THE CAUSES OF ELECTRICAL FATALITIES AT WORK

Successful accident prevention relies to a large extent on knowledge a bout the causes of accidents. The Australian Work-Related Fatalities S tudy provided the opportunity to gain a better understanding of the ca uses of fatal accidents at work by summarizing the circumstances of al l fatal accidents occurring in Australia over a three-year period. Thi s paper reports on a further analysis of the immediate and wider circu mstances of work-related deaths due to electricity. This analysis look ed at two groups of cases: first, where the direct cause of death was contact with electricity (electrocution); and second, where deaths occ urred in occupations with high exposure to electricity (electrical and related trades) but where the cause of death, was not necessarily ele ctrocution. The accident patterns for these two groups were compared t o accident patterns for all fatalities. As for all fatalities, behavio r was most likely to be involved in electricity-related deaths and be a prime cause; but unlike all fatalities, behavioral involvement occur red earlier in the accident sequence. The event just before the fatali ty was most Likely to be environmental, involving the worker coming in to contact with electricity, but this was very rarely a prime cause of the fatality. Overall behavior took similar forms in electricity-rela ted fatalities as for fatalities in general, with a few notable differ ences. First, in electricity-related fatalities omission errors were m uch more common than commission errors. Second, electricity-related fa talities had different patterns of contributing factors. Electrocution s were much more likely to have involved poor upkeep of equipment and task errors at an earlier time compared to electrical trades fatalitie s and fatalities in general. By revealing the particular details of th e causes of fatalities involving electricity, and consequently the mas t effective targets for prevention, better safety solutions can be des igned. (C) 1998 National Safety Council and Elsevier Science Ltd.