FACTS
- According to the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), heavy equipment and machinery accidents are among the leading causes of serious and fatal accidents on construction sites, and safety standards governing the use of powered industrial trucks (such as forklifts) on jobsites are among those most-commonly violated by employers.
- Some of the most-common factors involved in heavy equipment and machinery accidents include:
- Backing up
- Colliding with a stationary object
- Colliding with another piece of equipment
- Dropped loads
- Machinery entanglement
- Failure to check blind spots
- Objects falling from forklifts and other equipment
- Pinning workers between equipment and stationary objects
STATS
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- According to a report on the United States Department of Labor, 5,250 employees died on the job because of work-related injuries in 2018. Twenty-one percent of the fatalities were in the construction industry.
- Being caught in or compressed by equipment or objects is one of the top ten leading causes of workplace injuries according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. It is responsible for 3.5 percent of disabling workplace injuries and cost the U.S. economy approximately $2.1 billion in 2012.
- According to OSHA, 12 of the 874 deaths in the construction industry in 2014 were caused by a worker being caught in machinery at work, and one of the most frequently cited OSHA violations involves machinery and machine guarding.