Investigating awareness of emergency evacuation among construction workers

Abstract

Emergency evacuation at construction site is challenging to be conducted due to its dynamic conditions and changing layout. This paper presents a survey work on awareness of emergency evacuation among construction workers. One construction site, P32-2 in Forest City, Johor Bahru is selected for the survey work. 300 workers participated in the survey work. The survey consists of seven questions related to demographic, education levels, and emergency evacuation training. Based on the feedbacks, many workers are male and are in the age group between 20 to 30 years old. The construction site has more general workers than others position. The principal employers or contractors prefer to hire individuals who have no proper education as general workers. There are three challenges for instilling safety awareness of emergency evacuation effectively, which are i) a large number of workers, ii) low level of education, and iii) no training and experience in the emergency evacuation at construction site. This paper did not study worker’s competency to perform the emergency evacuation. More research work on emergency evacuation at construction site should be conducted to improve safety of construction workers.