University of Missouri launches work zone safety center

Columbia, MO — Amid one of the most ambitious road construction efforts in state history, the University of Missouri has established a center aimed at preventing fatalities and serious injuries in work zones.

The Missouri Work Zone Safety Center of Excellence will lead research and outreach on developing behavioral, educational, engineering and technological solutions to protect workers involved in the Improve I-70 project, which is expected to take up to five years. I-70 stretches more than 240 miles from St. Louis to Kansas City.

“I-70 is such a big project,” Praveen Edara, interim dean of the Mizzou College of Engineering and founding director of the center, told Safety+Health. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime, large infrastructure project.”

Because of the project’s scope, Edara said the MOWZES team will research a variety of safety approaches.

“We plan to look at a suite of things, starting from the portable rumble strips, for example, as you approach a work zone,” he said. “That’s low tech. On the other end of the spectrum, we’re also testing new technologies to alert drivers.” 

For example, an early detection and warning system would involve cameras monitoring traffic and sending real-time data on a vehicle’s speed and angle of approach, among other details. 

“Then we come up with the risk of that vehicle intruding (on a worksite),” he said. “If it exceeds a certain threshold, we send an alert either to inside the vehicle or it could be an audible alert, flashing lights, anything we can do to bring their attention to the actual driving.”

These “smart” technologies could be used to enhance work zone safety by deploying queue warning trailers that examine traffic buildup in real time using machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms.

Meanwhile, Missouri workers will benefit from enhanced training technologies, such as virtual augmented reality for flaggers to learn how they must communicate before arriving on a worksite.

MOWZES also plans to engage with various stakeholders, such as police, fire, emergency medical services and tow truck operators – all of whom would respond should a work zone crash occur.

“We’re trying to get input from all the stakeholders and then see what is the high-impact research for this community at large,” Edara said. “We’ll be that group that shares statistics and gets input from them.

“The end goal for everyone at the table is the same: We don’t want any fatalities in the work zone, period.”