SAFETY MANAGEMENT IS CHANGING FAST THANKS TO BIM

The scope, expanse and complexity of construction projects always pose EHS managers and their teams several difficult questions about how to keep their men and material safe. Project ICC Towers in Mumbai is spread over some 26 lakh square feet in which the team has built two 50+ storied towers. For EHS Manager, Gopi Krishnan the task of maintaining safety across “several basements, podium areas, nontower areas, multiple work fronts at various levels all active simultaneously,” has been a tall order and he says with feeling, “Even an army would have found it difficult to man and effectively monitor all the areas.” Rail or road projects that stretch for thousands of kilometres, pipe-laying water projects, underground metro alignments all severely test EHS capabilities.

Constructing the BIM way

“While the traditional methods of safety management are proving to be time-consuming, laborious and suboptimal, BIM is ushering in a new age of superior communication, better and more systematic interdisciplinary collaboration,” remarks P R Surendhrababu (PRS), Vice President & Head – Digital Engineering, “which is facilitating rapid decision-making, more precise evaluation and thereby better safety management. Perhaps, the most defining advantage of BIM is that it can influence a project before, during and post construction.

”The goals of safety management are to control safety actions and procedures in the workplace, to establish safety management processes, to prevent the occurrence of accidents, incidents and injuries at site. BIM does all that and more: it even helps identify possible flaws in design or construction to minimize loss of time and cost.

Synthetizing design and construction

Hitherto, designers designed, engineers and workmen constructed based on the drawings, each often operating within their respective silos. Design flaws, if any, were rectified at construction stage often involving rework and a steep price for the contractor; construction flaws often led to even bigger headaches. BIM is the vital link between design and construction, breaking the silos and paving the way for greater collaboration and communication.

The positive impact that BIM can make at design stage is being experienced by the PT&D IC design team. “We have modelled safety components for two pilot projects in our substation BU,” informs Ms. Geeta Hariharan, Head – Engineering, PT&D ASEAN, “and the benefits are already evident.” Their pilot projects are the 132 / 11 kV substation at Garhoud for DEWA, UAE for the Middle East BU and the 400 kV GIS substation at Guindy, TANTRANSCO. BIM is playing a key designing role for TI IC in their expansion project of the Bengaluru International Airport as well as in their BIDKIN and Dholera SIR projects.

BIM was introduced by the Heavy Civil team for their Chennai Metro project to address 3 main objectives shares Digital Officer – Heavy Civil, S Mohan Babu. “To assess preconstruction risks, to implement safety provisions on a day to day basis and to use a ‘prevention by design’ approach.” From a purely safety perspective, they focused on coordinating site logistics, syncing temporary works with permanent design, tracking obvious safety provisions that open and close during a project like floor penetrations for lift shafts and ensure clear communication of on field safety risks and hazards to the entire team.

Detecting and resolving clashes

BIM brings together two crucial activities of project execution and safety planning addressing the issues of lack of communication and difficulties that safety engineers face to analyse the what, when, why, and where safety measures are required to prevent accidents. “With 3D exchange of information through BIM, safety management is happening both at design and construction stages with clashes resolved at both junctures,” informs Dr Amarnath CB, Head – BIM Strategy. “With efficient data management, there is earlier, easier identification and mitigation of hazards resulting in better safety management.”

In the realm of engineering design, BIM can identify possible chances of collision of equipment at site and mitigate them even before construction. “With tracking and sensing technology, working fatalities and injuries like being struck by moving construction vehicles can be dramatically reduced,” shares Suryakanta Kabi, Manager – BIM, TI IC. referring to a hazard that TI IC has been wrestling with to control.

The rapid strides BIM is taking in this sphere is reflected by the statistic that in 2018-19, 3000+ clashes across various projects were detected, addressed, resolved and reported to site by the BIM clash detection process to measure potential savings and ensure safety and Suryakant ventures that “every clash detected can make significant savings.”

Addressing specific safety issues through BIM

Keeping a site safe from incidents:

By creating an actual visualization of the project before construction, BIM enables designers and engineers to identify and eliminate safety hazards and by linking to project schedule, both short term issues and those with the potential to create bigger problems later can be addressed. Once complete, a BIM model becomes a quick reference guide about everything at a project for everyone by which one can identify construction risks, prepare specific work plans and complete tasks efficiently and safely. “During the project, BIM takes the unpredictability out of construction,” says PRS. “The 3D drawings are more accurate, potential pain points can be foreseen, floor and roof penetrations checked and protected.” The BIM model can visualize risks, provide reports and maps of site conditions, help evolve sequential plans to detect and overcome hazards, even validate dimensional and informational relationships between items like number of equipment per square feet of space, distance between fire extinguishers, pedestrian protection measures and the like.

Making surveys easier and safer: Drones and LiDAR are go-to tools for geospatial data acquisition that captures data 4X times faster than conventional survey methods. Combining photogrammetry techniques, all 2D and 3D features of the project site can be collected and measured accurately even to the level of a centimetre by using well-established ground control points. Apart from topographic surveys, progress, smart monitoring, quantity estimations are all possible with these geospatial technologies that reduce human intervention and make surveying easier, quicker, more accurate, more economical and safer. Suryakanta informs, “we used drones and LiDAR extensively for the Mumbai-Nagpur Expressway Project at pre-bid and post bid stages, aerial LiDAR survey for the Mauritius Metro project at post bid stage and drone survey for the VadodaraBombay Road project at the pre bid stage.” He adds that the effort for field survey operations has been reduced by anywhere between 30-80% and labour costs cut by a good 20-25%.

Safeguarding the edges: Fall from height of workmen and material is one hazard that keep EHS managers across L&T Construction awake at nights. Instances of people or things slipping over the edges or falling through openings are primarily due to missing barricades. BIM detects and identifies missing fall protection installations in staircases, slab edges, slab openings and the like to alert site teams to install temporary safeguards or railings around dangerous locations.

Keeping fires at bay: Both during and post construction, fires remain an everpresent threat and BIM can prove to be a great foil to prevent the occurrence of one. The model is equipped with data to identify proper safety materials, fire zones, fire escape routes, etc. that can go a long way to mitigate fire hazards.

BIM is set to change the face of construction

Foreseeing is being forewarned and BIM is the ideal tool to literally foresee the future to pre-empt safety issues. “BIM has evolved as an intelligent repository of data that is of significance to all stakeholders, empowering them to take informed decisions,” elaborates PRS. “The flexibility of the BIM platform allows overlaying of data related to construction activity sequentially on the design data which means that we are creating a virtual construction environment involved what is to be built, what goes to build it and the inter relation. This is the power of BIM technologies and, needless to say, the safety aspects and the necessities to create a safe environment are available in precise detail. We can and should harness this BIM capability. BIM is the way forward to eliminate human error in both design and construction stages to ensure incident-free and safe project progress,” he emphasizes.

Businesses across L&T Construction are gradually understanding and appreciating the difference to construction that BIM can bring but PRS feels that the rate of adoption is not yet proportionate to its enormous benefits. “BIM can influence almost every aspect of construction; all it needs is a change in mindset to embrace and experience it. I am sure its time has come, and it is only a matter of time before BIM starts to make a marked and positive difference to the way we build,” rounds off PRS.