As a new director of the Pittsburgh Department of Public Works in 2021, Chris Hornstein was puzzled when division directors or managers complained that they didn’t have a full staff on hand because an employee was home with a sprained ankle or back strain. Often, this was the first time he heard about why someone was absent due to an injury.  While Hornstein knew about extended absences, many other injuries were not reported. “There was no single place where you could find this information,” he says.

That situation changed the next year with a new employee safety program for the city that was modeled on a well-known safety initiative at ALCOA, the private sector Pittsburgh-based company that had won global recognition decades before for dramatically improving its record for worker safety.

With a longtime personal focus on the importance of employee safety, Hornstein jumped at the chance to be the first and one of the most enthusiastic departments involved. Public Works was also an obvious choice to pioneer the safety system given the physical nature of many of its jobs, including the body stress experienced in street maintenance, snow removal and sanitation.

The new safety system involved focusing closely on data trends and looking into accidents on a real-time basis. It meant getting employees comfortable with reporting not just incidents, but those that came close to happening. And it meant that supervisors and managers needed to devote time to discussing safety issues and investigating and analyzing the cause of an incident as soon as it was reported, while also figuring out how to fix potential problems so they wouldn’t recur.

Keeping employees safe has real value to Pittsburgh. “We’re returning lost work hours,” says Chris Belasco, senior manager of Pittsburgh Digital Services and the city’s Chief Data Officer. “And we’re also upholding the value that it’s important that a worker comes home the way they came to work.”

The Results

Geoff Webster is board chair at the Pittsburgh Futures Collaborative, which helped city leadership introduce the safety system. In its 2025 annual report, the collaborative focused on the results that the city had achieved since 2022. This includes a decline of about 100 worker injuries annually, the savings of $5 million in costs per year between the start of the program in 2022 and 2025; a 20 percent drop of worker incidents in the City of Pittsburgh and a 42 percent drop in Pittsburgh Water, a public utility. 

Webster’s own interest stems from work he did with the late Paul O’Neill over many years while trying to redesign health systems in the Pittsburgh region. O’Neill, was chair and CEO at ALCOA, from 1987 to 1999, and the mastermind behind the company’s safety system and safety record. He was also Secretary of the Treasury for two years under President George W. Bush and passed away in 2020. His son, Paul O’Neill Jr., is also a board member and treasurer of the Pittsburgh Futures Collaborative, and, like Webster, has been an active advocate of the Pittsburgh worker safety system.

In 2026, Hornstein left the position of Public Works Director to pursue other leadership opportunities in the city, but Public Works remains the most active executive department using the city’s safety system. Other departments, such as the Department of Mobility and Infrastructure, are also involved, and the city is still working to diffuse the focused safety initiative across other departments in which employees have a higher risk of sustaining injuries.  Outside of the executive departments, Pittsburgh Water, is also an enthusiastic participant.

The data tells part of the story, but Hornstein is full of examples of the actual events that show how the safety system works.

For example, he points to a car accident during the winter several years ago when a plow truck slid back and was damaged when it hit a guardrail. In the past, the accident might have been attributed to the driver, who would have been required to undergo a driver’s education course. But Hornstein, the driver’s supervisor and the team that investigated the accident knew the driver had a multi-year record of safe driving. Immediately after the accident, the team looked into the road conditions. They not only found significant black ice on the road but also saw that a drain at the side of the road was blocked, causing the water to flow into the street. “This wasn’t a driver error,” says Hornstein. 

The culvert blockage was removed, preventing the same kind of black ice formation in the future, and the city then focused attention on other plow routes that could have drainage issues that made them vulnerable to black ice.

Inside the system

A key part of the initiative is keeping close track of the days that employees miss work due to injury. To do this, the city uses a method developed by the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration that is used for private companies. It’s called the DART rate, which stands for “Days Away, Restricted or Transferred.” Pittsburgh began to calculate the city’s DART rate in 2022, as a key element of the worker safety initiative.

Calculating the measurement does not make a workplace safer, but by tracking it, Pittsburgh has been able to see that intensive efforts to analyze risks have a solid payoff.

One important element of the system is getting employee buy-in to report incidents or even near misses. Getting this to happen meant recognizing psychological safety – because some employees didn’t feel safe reporting on an injury or the cause of a potential injury for fear that it would reflect poorly on them. 

In Public Works, the initiative also led to training team members to construct reports about who was injured (or might have been injured), with photos taken, if possible, to help identify causes. As Belasco says, “If a sanitation worker is injured in the act of picking up garbage, the team starts asking not just what happened, but why it happened.” They practice a “five whys” exercise, which drives the conversation to why an incident occurred. When all the information is put together, they can act on making fixes – not just in the location in question, but potentially on other sanitation routes where the same problem could also occur.

At the beginning, there was some employee and supervisor resistance to the extra work that came with the safety system, including the time taken to investigate the cause of an incident, as well as the analysis and follow-up. Over time, Belasco says employees and supervisors have generally come to value focused attention on safety, especially as the city’s statistics show the injury rate going down.  “You have to stay persistent and consistent, and people will start to see value in it,” says Mantra Sutariya, process improvement engineer with Pittsburgh’s  operational performance excellence team. The value, he adds is “to see what actually caused harm to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

This article was supported by and written in partnership with Civic Marketplace.

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