Incident trends for a hazardous waste cleanup company

Published reports to assess incidents in hazardous waste operations are scarce. This study was designed to evaluate incident trends in a relatively large hazardous waste cleanup company. The data for 6.5 years, winter 1990 through spring 1996, provided 1848 incident reports with 87% involving injury/illness cases. Over 75% of injury/illness incidents were due to mechanical agents, 10% occurred because of chemical exposure, 5% involved poisonous plants and insect bites, 2% resulted from temperature extremes, 1% were from cumulative injuries/illnesses, and in 7% the agent was not recorded. Almost 31% of injuries were related to the upper extremities, with the fingers most often injured, followed by the hands. Lower back strain cases constituted 11% of injuries, ankle/foot/toe cases 9%, and knee cases 5%. Recovery technicians (laborers) had the highest frequency of injury/illness incidents (52%), followed by supervisors (15%) and heavy machinery operators (10%). The incidence rates (IRs) for all recordable incidents ranged from 11.9 for the second quarter of 1990 down to 1.2 for the fourth quarter of 1995 with a mean (SD) and median of 6.3 (3.0) and 6.1, respectively. For the time period studied, IRs decreased significantly (p < 0.01). It was concluded that hands-on experience in the field and improvements in the health and safety program of the company--including expanding its focus (originally the prevention of chemical exposure) to include construction safety--reduced the incidents considerably. Introduction of new regulations has also contributed to this trend.