Fire safety on building construction sites as an important part of on-site safety management has rarely been studied for construction sites. To fill the knowledge gap, this research was conducted to identify important influencing factors on fire safety on construction sites, as well as their relationships, through a questionnaire administered to 1,492 fire officers in South Korea. The authors divided the questions into three factors (building, fire, and human) to distinguish factors affecting construction site fire safety. For the majority of the factors, there was high agreement on the importance level of factors affecting fire safety during construction between administrative and field firefighters. However, perception disparity did exist. The authors identified the interrelationships between factors through path analysis and structural equation modeling. The paths of factors showed the highest direct relation between building and fire factors, and the human factor played a mediator role between human and fire factors. The study contributes to the overall body of knowledge by providing officers’ insights into the factors contributing to fire safety on construction sites, as well as the quantification of the interrelationship among the factors, which will serve as the basis to develop effective safety measures, such as policies and regulations at both the project level and industry level, to address fire safety on construction sites. The SEM model developed in this study can also be used as a base model for future related studies.

Fire safety on construction sites has been rarely studied because fire accidents have a lower occurrence compared to construction’s “Fatal Four”. Despite the lower occurrence, construction fire accidents tend to have a larger severity of impact. This study aims at using news media data and big data analysis techniques to identify patterns and factors related to fire accidents on construction sites. News reports on various construction accidents covered by news media were first collected through web crawling. Then, the authors identified the level of media exposure for various keywords related to construction accidents and analyzed the similarities between them. The results show that the level of media exposure for fire accidents on construction sites is much higher than for fall accidents, which suggests that fire accidents may have a greater impact on the surroundings than other accidents. It was found that the main causes of fire accidents on construction sites are violations of fire safety regulations and the absence of inspections, which could be sufficiently prevented. This study contributes to the body of knowledge by exploring factors related to fire safety on construction sites and their interrelationships as well as providing evidence that the fire type should be emphasized in safety-related regulations and codes on construction sites.