In-Depth Accident Analysis for fatal occupational falls in the construction industry

摘要

The current paper analyzed 414 work-related single fatalities from the years 2001 to 2005 in terms of individual factors (age, gender, experience, and industry of the victim), performing tasks, environmental factors (falling site, falling height, wet condition, hour and month of occurrence), management factors (the company size measured by number of workers and use of personal protective equipment), source of injury, and causes for these accidents. Given that most accidents involve multiple events that cascade into a fatality, the current study expanded the coding up to three accident causes for each electrocution fatality. Each distinct combination of accident causes was coded and cross-tabulated with falling sites to identify effective prevention strategies. Our previous study applied Phi coefficient analysis to eliminate insignificant causes, leaving a much smaller set of significant causes for accident prevention. On the contrary, in the current study, the Boolean algebra was applied to simplify 39 cause combinations associated with falling from scaffold fatalities as the union of 7 single causes: B+E+F+G+L+P+W. All 414 fall fatalities can be reduced to (or 27 non-repetitive) cause combinations without excluding any cause combinations as shown in Table 4. Thus, the Boolean algebra allowed the authors to take into account a greater number of cause combinations and reduce to manageable size for the further analysis of prevention measures.