As I sit here on a cool Sunday afternoon waiting for my chosen football team to play their rival, I can’t help thinking how they looked so good at the beginning of the season, and then took a nosedive. This is much like a jobsite: Things can be going so well and then, in an instant, it can all change. In the case of my team, they took a chance on a backup quarterback after a couple of games. He looked good for a little while, but then overnight he played like a backup again and we fell from the top of the division. That precipitous drop inspired my topic for this month’s column: falls.
Year after year, falls rank as the number one cause of fatalities and injuries on the jobsite. According to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), in 2018 there were 1,008 construction-related fatalities. Of those, 320 were fatal falls to a lower level (BLS data).