• 26
  • January
    2012

Workers across the nation -- with employees of businesses in North Carolina certainly being no exception -- are daily exposed to peril and danger at their worksites, whether those are retail establishments, office buildings, maritime enterprises, factories or other work locales.

In North Carolina and most other states, it is a safe assumption that an inordinate number and percentage of work-related accidents and injuries that occur on the job are in the construction industry.

Construction injuries owe to a litany of factors, some of them quite obvious. Workers in construction zones and related environments are often exposed to defective or otherwise unsafe equipment. Tanks under pressure explode. Combustible material ignites. Cranes collapse. Trenches cave in. Roof supports lack integrity.

As a result, construction workers suffer from wide-ranging injuries. Those include burns, falls, crush injuries, electrical accidents, scaffold injuries, vehicle rollovers and many other harms. The list is long.

And those harms are perennial. Of the 53 people who the North Carolina Department of Labor (DOL) states died from on-the-job accidents in the state last year, 16 or them-- a full 30 percent -- worked in the construction industry.

Statistics released by the DOL indicate further that a third of all workplace deaths resulted from employees being struck by vehicles or equipment. Another third resulted from falls, a chronic problem in the construction field.

Employees suffering from workplace accidents are often unsure of their legal rights following an onsite work injury. They are sometimes especially unclear concerning workers' compensation and claims they might have against third parties who contributed to their injury.

An experienced construction accident and workers' compensation attorney can answer questions and provide diligent representation in any workplace-related injury claim.

Source: WRAL Raleigh, "Workplace fatalities up in 2011" Jan. 13, 2012