How To Ensure Safety When Installing Manholes & Underground Fixtures

With visible safety protocols like reflective clothing and traffic routing or safety practices for operating equipment, don't overlook the 1,500-pound safety concern: the crushing injuries from a manhole or utility vault cover.

Safety With Manholes & Underground Fixtures
Adobe Stock Images | By Daniel Avram

Working in road construction is a dangerous business. According to the Federal Highway Administration, more than 20,000 workers are injured each year in road construction work zones, and 35% of those are injuries due to contact with objects or equipment. With an influx of new and less experienced workers in road construction, proper training and safety guidance is imperative to help reduce injuries on the job. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics, 34.9% of new, untrained workers in the construction industry are injured during their first year on the job.

While workers may be more aware of visible safety protocols like reflective clothing and traffic routing or safety practices for operating equipment, it’s often the little things that cause accidentsand that adds up to injured workers, lost time, and higher insurance premiums for construction companies.

Safety With Manholes & Underground FixturesHand placement of shims and use of pry bars can lead to pinched or crushed hands or fingers. Caught-in or caught-between hazards are one of the leading causes of death and injury in the construction industry according to OSHA.RimRiserOne area of road construction that is often overlooked from a safety perspective is the lowly manhole, (and utility vault covers of all kinds). This stems from practices for installing and leveling manholes that haven’t been significantly updated in the last 75 years. For manholes, that typically involves having crew members lifting heavy cast iron tops with prybars as other workers insert bricks, clay wedges, or wood shims by hand to set the manhole covers to grade (or as close as possible given the inaccuracies inherent in the shimming process). With precast concrete tops and grates, the lifting is often done with excavators or cranes. These tops can weigh upwards of 1,500 lbs. or more and are suspended from chains as crews attempt to set the tops to finished grade by hand placing shims. This process is repeated several times until the correct grade is achieved, compounding the risk of injury with each lift.  

Crushing injuries are one of U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA) fatal four incidents, and “caught-in” or “caught-between” hazards are one of the leading causes of death and injury in the construction industry. OSHA defines these as injuries resulting from a person being squeezed, caught, crushed, pinched, or compressed between two or more objects or between parts of an object. That’s why OSHA requires the use of “special hand tools for placing and removing material without the operator placing a hand in the danger zone.”

Safety With Manholes & Underground FixturesShim material is often left up to the installer’s discretion. In a pinch, improvised materials are used to approximate the correct elevation.RimRiserYet the shimming continues, largely because “we’ve always done it this way.” It's no surprise, then, that working on manholes and utility fixtures can easily lead to back injuries, hand-crushing, pinching, and breaking injuries as crews attempt to simply raise or lower utility covers to grade using outdated methods that put people’s arms and hands in harm’s way.

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Manhole-related Injuries Are Serious Business

With high risk comes high insurance premiums for construction management firms and municipalities. Employers in the construction industry already pay more than twice the average worker’s compensation costs as compared to employers in all other industries. If we don’t get newer processes, specifications, and safety practices in place, the situation is only going to get worse.

Manholes and other utility covers are commonly situated as close together as 20 manholes in a single city center block or every 200-300 ft. in a suburban area. As roads are re-paved and repairedand as more utilities and services are built or moved underground to protect them from erratic weather patterns or simply to remove utilities from view to support the beautification of a city for its residents more manhole-related injuries are inevitable. Road crews must be made aware of the common dangers of working around underground utilities and systems and practices need to be upgraded to protect everyone involved.

4 Pieces of Advice 

Many of these dangers are entirely avoidable, particularly when proper guidelines and systems are in place to prevent them.

  1. Make manhole installation safety a conscious priority. Too often manhole rehab is a last resort, and it’s often last on the list of priorities for asphalt layers. This pushes workers to move quickly to level them as paving crews wait. When you have inexperienced crews on a job that’s a low priority or afterthought, with minimal supervision and outdated methods of installation, you have a recipe for injuries. It’s time to raise the profile of this work while leveling the profile of your utility covers.
  2. Ensure crews are aware of common dangers on the job. OSHA’s simple guideline of never putting hands or limbs between objects is a life-and-limb-saving recommendation. This is true whether you’re talking about lifting a cast iron manhole ring and cover or working with overhead objects like heavy concrete utility tops and grates. Using more modern methods of leveling can significantly reduce the number of workers required on-site and the time required to level these heavy objects, while also reducing injuries. And there’s no substitute for making sure every worker is aware of these hazards. The American Road and Transportation Business Alliance (ARTBA) has published guidelines and tools that can be posted at job sites discussing the hazards of “crushed by” and “pinned between” hazards.
  3. Employ training and safety procedures. When crews have inexperienced workers or a lack of standardized systems in place, everyone can be exposed to a higher risk of injury on the job. Procedures specific to underground fixtures must not be overlooked – whether for heavy precast concrete tops and lids or cast-iron manhole rings. ARTBA and the Transportation Development Foundation have published a Safety Center website where you can access training programs, events, tools, and other safety resources for road construction crews.
  4. Replace “we’ve always done it this way” with specs and engineered solutions. Upgrading engineering specifications to incorporate the latest, safest and simplest tools for utility cover leveling creates safer worksites (and smoother, longer-lasting road surfaces). Road crews can benefit from having these specs and equipment to ensure they know exactly what is expected for the safe and accurate installation of these awkward and heavy objects.

While specs can indicate the surface level of the road, there is no random shim that can precisely ensure that manhole and other utility covers are perfectly flush with the road surface. That puts workers’ hands and fingers at risk longer, trying to achieve a close-as-possible level. Contrast this with newer, engineered solutions like bolt- and screw-adjusted manhole rings and precast concrete tops that provide an extremely precise degree of accuracy while also eliminating the need for hands and arms to be placing shims under heavy objects. In these solutions, cast iron rings and precast tops can be premade with specially engineered screws that can be turned from above with a single ratchet or screw gun. This allows the tops to be quickly leveled exactly to specification by one or two workers without the use of machinery, prybars, or shims. In addition, the screws are uniform in size and easy to carry in a pocket, so road crews don’t need to carry around buckets of different-sized shims.

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Safety With Manholes & Underground FixturesTypical manhole casting being adjusted to final grade with RimRiser jack screws. No pry bars or shims required.RimRiserTaking these simple steps can offer significant benefits, both for crews and the companies and municipalities that employ them. “Many crushing injuries in road construction are a result of having inexperienced workers on a job site or the use of rigged-up tools, such as chains to lower heavy objects or any type of ‘shim’ typically used to raise objects, like manhole covers, to grade,” says Beth Stinson, vice president for Education Operations at the American Road & Transportation Builders Association (ARTBA). “By using products on the market with clear specifications and prefabricated parts, road construction crews will be able to greatly reduce their risk of injuries on the job.”

Reducing the number of injuries not only keeps people on the job, but it also pays off in lower insurance premiums. Insurance providers see a direct correlation between the products used for things like leveling manholes and other utility covers and reducing costs.

“When the product specs are in place and road construction crews implement safer practices, it improves efficiency, lowers overall project costs, and reduces workers' compensation injuries,” explains Justin Cumnock of Anchor Insurance and Surety Inc. “That can translate into a lower workers compensation Experience Modification Rate (EMR) factor and the potential to reduce insurance premiums down the road.” 

About the author

Aaron Barr is the founder and CEO of RimRiser with more than 30 years working in the field as a contractor, developer, and craftsman.

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