Struck-by incidents remain one of construction’s “Fatal Four” hazards, and heavy equipment is involved in roughly 75% of struck-by fatalities. According to the Center for Construction Research and Training (CPWR), struck-by incidents accounted for 17.2% of construction deaths in 2018 and 15.4% in 2019, consistently the second-leading cause of fatalities on U.S. jobsites, behind only falls.
For decades, the industry’s answer has been the same combination of spotters, high-visibility PPE, backup alarms, and internal traffic control plans. Those measures work, but they all depend on something that’s inherently unreliable under pressure: human attention. That’s the gap a newer category of jobsite technology, known as active fleet orchestration, is now being marketed to close, and it’s worth understanding what it actually does before deciding whether it belongs on your site.
Struck-by incidents don’t happen because crews ignore safety protocols. They happen because construction sites are dynamic environments where equipment paths, worker locations, and sightlines all change by the minute. A spotter can be looking the wrong way for two seconds. A radio call can be delayed. A worker can step into a blind spot that didn’t exist five minutes earlier because the grade changed or a stockpile shifted.
NIOSH research backs this up: construction workers face roughly twice the nonfatal struck-by injury rate of all other industries combined, and pedestrian workers struck by vehicles account for about 48% of fatal struck-by injuries. Road construction crews see the highest fatality rates of all, which lines up with the fact that roughly 1 in 10 construction fatalities are tied to work zone incidents. None of this points to a training gap so much as a structural one: the controls in place are administrative and reactive, not built to catch a developing conflict before a person is already in the equipment’s path.
The technology getting attention this year works differently than the proximity alarms and backup cameras most fleets already have. Rather than alerting an operator after a worker is already close, active fleet orchestration platforms track the real-time position and intended path of every piece of equipment on a site relative to workers, and intervene, slowing, stopping, or rerouting a machine, before the paths actually converge.
As Mel Torrie of Autonomous Solutions, Inc. put it in an industry piece published this month: “The safest way to handle a struck-by hazard is to make sure it never has a chance to form, positive separation between people and equipment, maintained continuously.” That’s a meaningful shift in framing. Instead of warning someone that danger is close, the system is designed to keep danger from forming in the first place, using predictive logic rather than a fixed proximity radius.
It’s worth being clear about what this technology is not: it’s not a replacement for spotters, traffic control plans, or PPE. The companies building these platforms are positioning them as a supplemental layer, not a substitute for the controls NIOSH already recommends: positive physical barriers between workers and traffic, improved visibility, sequential (not contact) triggers on equipment, and never working beneath a suspended load.
For a safety manager, the practical question isn’t “spotters or software,” it’s where a predictive layer adds the most value on top of what’s already required. Sites with the highest struck-by exposure (active work zones, congested laydown yards, night shifts with reduced visibility) are the most logical starting point, since that’s where human attention is stretched thinnest and the cost of a missed cue is highest.
None of this is a simple retrofit. Equipping a mixed fleet with tracking and orchestration hardware carries real upfront cost, and older machines may need aftermarket sensor kits rather than factory-integrated systems. Connectivity is a genuine constraint on remote or rural sites where cellular coverage is inconsistent, and any system that intervenes in equipment operation needs a fallback plan for when it loses signal.
The bigger barrier is often cultural rather than technical. Operators who have run equipment safely for twenty years can be skeptical of software second-guessing their judgment, and that skepticism isn’t unreasonable; it has to be earned through a system that reduces false alarms and proves itself in the field rather than adding friction to every shift. Any contractor evaluating this technology should expect a real change-management effort alongside the capital investment, not just a hardware purchase.
Struck-by incidents rarely come down to bad luck or a single operator’s mistake. They come from traffic control plans that were written once and never revisited, safety programs that don’t reflect how a site actually operates day to day, and no dedicated set of eyes walking the site to catch a developing hazard before it becomes an incident. That is exactly the gap CORE Safety Group’s safety consulting services are built to close.
Our team conducts on-site safety inspections and auditing to evaluate how equipment, workers, and traffic actually interact on your jobsite, not just how the plan on paper says they should. Where that turns up gaps, our safety program assessment services help you rebuild struck-by prevention around your real site conditions, whether that means a stronger internal traffic control plan, added physical separation, or a clear-eyed evaluation of whether new equipment technology is worth the investment.
For contractors who need a consistent safety presence rather than a one-time audit, our safety staffing services put an experienced safety professional on your site to catch what a busy superintendent can’t always see. And because a plan only works if crews and operators actually understand it, our onsite OSHA training keeps struck-by prevention part of the daily conversation instead of a binder that sits in the trailer.
Struck-by risk changes as your site changes. If it’s been a while since your traffic control plan or equipment protocols were reviewed against how the site is actually running today, that’s worth a conversation before OSHA, or an incident, makes it one for you. Request a quote or reach out to our team to get started.
*This article is intended as general guidance and does not cover every OSHA recordkeeping requirement or exemption that may apply to your business. For a full assessment of your specific obligations, talk with our Safety Consulting team or refer directly to OSHA’s recordkeeping regulations.*
