The Causes of Electrical Fatalities at Work

Abstract

Successful accident prevention relies to a large extent on knowledge about the causes of accidents. The Australian Work-Related Fatalities Study provided the opportunity to gain a better understanding of the causes of fatal accidents at work by summarizing the circumstances of all fatal accidents occurring in Australia over a three-year period. This paper reports on a further analysis of the immediate and wider circumstances of work-related deaths due to electricity. This analysis looked at two groups of cases: first, where the direct cause of death was contact with electricity (electrocution); and second, where deaths occurred in occupations with high exposure to electricity (electrical and related trades) but where the cause of death was not necessarily electrocution. The accident patterns for these two groups were compared to accident patterns for all fatalities. As for all fatalities, behavior was most likely to be involved in electricity-related deaths and be a prime cause; but unlike all fatalities, behavioral involvement occurred earlier in the accident sequence. The event just before the fatality was most likely to be environmental, involving the worker coming into contact with electricity, but this was very rarely a prime cause of the fatality. Overall behavior took similar forms in electricity-related fatalities as for fatalities in general, with a few notable differences. First, in electricity-related fatalities omission errors were much more common than commission errors. Second, electricity-related fatalities had different patterns of contributing factors. Electrocutions were much more likely to have involved poor upkeep of equipment and task errors at an earlier time compared to electrical trades fatalities and fatalities in general. By revealing the particular details of the causes of fatalities involving electricity, and consequently the most effective targets for prevention, better safety solutions can be designed.