OSHA Statistics

Powered industrial trucks can be dangerous pieces of equipment if operators are not properly trained, if the machines are not properly maintained and if management fails to enforce safety rules. Statistics show that more than 100 employees are killed each year as a result of powered industrial truck incidents. Some 34,900 suffer serious injuries that include fractures, amputations, and permanent disability. An additional 61,800 experience minor injuries. There are no statistics to identify the daily costs of incidents that cause product damage, property damage, fires, and delayed shipments. In all likelihood many thousands of these potentially serious incidents or events take place each day in the workplace, but they are often considered commonplace occurrences by workers and management. 

An analysis of contributing factors in Table 10-1 identifies the causes of the annual toll of fatalities for powered industrial truck operators. Management should focus on the causes in an effort to prevent loss of life in their own facilities. 

These percentages were taken from an OSHA study titled, First Report of Serious Accidents, 1985-90.  

Additional studies on forklift incidents have taken place in specific states as well as nationally. OSHA conqileted a computer search of data to identify the bank of information available on powered industrial truck injuries. The study identified 4,268 reports in the system search using the key word industrial truck. Within the study, 3,038 fatalities, 3,244 serious injuries and 1,413 nonserious injuries were identified. It is important to note that some of the reports indicated multiple injuries and/or fatalities per incident. 

OSHA Computer Search Key Word industrial Truck  

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At the Professional Development Conference held by the American Society of Safety Engineers in June 2002, there were at least three sessions pertaining to leading indicators. Speakers and writers say that this new form of measurement is offered as a response to the dissatisfaction some safety practitioners have expressed concerning the use of what they say are trailing indicators — OSHA statistics, costs — as the sole measure of safety performance. 

Over time and when the exposure base is sufficiently large, comparisons of workers compensation costs and OSHA statistics, with other companies in the same industry or those considered to have comparable risks, should have a positive and linear relationship. In a benchmarking process, an individual shared data with a company that had an OSHA incident recordable rate of 0.9, which was about one-seventh of his own company s record. He expressed doubt about the validity of the 0.9 OSHA rate, but became a believer when workers compensation cost trendings... 

Without question, there are inconsistencies, even within companies, in classifying and recording OSHA statistics. Still, if the inconsistencies in the reporting system remain constant, the data produced will serve as useful performance and trend indicators. 

Do the OSHA statistics—the recordable case rate and the lost workday case rate —for an exposure of 1,000,000 hours have a confidence level of, say, 68.27%, as measures of the quality of safety performance An entity of this size would more than likely purchase workers compensation insurance and have an experience modification as an additional measure. 

Now move the hours worked to 10,000,000. Will the confidence level of OSHA statistics as performance indicators be as high as 95.44% At 20,000,000 hours, how about a confidence level of 99.73% At 40,000,000 hours, would you go for 99.9937%. We could go on with this exercise, increasing the size of the exposure base and, thereby, the validity of the OSHA statistics. But, no matter how large the statistical base became, we could never conclude that OSHA rates, nor any other historical data, has a 100% confidence level as performance measures or predictive indicators. 

One could argue that superior OSHA incident rates are not absolutely indicative as performance measures, and they are not. Some of those companies with superior OSHA statistical records are faced with the dilemma of having occasional serious injuries and fatalities. That subject is discussed in Chapter 8, Improving Serious Injury and Fatality Prevention. ... 

Belief that OSHA statistics are accurate measures of serious injury and fatality potential. 

Now increase the hours worked to 10 million. Will the confidence level of OSHA statistics as performance indicators be as high as 95.44 percent—encompassing two standard deviations of probability At 20... 

R.G. Dunlop, Mine Scrutiny Minimal Despite Record, Louisville Courier-Journal, June 3, 2007, at Ai (MSHA statistics) David Barstow, U.S. Rarely Seeks Charges for Deaths in Workplace, NYT, December 22, 2003, at Ai (OSHA statistics) Jackson Dougherty, Safety is Casualty (Kentucky prosecutions). 

Labor Department Labor employment standards and statistics, OSHA, Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA)... 

On April 6, 1994, OSHA published its final revisions to the Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) standard in the Federal Register, Vol. 59, No. 66. With the implementation date of July 5, 1994, the regulation, applicable to the general industry, represented major changes in the selection and use of PPE. OSHA believes that through compliance with the PPE standard, safety statistics that track worker safety will improve. These improvements will add up to 712,000 lost workdays and 95,000 recordable cases. 

OSHA stands for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration of the United States government. OSHA is responsible for ensuring that workers are provided with a safe working environment. Table 1-2 contains several OSHA definitions applicable to accident statistics. 

Recognizing that the chemical industry is safe, why is there so much concern about chemical plant safety The concern has to do with the industry s potential for many deaths, as, for example, in the Bhopal, India, tragedy. Accident statistics do not include information on the total number of deaths from a single incident. Accident statistics can be somewhat misleading in this respect. For example, consider two separate chemical plants. Both plants have a probability of explosion and complete devastation once every 1000 years. The first plant employs a single operator. When the plant explodes, the operator is the sole fatality. The second plant employs 10 operators. When this plant explodes all 10 operators succumb. In both cases the FAR and OSHA incidence rate are the same the second accident kills more people, but there are a correspondingly larger number of exposed hours. In both cases the risk taken by an individual operator is the same.4... 

Decision-makers have sometimes found presentations of comparative risk information a useful aid to the public discourse on risk acceptance. We referred in an earlier section, for example, to the OSHA s use of statistics on the risks of job-related accidents to support decisions... 

Occupational Safety Health Administration (OSHA) www.osha.gov Statistical Abstract of the U.S. http //www.census.gov/statab/. 

Figure 6. Decision contours resulting from OSHA Compliance Criteria AL = 0.835, and UAL = 1.165, and assuming that the decision is based on six statistically independent samples. In comparison with Figure 5, many more environments are subject to a citation. This even includes some environments within the acceptable region bounded by the A EL contour in Figure 2.

How, Then, Does OSHA Issue So Many Citations To support a citation, a compliance officer must demonstrate with a high degree of confidence that at least one employee was exposed above the standard on the day of the inspection. Assuming that day-to-day variability in exposures is approximately equal to the worker-to-worker variability on the day of the inspection, then 1t would be possible, in principle, for a compliance officer to collect n statistically independent samples. Under these conditions, the probability that the workplace will be found in compliance is equal to the probability that all n samples are less than the AL. Let Pn(OK) represent the probability of compliance after n samples are collected and P(0K) represent the probability that a single sample is less than AL. Then one has ... 

Highlights regulatory enforcement efforts and numerous OSHA citation statistics for failure to comply with mechanical integrity regulations... 

The website of the U.S. Department of Labors Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) can be found at http //www.osha.gov. The OSHA home page contains information of value to health professionals, links to publications, technical data, and advisory information. The site has links to compliance assistance, laws and regulations, news releases, safety/health topics, statistics, and more. 

Dr. Frank P. Lees, Loss Prevention in the Process Industries Hazard Identification, Assessment and Control, 2d ed., ISBN 0-8169-1547-8. This is a three-volume set published by Butterworth-Heinemann, Oxford. U.K., 1996. Dr. Frank Lees s epic three-volume masterpiece is without a doubt the premier source of practical and statistical pnKess safety reference material. Within the. 1,962 pages of valuable facts, nearly every aspect of process safety is covered. Should you wish additional description of the b(K)k. try Butterworth-Heinemann s web site at www.butterworth.heinemann.co.uk/register/ us/index.htm. Since this is a British text, there is little specific information on compliance with the OSHA Process Safety Management standard. A large index makes it easy to find specific subject material. List price 599, and worth every penny. I have seen discounted prices. 

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