Construction Industry Safety and Health

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Nail guns can boost productivity on a construction site, but they also cause tens of thousands of serious injuries each year. In fact, nail gun injuries hospitalize more construction workers than any other type of tool-related injury.

Dr. David Michaels, Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health recently spoke to meteorologists and weather forecasters about OSHA's Heat Stress Awareness Campaign:

It’s not news that falls from height cause the majority of work-related fatalities among residential construction workers (64 percent, according to a 2011 report by the BLS).

Question: At what distance from an unprotected side or edge does a worker, performing steel erection activities under 29 CFR 1926 Subpart R with a fall hazard greater than 15 feet, be required to have fall protection?

OSHA has partnered with the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health and National Occupational Research Agenda (NORA) - Construction Sector on this nationwide outreach campaign to raise awareness among workers and employers about common fall hazards in construction, and how falls from ladders, scaffolds and roofs can be prevented and lives can be saved. Here's how:

Working at heights carries risk. About five American construction workers are killed every week by falls from heights, 251 of them in 2011 alone. New data from the Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries (CFOI) show you don’t have to fall very far for the fall to be deadly.

This true tragedy is taken from the files of NIOSH’s Fatality Assessment and Control Evaluation (FACE) program: A 17-year-old female laborer fell about 26 feet from a residential roof to a stone patio. Nine days later she died from her injuries. The victim was working for a construction company replacing a residential roof. (How common is this work? You and friends may have done this yourself.)

Heat is a frequently underestimated occupational hazard of the construction industry, according to Pete Stafford, Executive Director of the Center for Construction Research and Training (CPWR).

OSHA will co-moderate a free webinar with the American Staffing Association at 3 p.m. EST on Thursday, July 18, to discuss best practices for protecting temporary workers.