Common types of fatal workplace accidents in Texas

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics recently put out a comprehensive report detailing the number of fatal workplace injuries to take place in the United States. For the entire country, they arrived at a total of 4,405. This was actually a drop from the year before, which saw 4,628 fatal accidents. In Houston, specifically, there were 86 fatal accidents.

Breaking down the type of incidents can shed some light on how workers are most likely to be injured and even killed on the job, and a full two cases out of every five relate to transportation issues. That brings it to a grand total of 1,740, and the majority of those — 991 incidents — were tied to automobiles. Those numbers are still high, but they were down from the previous year by around 10 percent.

Other transportation issues involved aircraft. These aviation issues led to a full 133 deaths, which was about 8 percent of the overall total.

One surprising number is that 753 cases were tied to violence, either involving animals, other human beings or the workers themselves. A total of 397 or these incidents were labeled as homicides, while 270 of them were labeled as suicides. There were 8 percent more suicides than there were in 2012, which is intriguing since most of the other major numbers fell going into 2013.

As is expected, falls played a big role. When considered along with slips and trips, there were 699 such incidents, and 574 of them involved employees falling down to a lower level.

No matter how a workplace accident takes place, the family members of workers who have been killed must know about their rights to compensation.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, “National Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries in 2013 (Preliminary Results)” Nov. 23, 2014