Heavy Equipment Operation Stats & Facts

FACTS

1. Construction equipment operators risk injury from hazards such as falls, slips, and trips and transportation incidents. Workers can avoid injury by observing proper operating procedures and safety practices, such as wearing personal protective equipment. Bulldozers, scrapers, and pile drivers are noisy and shake or jolt the operator, which may lead to repetitive stress injuries.
2. The worst heavy equipment accidents can cause potentially fatal injuries to the spinal cord, head, and neck, such as concussions, broken bones, and amputations. In addition to the trauma of the injuries, the wounded workers also face additional troubles in the form of high medical costs and lost wages due to the absence from work.
3. Ensuring adequate rollover protective structures for heavy equipment, requiring fastening of seat belts, adoption of a lock-out/tagout standard, establishing restricted access zones around heavy equipment, and requiring spotters for workers who must be near heavy equipment or trucks would reduce the risk of heavy equipment- and truck-related deaths in construction.
4. There are many different construction site accidents associated with heavy equipment such as cranes, bulldozers, front-end loaders, dump trucks, excavators and the like. Such heavy equipment is a necessity on nearly every construction project.

STATS

• Heavy equipment crashes caused more than 7,600 deaths at a rate of almost 404 deaths per year.
• As per a report by the Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA), out of 4,674 worker fatalities in the private industry in 2017, more than 20% were in the construction industry. This equates to one in five worker deaths in 2017.
• The Bureau of Labor Statistics Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries identified 253 heavy equipment related deaths on construction sites in the Excavation Work industry.
• Around a thousand construction workers are killed on job sites every year in the US. And that number’s gradually increased every year since 2013 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). An alarming number of those deaths and injuries were caused by heavy equipment. Most occurred when the victim was either struck by moving equipment, or caught-in or between heavy machinery and another impediment (wall, another machine, etc).
• Heavy equipment operators and construction laborers made up 63% of the heavy equipment- and truck-related deaths. Backhoes and trucks were involved in half the deaths. Rollovers were the main cause of death of heavy equipment operators. For workers on foot and maintenance workers, being struck by heavy equipment or trucks, and being struck by equipment loads or parts were the major causes of death.