Health and Safety Challenges Among Post-Disaster Reconstruction Workers

Abstract

With the increase in the number of natural disasters in recent years, post-disaster reconstruction (PDR) efforts have become increasingly important to aid community recovery. Accordingly, a large body of recent research has focused on identifying the best practices for accelerating recovery and restoring impacted communities. However, relatively little attention has been devoted to the health and safety challenges experienced by reconstruction workers that aid post-disaster recovery and reconstruction efforts. The current investigation focused on addressing this knowledge gap by seeking to uncover the health and safety challenges that reconstruction workers experienced in the context of the 2015 Gorkha earthquake in Nepal – that was responsible for nearly 9,000 deaths and 22,000 injuries. The data collection effort involved in-depth interviews with several stakeholders, including construction workers, supervisors, site engineers, general contractors, homeowners, and governmental officials. This study enhances our understanding of the health and safety challenges experienced by PDR workers. The study also offers insight on how the obtained knowledge can be leveraged by government and stakeholders with supervisory roles to ensure proper health, safety, and wellbeing of the reconstruction workers.