Overview:

This paper and presentation will address the worker injuries in the-for hire and private trucking industries. It will look at losses occurring in the SIC codes for the for hire trucking industry to gain insight into the types of losses that should be expected with private transportation companies. The private transportation companies will fall into a wide variety of SIC codes making an analysis of the injuries from those operations impractical.

Review of Injuries:

To gain insight into the types of injuries that occur in the trucking industry we looked at losses for a group of that typically have between 25 and 500 power units. We chose the following SIC codes:

Table: SIC Codes (available in full paper)

To limit the number of injuries and allow an individual review of each description we limited the claims to those occurring between January 1, 2000 and December 31, 2001. The claims were valued as of January 1, 2002. The costs of the individual injuries can and do develop over time but our main concern was with trends and percentages. The costs were not developed or trended

We looked 1,286 claims with incurred costs of &10,000 or more. We looked at the text description to assign a type based on the activity that was being performed when the injury occurred. This gave us a better perspective of how the injuries occurred and what types of prevention programs would be effective in controlling them.

There were a total of nine fatal injuries. Although nine fatalities does not show a reliable trend there was a pattern that was consistent with what we would expect the most common type of activity to be.

There were 34 separate types of activities identified. Many of these were assigned an additional classification to provide enough detail to identify specific issues needing to be addressed. The complete list is shown in Appendix A. The table below shows the common types of injuries. These are the ones that we will focus on. They represent 77% of the costs and 73% of the frequency.

Table: The common types of injuries (available in full paper)

There was one other type that also had some significance. Pedestrian injuries accounts for 1% of the frequency and 4% of the costs. These could have been fatal if the positioning had been slightly different. Pedestrian injury is an area that should get attention due to their potential to become fatal injuries.

Each of the main types are shown below:

Maintenance:

There were a number of ergonomic issues in the maintenance areas. Over half of the costs and close to half of the frequency of the maintenance injuries were from moving parts and equipment. The other issues were injuries from working with tires, falls from ladders and cumulative trauma injuries from use of air powered tools.

Tarps:

Close to 90% of the frequency and 70% of the costs for tarp related injuries were, falls while Tarping and strains while handling tarps.

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