Driving Vehicles and Moving Equipment Safely Stats and Facts

FACTS

  1. Workers on roadway construction worksites are exposed to possible injury and death from moving construction vehicles and equipment.
  2. Every year heavy equipment operators, ground workers and pedestrians are injured or killed by heavy mobile equipment used in construction. Many of these incidents are the result of rollovers or by individuals being struck or crushed by equipment.
  3. People who work with and around vehicles and mobile equipment in industrial workplaces are at risk of serious injury or death.
  4. Various types of vehicles, including tractors and trucks, and mobile equipment, such as forklifts, tow buggies and pallet walkies can be found in industrial workplaces.
  5. Incidents involving these devices have caused deaths, injuries and damage to property. There have also been “near misses” in which incidents could have occurred.

STATS

  • Workers were fatally struck 143 times by a vehicle or mobile equipment that was backing up. In 84 of these cases, the worker was fatally struck by a dump truck that was backing up.
  • NIOSH and State partners investigated 36 deaths of workers killed by backing construction vehicles or equipment on roadway construction worksites through the Fatality Assessment and Control Evaluation (FACE) Program.
  • In 2019, 170 construction workers lost their lives from being struck by equipment, objects, or transport vehicles, a 7.6% increase from 158 deaths in 2011. The number of overall construction fatalities rose 41.1% during the same period.
  • In 2019, nearly half (47.1%) of struck-by fatalities in construction involved transport vehicles, such as trucks. Objects or equipment were responsible for the remaining struck-by deaths, in particular falling objects or equipment (26.5%) and powered, non-transport vehicles such as forklifts (17.6%).
  • 43,239 people in the United States died each year in transportation-related incidents. Based on the average number of U.S. residents over that period, the annual risk of dying in a transportation-related accident is 1 in 6,800.
  • Transportation-related fatalities constituted just under 2% of the 2.43 million deaths per year from all causes in the United States, or 1 in 56. Transportation was the biggest source of all “unintentional injury deaths” (38%) — those not caused by old age, disease, suicide or homicide.