During a 45-year career, there is a one in 200 chance that a construction worker will die from a work-related incident. That’s a pretty scary statistic.
A starkly worded tweet from the New York City Fire Department (FDNY) spelled out the fate of a construction worker buried under rubble last Wednesday: “The incident is transitioning from a rescue to a recovery.” The tweet came after first responders dug for three hours in heavy rain through a mixture of mud and concrete for hours in an effort to find the worker who disappeared when a retaining wall cracked and collapsed.
An explosion at a Gatesville, Texas, hospital addition project killed one construction worker, 43-year-old Michael Bruggman, and injured 15 others, according to KWTX. Ten of those injured at Coryell Memorial Healthcare System were in critical condition at one point.
Even with the proper precautions like flashback arrestors, exhaust hoods for fumes and gases, or fire extinguishers, welding carries a lot of risk. Needless to say, a good pair of gloves are as important to a welder as a welding hood – or at least they should be.
The collapse of an unapproved retaining wall in Poughkeepsie, New York killed one worker and injured another – and resulted in more than a quarter of a million dollars in fines for a construction company. In the wake of the August 2017 incident, OSHA cited Onekey LLC, for exposing employees to crushing hazards, for failing to train employees to keep a safe distance from the wall and soil pile, and for failing to provide proper fall protection.
Fall prevention and protection is a primary focus of construction industry safety programs. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, falls are the number one cause of construction-worker fatalities, accounting for one-third of on-the-job injury deaths in the industry.
Construction activity in the southern United States is booming. In Texas and Tennessee alone, construction now generates more dollars annually than it did before the Great Recession. In Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina, construction spending is rapidly approaching pre-recession levels.
A 19-year-old female construction worker was killed last month in a work-related accident in west Bexar County, Texas.
A sheriff's deputy at the scene said that a backhoe operator didn't know the victim was at the bottom of a 15-foot hole when he dropped the digger into the hole, killing her.
The foreman of a New York City construction company was sentenced to 1 to 3 years in prison last week after a state Supreme Court jury convicted him in the death of an employee, 22-year-old Carols Moncayo.
The number of deaths due to workplace trauma last year was the highest recorded since 2008, according to data released late last week by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics culled from its 2015 Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries (CFOI).
