Construction hazards are well documented and remarkably consistent across countries and decades. What changes is not the hazard but whether the control is in place at the moment the work happens.
1. Falls from height
The leading cause of serious injury and fatality in construction. It happens when people work on edges, roofs, scaffolds, ladders or openings without adequate collective protection, or when personal fall protection is worn but not connected to a suitable anchor. A harness clipped to itself, to a handrail of unknown strength, or to nothing at all is a common finding after the fact.
2. Struck by moving objects and vehicles
Loads swinging from cranes, materials falling from scaffolds, and reversing plant in shared pedestrian areas. The mechanism is nearly always a failure of segregation: people and moving objects occupying the same space at the same time because the exclusion zone was never established or was walked through.
3. Caught in or between
Trench collapse, unguarded rotating machinery, and pinch points between plant and fixed structures. Excavation collapse is the most unforgiving of these — a cubic metre of soil weighs well over a tonne and gives no warning.
4. Electrocution
Contact with overhead lines during lifting or tipping, damaged temporary supply cables, and work on equipment that was assumed dead but never proved dead. Electrical incidents are disproportionately fatal relative to how often they occur.
The common thread
- The hazard was known and documented in a risk assessment
- The control existed on paper and was absent at the workface
- Time pressure or a change in the plan removed the control
- Nobody with authority stopped the job when the control went missing
Which is why competence training matters more than documentation. The person at the workface has to recognise the missing control and have the standing to stop.