It’s the season of hotdogs and hamburgers on the grill, getting a suntan on the beach, and sitting in traffic for hours and navigating through detours on the road. It’s that time of year again peak road construction season. As our dedicated road work crews get our roads paved and patched as the summer sun shines down, many drivers hurry through construction sites, and road workers put a focus more on getting the job done than their personal safety. With over 20,000 workers injured in road work zones every year according to the U.S. Department of Transportation, we need to pay attention to road workers, and road workers need to pay attention to safety.

Many state governments require road workers to wear Reflective Safety Vests, and for good reason, their bright green, orange, or yellow vests do a great job of catching the eye of motorists on the road and construction vehicles backing up in the work zone. We urge you to take your safety into your hands or the hands of your team and equip yourself in Reflective Safety Pants and Reflective Gloves. Sure, it’s hot as hell out there, but when it comes down to heat versus safety, gear up in reflective safety clothing and cool down on your break in the truck with the AC. Need a little convincing? Read on:

  • Over 700 road worker fatalities have been recorded in the past six years.
  • Being struck by a motor vehicle is the second most common cause of road worker fatalities, preceded only by runovers/backovers by construction vehicles.
  • Road worker deaths account for 1.5% to 3% of all workplace fatalities each year.
  • 1.6 deaths (including road workers and drivers) occur each day.

We’ll never know how many of the over 700 lives additional Reflective Safety Clothing could have saved, but we do know that making safety a priority no matter how hot the conditions outside, can only help decrease the chance of an accident on the job. Whether you’re a road worker yourself, head up a road crew, have family or friends in a road construction field, or simply find yourself driving through a construction area, do your part to drive home the importance of road worker safety all year long.