It’s National Work Zone Awareness Week
Slow down! This week is National Work Zone Awareness Week. It's an effort to remind drivers to slow down in construction zones so workers can go home to their families.
The Fall of 2020 was a tragic time for Michigan's road and bridge workers. In a three months span of time, five road workers were struck and killed and three more injured in work zone crashes.
it is critical that drivers, passengers, and workers take work zone safety seriously. In 2020, preliminary Michigan work zone crash information shows that there were:
- 15 fatalities
- 69 serious injuries
- 785 injury crashes
- 4,900 total crashes
Michigan is hosting National Work Zone Awareness Week. It is an annual spring campaign to encourage safe driving through construction work zones. It runs Monday, April 26th through Friday, April 30th. The theme of this year's campaign is "Drive Safe. Work Safe. Save Lives". The Michigan Department of Transportation says this campaign "emphasizes the importance of driving safely and workers making safety a priority to ensure that we all work together to save lives in work zones."
You will see a lot of road construction around the state. As Governor Gretchen Whitmer's $3.5 billion Rebuilding Michigan program gets underway, you will encounter major work underway on some of the state's main freeways and bridges over the next few years. As motorists, we are urged to think about the people doing that road construction work and the risks they face when drivers speed through the work zones.
According to the Federal Highway Administration, 842 people were killed in work zones in 2019 nationwide. That is up from 2018 when 757 people were killed in work zones.
If you would like to show your support -- in addition to slowing it down in construction zones -- MDOT and its statewide safety partners are asking you to "Go Orange" on Wednesday, April 28th. Show your support by sharing a photo on social media of you, or your team, wearing orange, and include the hashtags #Orange4Safety and #NWZAW.
The Michigan Department of Transportation also remind you to "know before you go". You can check out active work zones on state roads before you head out on their website at www.Michigan.gov/Drive.