 0.627 6
performed on the scaffolding. and prevention while working.
All factors 0.717 All factors 0.785

D. Group 4: Factors Related to the Personal Safety

The ranks and the RIIs of four factors related to personal

safety are presented in Table (4). ‘Do not be disposed of G. Group 6: Factors related to the personal competencies
material accumulated at the end of each working day’
factor was ranked in the first position with RII of 0.866. Table (6) illustrates that ‘Did not work in according to the
This result revealed that the accumulated materials hinder code used in the erection of scaffolding’ factor was ranked
the movement of workers and increase slips from in the first position with RII of 0.873. There is no testing,
platforms.. The workers lift heavy materials with their inspection and visit work sites are done by the competent
hands up between platforms was ranked second factor authorities was ranked also first with RII of 0.873 as the
with RII of 0.793. This result indicated that workers using same importance with previous factor. Warning and safety
their hands to lift heavy materials caused falls by slip or signs are not placed for the workers at the work site was
wrong overturn. ranked last with RII of 0.624. This result indicated that
this factor has a little effect in causing scaffolding
accidents in Gaza Strip.

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 The 6th International Conference on Construction Engineering and Project Management (ICCEPM 2015)
Oct. 11 (Sun) ~ 14 (Wed) 2015 • Paradise Hotel Busan • Busan, Korea
www.iccepm2015.org
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www.iccepm2015.org
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