Struck-By Hazards: The Workplace Killer Most Small Businesses Underestimate

When safety professionals talk about the four leading causes of fatalities in construction — the so-called "Fatal Four" — falls tend to dominate the conversation. And that's fair: falls account for more deaths annually than the other three combined. But right behind falls, consistently year after year, sits a category that gets far less attention: struck-by incidents. In 2023, struck-by hazards were responsible for roughly 10 percent of all construction fatalities, according to OSHA data. Across all industries, they represent one of the most common causes of both fatal and serious non-fatal injuries. And in small businesses — where engineering controls are often minimal and hazard awareness training is frequently informal — they're a persistent and underappreciated risk.

A struck-by incident is exactly what it sounds like: a worker is hit by a moving object, vehicle, or piece of equipment. The mechanics are varied. A nail gun fires a fastener that travels through drywall and strikes someone on the other side. A forklift reverses without warning and catches a warehouse worker. A load shifts during crane operations and a component swings into a rigger. A truck driver on a job site rolls past a worker who's standing in a blind spot. Falling tools from an elevated work platform hit someone below. The common thread is that a worker is in the path of something moving — and the outcome is injury or death.

Why Small Businesses Are Disproportionately Exposed

Large employers with mature safety programs tend to invest heavily in the engineering and administrative controls that prevent struck-by incidents: designated pedestrian lanes with physical barriers, backup cameras and audible alarms on all powered equipment, rigorous spotting and signaling protocols, and tool tethering programs on elevated work. These controls exist because risk managers have done the math — the cost of the control is small compared to the cost of a workers' compensation claim, an OSHA penalty, or a fatality.

Small businesses don't always make that calculation explicitly. Employers with fewer than 50 workers often operate on tighter margins, with equipment that was purchased used and may lack modern safety features, in facilities that were designed for other purposes, and with safety programs that consist more of informal habit than documented procedure. Workers in these environments are often assigned to multiple tasks in a single shift, moving between roles that each carry different hazard profiles. The familiarity that comes from working in the same space every day can become a liability — workers stop noticing hazards that have been present for a long time.

OSHA's data consistently shows that smaller employers have higher rates of certain types of injuries relative to hours worked. For struck-by incidents specifically, the industries with the highest concentration of small employers — specialty trades contracting, landscaping, warehousing, small manufacturing — are also the industries where struck-by fatalities cluster.

The Four Struck-By Categories

OSHA broadly organizes struck-by hazards into four categories, and understanding them separately is useful because the controls for each are somewhat different.

Struck by flying objects covers situations where something is propelled through the air — a nail or fastener from a pneumatic tool, chips and sparks from grinding or cutting operations, broken bits from a grinding wheel, debris from a demolition tool. In small shops, this category shows up constantly: a grinder used without a face shield because "I'm only doing one cut," a powder-actuated tool used in an open work area, a compressed air hose used to blow debris off surfaces (which can propel particles at dangerous velocities). The controls here are primarily PPE — safety glasses and face shields — combined with tool selection and maintenance. Grinding wheels that are mounted improperly or used on materials they weren't rated for are a particular failure point.

Struck by falling objects is the category that haunts construction sites, mezzanine work, and any operation where tools or materials are used at elevation. A wrench dropped from a scaffold at 20 feet hits the ground with roughly the same force as if it had been thrown hard — and falls from greater heights are worse. OSHA's construction standard requires debris nets, catch platforms, or toe boards on scaffolds precisely because falling objects kill and injure workers with regularity. In warehousing, the failure mode is often about rack integrity and loading practices: overloaded pallet racks, improperly stacked materials that get bumped by a forklift, or items stored on top of racking that gets dislodged by vibration.

Struck by swinging or rolling objects describes situations where a moving object's path intersects with a worker — a crane load that swings when the equipment operator brakes suddenly, a pipe that rolls off a truck bed during unloading, a dumpster that tips. Rigging operations in construction and materials handling in manufacturing are the primary contexts here. The hazard is compounded when workers are close to the operating radius of cranes or hoists, standing in the "line of fire" during unloading, or working in areas where mobile equipment is maneuvering.

Struck by powered vehicles and mobile equipment is the struck-by category that generates the most fatalities in both construction and warehousing. This includes forklifts, compact utility loaders, tractors, delivery trucks, and on-road vehicles near work zones. The pattern of these incidents is remarkably consistent: the operator doesn't see the worker, or the worker assumes the operator has seen them, and the gap between those two assumptions is where someone gets hit. Forklifts alone are involved in approximately 85 fatal incidents and 34,900 serious injuries annually in the U.S., according to OSHA. A meaningful percentage of those involve pedestrian contact — a worker on foot in an area where a forklift is operating.

Recognizing the Line of Fire

Safety training often uses the phrase "line of fire" to describe the space where a moving object's path could intersect with a worker's body. Getting workers to recognize and instinctively avoid the line of fire is one of the most practical things a safety program can accomplish, and it transfers across all four struck-by categories.

The principle is simple: before you position yourself, ask what is moving or could move in this space. If the answer is anything — a vehicle, a load, a swinging tool, material being lifted — then standing between that thing and any fixed structure, or standing in its path of travel, puts you at risk. This sounds obvious, but workers violate it constantly because habit overrides hazard recognition. A worker who has walked between a forklift and a rack hundreds of times without incident begins to feel that the behavior is safe. It isn't. The risk is the same on the 500th walk as it was on the first. The only thing that has changed is the worker's perception of it.

For supervisors and safety managers, the most productive struck-by training you can deliver isn't a PowerPoint presentation — it's a walk-through of the work area with the crew, asking workers to identify where moving objects and stationary workers are likely to be in close proximity. Workers almost always know where the hazards are. The job is to get them to articulate it, which builds the habit of thinking about it.

Controls That Actually Work in Small Business Settings

The hierarchy of controls applies to struck-by hazards the same way it applies to everything else: elimination first, then substitution, then engineering controls, then administrative controls, then PPE. In practice, small businesses often reach for PPE first — hard hats, safety glasses, high-visibility vests — because they're inexpensive and immediately available. That's not wrong. PPE matters. But it's the last line of defense, not the primary one.

Engineering controls for struck-by hazards are often more accessible than employers assume. Physical barriers — painted pedestrian lanes, concrete wheel stops, bollards — cost relatively little and dramatically reduce vehicle-pedestrian contact risks. Forklift spotters and proximity warning systems (audible alarms, flashing lights) address the visibility gap that underlies most vehicle-pedestrian incidents. Toe boards, tool lanyards, and debris screens are inexpensive solutions to falling object hazards at elevation. Safety netting in crane work areas creates a physical barrier for swinging load incidents. None of these require a large capital investment; what they require is someone deciding they're worth doing.

Administrative controls matter too. Establishing clear right-of-way rules for mobile equipment — who yields to whom, how pedestrians signal their presence in equipment operating areas, what to do when visibility is limited — and enforcing those rules consistently is as important as any physical control. Some small businesses implement pedestrian exclusion zones during high-activity periods: when the forklift is actively moving material, workers on foot stay out of the defined area. This is simple, costs nothing, and works.

One administrative control that's worth calling out specifically is pre-task planning. Before a task that involves mobile equipment, overhead work, or material handling, a two-minute conversation that addresses "where will the equipment be moving, where will workers on foot be, and how do we make sure those paths don't cross" is one of the highest-value safety activities in a workday. It doesn't require a formal job hazard analysis, though that's useful for higher-risk tasks. It just requires the habit of asking the question before work starts.

What OSHA Looks For

OSHA's struck-by enforcement is concentrated in a handful of standards that come up repeatedly in inspection records. In construction, the primary citations involve 1926.502 (fall protection, which covers falling objects), 1926.600 and 1926.602 (equipment safety), and 1926.20 (general safety and health provisions). In general industry, mobile powered industrial truck operations under 1910.178 are the most common vehicle-related citation.

Beyond specific standards, struck-by hazards can also generate citations under OSHA's General Duty Clause — Section 5(a)(1) of the OSH Act — which requires employers to provide a workplace free from recognized hazards likely to cause serious physical harm. A workplace with documented near-miss reports involving forklifts and pedestrians, for example, has recognized the hazard. Failure to act on that recognition is a general duty violation. This is another reason near-miss reporting and follow-through matter: they create a record of what you know and what you did about it.

OSHA's Site-Specific Targeting (SST) program and its various National Emphasis Programs (NEPs) have increasingly focused on industries with high struck-by rates — warehousing and distribution, manufacturing, and construction specialty trades. If your operation falls into these categories and your injury rates are above your industry average, you're more likely to receive a programmed inspection. The best time to address struck-by hazards is before an inspector shows up.

A Practical Starting Point

If your business hasn't done a systematic struck-by hazard assessment, the place to start is a walkthrough focused on answering one question in every area of your operation: what is moving here, and where are workers on foot likely to be relative to it? Document what you find. Categorize it by the four struck-by types. Identify the highest-severity scenarios first — the situations where a vehicle or heavy load is in close proximity to workers with no physical separation.

From that inventory, you can build a prioritized list of controls. Some will be immediate: a can of paint to mark a pedestrian lane, a conversation with equipment operators about slow-speed requirements in congested areas, a reminder that hard hats and safety glasses are required in designated zones. Others will take longer: purchasing backup cameras for forklifts, installing bollards, formalizing the pre-task planning conversation as part of the daily routine.

The goal isn't perfection. It's progress, documented and verifiable. Workplaces that treat struck-by hazards seriously — that see the forklift near-miss as a warning rather than a story — are the ones that avoid the incident that eventually shows up in an OSHA fatality report. The warnings come first. What you do with them is up to you.

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Further Reading:

• OSHA Struck-By Hazards in Construction: osha.gov/struck-by
• OSHA Powered Industrial Trucks Standard (1910.178): osha.gov/laws-regs/regulations/standardnumber/1910/1910.178
• NIOSH Forklift Safety: cdc.gov/niosh/topics/forklift
• CPWR — The Center for Construction Research and Training: cpwr.com