Summary
- In the EU, construction accounts for 23% of all fatal accidents at work, more than any other sector (Eurostat, 2024).
- In US private construction, falls, slips, and trips caused 37.6% of deaths, 389 of 1,034 in 2024.
- In Great Britain in 2025/26, the most common causes of death at work were falls from height, being struck by a moving vehicle, and being struck by a moving object.
- In Kyiv in 2025, more than half of those injured at work across all sectors were hurt for organizational reasons, most often because an occupational safety instruction was not followed.
For: owners of construction companies, occupational safety engineers, site managers
Construction accounts for the most deaths at work
According to Eurostat, 3,367 people died at work in the EU in 2024, and 23% of these deaths were in construction. That is the largest share of any sector.
The US picture is similar. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) counted 5,070 deaths at work in 2024, of which 1,032 were in construction and extraction occupations. In Great Britain, provisional HSE data for 2025/26 show that 25 of 126 workers killed worked in construction.
What exactly people die from
| Cause | What the data show |
|---|---|
| Falls | US, 2024: 389 of 1,034 deaths in private construction, 37.6%. Almost all of them were falls from height to a lower level. Construction accounts for almost half of all fatal falls in the private sector. |
| Falls from height, all sectors | Great Britain, 2025/26: 31 of 126 deaths, the most common cause. |
| Vehicles and moving objects | Great Britain: struck by a moving vehicle, 24 deaths; struck by an object, 21. EU, 2023: 27.1% of deaths began with loss of control of a machine or vehicle, 23.8% with being struck by a moving object. |
| Cranes | US, 1992-2006: 323 crane-related deaths. 59 people were struck by the boom and 24 by the crane load. The data are old, but there are no newer figures of this quality. |
A camera over the zone can see a person under a crane load or a worker next to moving machinery before anything happens. Falls are harder: the camera sees an unguarded edge and a person near it, but not whether the harness is clipped on.
The cause is more often organization than chance
We did not find national Ukrainian data for 2025, but the occupational safety department of the Kyiv City State Administration (KMDA) published a report for Kyiv. Of 409 people injured, 219, or 53.5%, were hurt for organizational reasons. The most common of these, 145 people, was failure to follow an occupational safety instruction. These 409 also include 110 people injured in events related to the war, and construction makes up only 2.2% of them, so the figure applies to all sectors of the city.
On site these causes look ordinary: the hard hat is lying in the site cabin, a person walked under a load because it was shorter, the harness was not clipped on because it was "just for a minute". Some of these violations can be noticed before they end in an injury.
What a camera can do
A safety engineer physically cannot be everywhere on the site. Most large sites already have cameras, but the footage is watched after an incident. Video analytics on the same stream can be configured to flag the moments worth checking as they happen:
- a person without a hard hat or vest in a zone where they are mandatory;
- a person in the zone under a crane load;
- an unauthorized person on site outside working hours.
Each event becomes an event card with a frame, and the person responsible makes the decision. At the meat processing plant where we ran the system, it monitored hair caps, masks, and gloves. We have not yet tested hard hats and vests on a construction site, so we configure construction rules for the specific site and run them in shadow mode first.
Where to start
- List the site zones with the highest risk: work at height, the crane zone, vehicle routes.
- Check which of them the cameras cover and whether a person there appears large enough in the frame.
- Pull the log of accidents and minor injuries for the past year and see which causes repeat.
- Agree who receives the event cards and how quickly they respond.
- Ask any vendor on which sites their hard hat monitoring has already worked and how many false event cards per shift it produced. We can connect to your existing cameras and start in shadow mode.
Where to apply this
- Construction
- Occupational safety
- Silo, bin, dust: what accident statistics show for grain elevators
- The loading dock where money goes missing: cargo theft, truck detention, and forklifts
- HACCP and video monitoring for audits
Sources
- Eurostat. Accidents at work statistics
- Eurostat. Accidents at work: statistics on causes and circumstances
- U.S. BLS. National Safety Stand-Down highlights fall hazards in construction, 2026
- U.S. BLS. Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, 2024
- HSE. Work-related fatal injuries in Great Britain
- CPWR, 2008. Crane-related deaths in construction and recommendations for their prevention