![]() The majority of the dredges visited were extracting sand or gravel. Twenty-one fatalities involved shore- or dredge-based support equipment, including a rollover of a front-end loader, a falling crane boom, a fall into a hopper, and conveyor accidents on land. Five of the fatal accidents were from electrocutions. The belt was started while he was working on it, and he was knocked into the water. An example of such an accident is one in which a worker was repairing a dredge-to-shore conveyor belt. Machinery accounted for a smaller number. There were more drownings from boats and walkways (mostly pipeline walkways) than from the dredges themselves. Note that about 59 pct of the fatalities in the table are drowning accidents. There was also an annual average of more than 95 nonfatal injury accidents, as well as several hundred noninjury accidents. Table 1 shows the fatal accidents that occurred on U.S. To try to quantify the hazards, data were taken from the Mine Safety and Health Administration’s accident records since January 1973. These categories include drowning, slips and falls, electricals mechanical, and fire. The information was analyzed in five separate categories which appear to be the most important in terms of developing countermeasures for these accidents. Design considerations for safety were discussed, as were training and product liability questions and the accident experience of company field representatives during erection, initial operations, and maintenance of delivered dredges. Three companies whose principal business is the manufacture of dredges and dredge components were also visited. In all, field visits were made to 31 dredge operations. ![]() ![]() The research discussed here included field visits to a selected sample of mining dredge operations, an examination of dredge-related injury data in the files of the Mine Safety and Health Administration’s Health and Safety Analysis Center in Denver, and field visits to a selected number of nonmining dredge operations. Still, over the 10½-yr period that ended in June 1983 63 people were killed and almost a thousand injured in mining dredge operations in the United States. It is true that personal injury rates for dredge workers, normalized in terms of worker-hours, dredge operating hours, or tons of material moved, are lower than those for many other mining operations. It is generally assumed that dredge operations are “safe”-certainly much safer than other mining and construction operations to which they are usually compared. The data, covering the period 1933 to 1942, included those related to 36 fatalities and 3,700 injuries in dredge mining. He also reviewed 10 yr of accident data pertinent to such mining in the United States. In the 1940’s, we visited hydraulic and dredge mining operations in Alaska and California.
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