Closing address

I would like to comment on the background of safety behind this conference. The conference has dealt with the failure and the ways of safely designing box girder bridges, but what triggered it off was the fact that they were not all standing up—some of them failed.

There are three factors involved: the safety of structures during erection, the safety of construction plant and the safety of the personnel, and the background is pretty grim. In the UK alone there are 200 fatal accidents per annum on construction sites. That is the average during the last decade. I think that is far too many. For every man killed there are some 200 who suffer injury of some kind or another. That is a terrible and needless toll of human suffering. In addition, it tends to set up a chain reaction of trouble at home, an extra load on the medical services, plant standing idle, and other men underemployed. Much more time is lost through accidents in the civil enginering industry than through strikes. The cost to the industry in accidents alone is reckoned at more than £100 million per annum.