Latest stats on MEWP accidents
The latest IPAF Global Safety Report analyses the main causes of serious injuries and fatalities occurring when using powered access machines to conduct temporary work at height, highlighting the need to gather more near-miss data from across the industry worldwide to help avoid the most common types of serious accident in future.
While the report, based on incidents logged in IPAF’s Accident Reporting Portal (www.ipafaccidentreporting.org), indicates the main causes of serious injuries and deaths while using powered have not changed significantly across the most recent two years of data, electrocutions have increased slightly to become the joint most common cause along with falls from the platform.
Over the whole five-year period 2016-2020, the most common causes of fatal incidents were falls from the platform and electrocutions, both accounting for 23% of deaths, followed by entrapments (19%), MEWP overturns/tip-overs (12%), MEWPs being struck by another machine or vehicle (6%) or hit by falling object(s) (5%).
In the early days of the accident reporting project, which launched in 2012-13, the majority of reports were received from IPAF’s UK membership. As the project enters its second decade, reports are now coming in from around the world, with reports received from 19 countries across the most recent two years of data gathering, and more than 25 countries worldwide in the past five years.
For more information, visit www.ipaf.org
