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Analysis of 2005 Fatalities Reveals Causes Changed Little Since 1991
7/9/2007
Knoxville, Tennessee -- The Construction Industry Research and Policy Center (Web Site) has released an analysis of fatal events in the construction industry that reveals the causes of construction-related deaths in the United States have changed little since 1991.
The study incorporates data collected from OSHA inspections of 753 fatal construction incidents in calendar year 2005. According to the executive summary of the report, five of the 30 proximal causes classified in the report accounted for 305 (40.5 percent) of the fatal events investigated. They were:
- Falls from/through Roofs: 92 events (12.2 percent);
- Falls from/with Structures: 70 events (9.3 percent);
- Crushed/runover of Non-Operator of Construction Equipment: 60 events (8.0 percent);
- Crushed/runover/trapped of Operator of Construction Equipment: 44 events (5.8 percent); and
- Struck by falling object/projectile (including tipovers): 39 events (5.2 percent).
A comparison of the year-to-year ranks of the proximal causes during the 1991-2005 period shows that they are highly and significantly correlated, i.e., the individual ranks of the causes vary very little from year to year.
Most of the fatal events involved a single victim, but 16 (2.1 percent) of the events were multifatality events that accounted for 33 (4.3 percent) of the fatalities.
Other findings were: (1) in 400 (53.1 percent) of the fatal events the victim was judged to be the primary initiator of the cause; in 120 events (15.9 percent) another employee was judged to be the primary initiator of the cause; in 198 events (26.3 percent) the victim was judged to be simply in the wrong place at the wrong time; and the remaining 35 events (4.6 percent) could not be classified; (2) in 597 of the events (79.3 percent) the victim was judged to be performing work at the task site when injured; in 105 events (13.9 percent) the victim was relocating between work stations or entering, leaving or away from their task site when injured; and in 51 events (6.8 percent) no classification was possible; and (3) most fatal events happened on Thursday with 151 (20.1 percent) events occurring that day of the week, followed by Wednesday with 148 (19.7 percent) occurring that day; and most fatal events happened between the 11 and 12 hours (11:00 am and 12:00 pm) with 85 (11.3 percent) events occurring during this time interval, followed by 14 and 15 hours (2:00 pm and 3:00 pm) with 83 (11.0 percent) events occurring during this time interval.
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