Article

Study on health and safety aspects of demolition projects in Penang

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Abstract

As a developing country, there are new developments undertaken to achieve the various goals set for developing countries. There are a lot of buildings being torn down to replace them with new buildings. The aim of this study is to see what kind of accidents and precautions to prevent or minimize accidents and also to find the cause of the accident in a demolition project. This study uses the interview in which the respondent can share more information about the experience in depth. Information gathered revealed that, the types of accidents that occur in demolition projects are similar to ordinary construction projects such as falling objects, falls from height, bodily injury and accidents caused by machinery. If precautions are ignored, various types of accidents may occur at demolition sites and potentially cause death. This study had been carried out in Penang, Malaysia.

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... More specifically, the analysis of OHS hazards during the deconstruction process has received little attention from research studies. 16,18 Compared to other demolition methods, deconstruction tasks are expected to be more hazardous. For example, in a mechanized demolition task, a single heavy machinery equipped with a breaker needle can quickly demolish a 2-3 story building with very little hazard exposure to a single machine operator. ...
... The results from the current study also suggest that focusing only on the selective manual demolition phase, as emphasized in the extant literature, 8,12,18,19 cannot help the stakeholders reduce the OHS hazards for the overall deconstruction process. Instead, the focus is warranted also on the preparation and material processing phases while identifying the critical OHS hazards for any deconstruction projects. ...
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A. Aidoo, Bernard Martin, K. Partufe, Sena Gladstone and Yeboah Patric. 2014. Assessing the Potential Hazards of Demolishing Operation. Civil and Environmental Research. ISSN 2224-5790 (Paper) ISSN 2225-0514 (Online). 6(9): 2014, Ghana.
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