Forklift truck injuries are unfortunately all too common. Even in this health and safety obsessed country, which the popular press would have us believe in the grip of personal injury compensation fever, forklift truck accidents that can give rise to such claims being brought, are happening in workplaces across the UK at the astonishing average rate of twenty two each day of the year.
According the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) three million employees in the UK work with or around vehicles and vehicle related workplace fatalities for this group rose year on year throughout the first decade of this century. Forklift trucks were involved in 24% of those vehicle related accidents and this amounts to, on average, eight thousand forklift truck accidents being reported to the HSE every year.
Forklift trucks – the dangers to pedestrians
When most people think of forklift truck accidents they tend to dwell on the danger to the operator of the vehicle and of the forklift truck toppling over and crushing him or her or warehouse shelving collapsing on the vehicle or some mechanical failure causing any number of catastrophic injuries to the driver. In reality, although operators of forklift trucks feature substantially in the injury statistics it is actually non-operators (pedestrians) who fare by far the worst in accidents involving such vehicles.
Pedestrians represent a whopping 70% of those injured and strangely enough and contrary to popular imagination injuries suffered as a result of forklifts overturning are statistically the rarest. HSE statistic reveals that employees are twice as likely to be hit by a forklift truck than to fall from one. This all points to on-going and unresolved health and safety issues in some workplaces around reducing of the risks involved in pedestrians and forklift trucks operating together.
If further proof were needed as to this situation, a poll carried out by the HSE six years ago revealed fifteen hundred employers admitting to serious concerns about the safety of their pedestrian workers who worked alongside forklift trucks and a third of employers polled believed that their workers were definitely at risk of workplace transport injuries. As part of the same survey, 45% of forklift truck operators stated that their supervisors and managers had never given them a safety check.
Obviously, until more employers decide to get a grip on their basic health and safety duties, forklift truck related injuries will not decline in number at an acceptable rate and specialist work related compensation claim solicitors will not find themselves short of clients injured by those vehicles.
Forklift accident compensation claims experts – 0800 1404544
If your employer’s health and safety failings cause you to get injured in a forklift truck accident, you could win damages.
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