Around Seattle, you might think more workers are getting hurt given that construction is booming. Turns out, the opposite is true. Construction worker injuries have steadily trended downward for decades in Washington state. Read: The day Seattle Nice died I looked at the past 20 years of data from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. Since the 1990s, the rate of injuries and illnesses in the construction industry in Washington state declined 60 percent by 2016, the most recent year in the data. For every 100 full-time construction workers in the state, roughly six got hurt or sick in 2016, compared to 12 in 2006 and more than 17 in 1996.

That’s because a lot has changed in construction recently. Consider a recent case, of an ironworker falling off a high rise in downtown Seattle on April 30. Five years ago, that worker would be dead. But he fell into a safety net that is supposed to catch tools — and survived. Read: When wearing fragrance at work, use common scents Bob McCleskey was mulling that over after the accident. He is the CEO of Sellen Construction, which is building that high rise.

“As a leader of a company, it's the worst nightmare when you get a call,” McCleskey said. “I'm so thankful that it worked out the way it did.” The worker landed in the net eight floors down, badly injured. The fire department fished him out of the net and took him to Harborview Medical Center. That type of net is new to construction, McCleskey said. “It’s really just the last four or five years where they’ve been put in place around steel structures as they’ve been coming up to catch anything that drops over the edge,” he said. (When he says “anything,” that usually means falling tools, not falling people.)

You can see other improvements to construction safety in Seattle’s hotbed of the building boom, South Lake Union. Read: The tragic reason Seattle Center never got a SeaWorld I go to the ninth floor of one of Google’s new buildings that’s under construction, next to MOHAI and Lake Union. My tour guide is Mandi Kime, safety services director for the Associated General Contractors, an industry group. There are no walls or windows on floor 9 yet. Instead, between us and the open air are specially designed wood and metal handrails with bright orange netting. Guardrail technology keeps improving, she said.

“It’s no longer, ‘Let’s just slap up some two-by-fours and call it good and just hope nobody leans on it.’ This is an engineered system,” Kime said. Kime audits construction site safety, checking through a list of more than 200 points. Companies that do well during her audits get special recognition as members of the “Safety Team” (complete with hardhat stickers) and qualify for shorter state safety inspections, too. Falls are one of the top hazards for workers in construction. When workers go beyond the guardrails, to install glass walls, for example, they suit up. Workers wear a harness over their shoulders and legs that is connected to a line inside the building – some lines are like big bungee cords and others are called a “yo-yo,” Kime said. “It’ll let you go out, but it you go out too fast, it’ll retract and stop you,” Kime said.