Heavy industrial equipment, such as manufacturing equipment, food processing machines, press machines, and many others contain moving parts with the ability to maim and disfigure, often causing severe injury such as mangled digits and limbs, amputations, burns, and blindness. Other workplace accidents result in spinal cord injury, traumatic brain injury, and paralysis. Due to the severe nature of such injuries, workplace accidents are often the subject of personal injury lawsuits and litigation. As construction workers are faced with a wider variety of dangers and a heightened risk of work-related injury or fatality than employees in any other U.S. industry, many claims involving an unsafe workplace or unsafe practices pertain to the construction fields. However, workers in all areas of industry are injured, often severely, each day in the U.S.

Safety measures are essential for protecting workers from these injuries. While the Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulations are designed, in part, to prevent employers from removing guards from machines and failing to provide safety equipment, employees continue to be injured at an alarming rate. Machine guarding and related machinery violations are continuously among the top violations of worker safety protocol. In fact, there were 3,050 federal citations issued in 1998 for dangerous machines. Mechanical power presses have also become an area of increasing concern, with industries having high amputation rates under increased scrutiny. Nail guns have been the subject of many product liability claims and lawsuit. Safeguards, shut-off devices, safety circuits and other simple safety equipment can often protect workers from needless and preventable injuries.

Crane accidents result in numerous deadly injuries each year. According to data recorded by OSHA, crane accidents take as many as 50 lives in the U.S. each year. Contact between cranes and power lines is the most common cause of fatal accidents -- roughly 40%. Contact with overhead power lines is a major cause of fatalities in the construction industry. As many as 100 workers are killed each year by inadvertent power line contacts. The other major causes of crane accidents include assembly and dismantling the crane (12%), boom buckling (8%), rigging failure (7%) and upset and crane overturning (7%). There are approximately 125,000 cranes in operation today in the construction industry as well as an additional 80,000-100,000 in general and maritime industries. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 79 fatal occupational injuries were related to cranes, derricks, hoists, and hoisting accessories in 1993. About 250,000 crane operators and a large number of other workers and the general public are at risk of serious and often fatal injury due to accidents involving cranes, derricks, hoists, and hoisting accessories.

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