Improper Work Practices and OSHA's Fatal Facts

On its website, OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration), provides an outstanding collection of accident summaries (“Fatal Facts”) of fatal accidents attributable to improper work practices. Many of the summaries make gripping reading—“Do you mean somebody died because of this?”—and would make a strong impression on engineering or construction students in a class on workplace safety or in a training session for workers. Unfortunately, the summaries are in a form on the website that makes them very inconvenient for students and others interested in workplace safety to access and read. Among other inconveniences, the seventy-one summaries appear on seventy-one separate webpages, rather than being collected into a single pdf file. Thus to access all the summaries, a prospective reader has to click on seventy-one different links.

These concerns motivated the development of the present book. The book consists of a representative sample of thirty-five summaries, selected to eliminate repetitious accident types (falls are a cause in almost a third of the seventy-one accidents on the website), and edited for proper display in Kindle. The summaries in the book have been supplemented by the inclusion of statistical data on the type and frequency of workplace accidents in general and also a discussion of how most of the Fatal Facts accidents could have been prevented by following some simple safety guidelines. To help reach the target audience of safety instructors, students, and others interested in workplace safety, the book is offered at the lowest price Amazon permits for a Kindle book. Instructors considering using the book in their classes should note that students can read the book, once purchased, by using the free Amazon program, Kindle for PC, which runs on any PC. The summaries are a valuable resource for promoting workplace safety and deserve to be more widely known and read. The present book is meant to be a step towards that goal.