DID YOU KNOW?

Employee exposure to unguarded or inadequately guarded machines is prevalent in many workplaces. Consequently, workers who operate and maintain machinery suffer approximately 18,000 amputations, lacerations, crushing injuries, abrasions, and over 800 deaths per year.

Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA) nominated OSHA’s top ten cited violations in 2017. Machine guarding was NO.8 on this not so famous list with 1.933 violations. In 2018, machine guarding was NO.9.

A lack of machine safeguarding also held the dubious distinction of making the list of OSHA’s ten largest monetary penalties for the year — not once but four times. In fact, the largest proposed monetary penalty, a staggering $2.6 million (USD), arose from an incident where a worker was crushed to death while clearing a sensor fault in a robotic conveyor belt.

According to the most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data, manufacturing plants reported approximately 2,000 accidents that led to workers suffering crushed fingers or hands, or had a limb amputated in machine-related accidents. The rate of amputations in manufacturing was more than twice as much (1.7 per 10,000 full-time employees) as that of all private industry (0.7).

There was an average annual decrease of 2.8% in overall machine-related fatality rates from 1992 through 2010. Mobile machine-related fatality rates decreased an average of 2.6% annually and stationary machine-related rates decreased an average of 3.5% annually. Groups that continued to be at high risk included older workers; self-employed; and…