Jobsite housekeeping and slips, trips, and falls field guide

What good jobsite housekeeping is

Jobsite housekeeping is keeping the work area clean and clear so people and material can move without getting hurt. That means debris off the floor, cords and hoses out of the walkway, materials stacked where they belong, spills cleaned up, and protruding nails bent over or pulled. It is not making the site look pretty for a photo. It is removing the things that put a worker on the ground or hide a worse hazard underneath.

Clutter is not a cosmetic problem. It causes slips, trips, and same-level falls, which are among the most common injuries on a construction site. It feeds fire when scrap and oily rags pile up near hot work. It hides the things you need to see, the floor hole, the loose plank, the live cord with a cut jacket. And it slows the work, because a crew that spends the morning hunting for a tool or stepping around a pile is a crew that bills hours to nothing.

A messy site is a hurt and slow site. That is the whole case in one line, and it holds up on every job we have ever walked. The crews that run clean are the same crews that finish on time, because the two come from the same habit: deal with the small thing now, before it becomes the thing that stops you. This guide is the housekeeping half of safety. The written program and the daily structure that hold it together live in the construction safety program guide, and access and ladder housekeeping live in the ladder safety guide. This one is the floor.

Why a messy site is a hurt and slow site

Same-level slips and trips do not look dramatic, so they get treated as minor. They are not. Falls on the same level are one of the leading sources of injury in construction, and a twisted knee or a broken wrist from a trip over a cord costs the same lost time as a fall that sounds worse on the report. The worker is off the job either way, and the cause is almost always something that was on the floor and did not have to be.

Clutter also hides hazards, which is the part that turns a small mess into a serious one. A pile of scrap covers the floor opening nobody marked. A run of debris hides the cord with the cut jacket. Tarps and material stacked against an exit turn a clear path into a maze on the day there is smoke and people need to get out. You cannot control a hazard you cannot see, and a dirty floor is a floor full of things you cannot see.

Then there is fire. Combustible scrap, sawdust, packaging, and oily rags are fuel, and they collect fastest exactly where the work happens, which is often where the torches, grinders, and heat guns are too. A roofing crew running a torch or a hot-air welder over a deck covered in loose felt scraps is one stray spark from a problem.

And the mess slows you down every single day, which is the cost that never shows up on an injury log. Time spent looking for the impact driver that is buried under packaging is time off the schedule. Moving the same stack of material three times because it was set in the path is rework nobody priced. Clean is not the opposite of fast. Clean is how fast happens.

Clean as you go beats the Friday blitz

Housekeeping is a habit, not an event. The crews that get hurt and fall behind are the ones who let the mess build all week and then throw a couple of people at it Friday afternoon. By Friday the scrap has already hidden the floor hole, the cords have already crossed the path a hundred times, and someone has already rolled an ankle. The blitz cleans up the evidence. It does not prevent the injury, because the injury already happened on Tuesday.

Clean as you go means the person who makes the mess deals with it as part of the task, not later and not someone else. You cut the strapping, the strapping goes in the bin, not on the deck. You finish a roll of membrane, the core and the wrapper go to the trash spot before you open the next one. You pull a board, the nails come out or get bent over right then, while the board is in your hands. The cost is a few seconds at a time. The Friday version costs hours and an injury.

It is also everyone's job, not the cleanup crew's and not the new guy's. The fastest way to kill a clean site is to make housekeeping a punishment detail that one person owns. When the foreman picks up scrap on the way past instead of stepping over it, the crew learns that clean is how this site runs. When the foreman steps over it, so does everyone else. The standard on the floor is whatever the lead walks past.

The work that genuinely needs a scheduled push, the end-of-shift walk and the periodic deep clear of accumulated debris, is the subject of later sections. Those are real and necessary. They are the complement to clean-as-you-go, not a substitute for it. A site that only cleans on a schedule is dirty every hour between schedules, and that is where people get hurt.

What causes slips, trips, and falls?

Slips, trips, and same-level falls each have a different mechanism, and naming the difference tells you which control to reach for. A slip is a loss of traction between the foot and the surface. It comes from wet, ice, mud, dust, loose grit, or a smooth surface under a worn boot. The foot goes out from under the worker. A trip is the foot catching on something it did not clear, a cord, a pipe, debris, a raised lip, an extension cord, a hose, a change in floor level. The upper body keeps moving while the foot stops, and the worker goes down or pitches forward.

A same-level fall is the result of either one: the worker ends up on the surface they were standing on, or against a nearby object. It is distinct from a fall from height, which is the Focus Four hazard the fall-protection rules target. Both matter. Same-level falls are more common and get less attention, which is exactly why they keep happening.

The controls follow the mechanism. Slips are a traction problem, so you fix the surface, clean the spill, de-ice the path, control the mud, and put the right boots on the crew. Trips are a clutter and surfaces problem, so you clear the path, route the cords, mark the level change, and keep the walkway defined. Most of this guide is trip control, because most of what a crew can fix in five minutes is a trip waiting to happen on the floor.

Keep walkways and exits clear

Walkways and exits are the one part of the floor that never gets to be a staging area. People move through them under load, carrying material, watching where the next stack goes instead of where their feet land. A walkway with a cord across it or a pallet half in it is a trip set for the busiest part of the day. Define the paths, keep them clear, and keep them clear all the time, not just when an inspector is on site.

OSHA 1926.25 is specific that debris has to be cleared from work areas, passageways, and stairs in and around the structure. Passageways and stairs are called out by name because they are where a fall does the most damage and where a blocked path costs the most in an emergency. A defined walkway also speeds the work, because a crew moving freely through a clear path moves faster than a crew picking its way through a field of material.

Exits and exit routes get the strictest version of this rule, and the reason is not paperwork. The day there is a fire, the day someone has to get a hurt worker out fast, the exit has to be open, lit, and unobstructed. Material stacked in front of a door or a stairwell is fine right up until the moment it is the worst possible decision anyone made that week. Nothing stores in an exit. Nothing parks in a passageway. Hold that line and most of the trip hazards on a site lose their best real estate.

How do you manage cords and hoses?

Cords and hoses are the single most common trip hazard on an active site, because the work needs them and they want to lie wherever the last person dropped them. The fix is to keep them out of the path. Route extension cords and air or water hoses overhead or along the walls, not across the walkway. When a line has to cross a path, run it under a cord cover or ramp so the foot rolls over it instead of catching it. OSHA 1926.416 is direct that working spaces and walkways have to be kept clear of cords so they do not create a hazard.

Overhead is the better answer when you can get it. A cord run up and across on a hook or a cord tree is out of the path entirely, off the wet floor, and away from the traffic that abrades the jacket. Along the wall is the next best, kept tight to the base so it is not a snag. The worst case is the line dropped diagonally across the open floor, which is exactly where it ends up by default if nobody manages it.

Cords are also an electrical hazard, not just a trip one, so housekeeping and shock protection ride together here. On a construction site, ground-fault protection is required for cord-and-plug equipment, commonly through a GFCI on the circuit or an assured equipment grounding conductor program, under the OSHA construction electrical rules. A cord with a cut or cracked jacket lying in water on the floor is both a trip and a shock waiting to happen. Pull damaged cords out of service. Do not tape a cut jacket and keep using it.

At the end of the run, the cord goes back on the reel or coils on the hook. A cord left in a pile on the floor overnight is the next morning's trip and the next storm's wet line. Managing cords is a small habit repeated all day, and it removes a hazard that otherwise reappears every hour.

What does OSHA say about jobsite debris?

OSHA 1926.25 is the housekeeping standard for construction, and it is short and blunt. During construction, alteration, or repair, scrap with protruding nails and all other debris has to be kept cleared from work areas, passageways, and stairs in and around the building. Combustible scrap and debris has to be removed at regular intervals during the course of the work, and a safe way to get it down has to be provided. Containers have to be provided for waste, trash, oily and used rags, and other refuse, with covers on the containers for oily, flammable, or hazardous waste, and the waste has to be disposed of at frequent, regular intervals.

The phrase that does the work is at regular intervals. Debris is not something you remove once at the end. It builds continuously, so it has to come out continuously. Set bins where the work is, empty them before they overflow, and keep a clear path for the material to travel from where it is made to where it leaves the site. A bin nobody can reach is a bin that does not get used, and the scrap ends up on the floor instead.

When the debris is coming down from height, it does not get thrown. Material more than a story up that is dropped to the ground gets a chute or a controlled, barricaded drop zone, which is the subject of the separate waste-disposal rules. The roofing case is the everyday one: tear-off debris coming off a roof goes down a chute into a dumpster, not over the edge into a walkway, and the landing area gets barricaded so nobody walks under the drop.

Read 1926.25 as the floor, not the ceiling. It is the federal minimum. The project safety plan, the general contractor's site rules, and the AHJ can require more, and a good site already does. Verify what the adopted standard and the jurisdiction actually require before you treat the federal text as the whole story.

Protruding nails and impalement

Protruding nails are called out by name in the housekeeping standard for a reason. A board with nails sticking up, left on the floor or leaned against a wall, is a puncture wound waiting for the next person who steps on it or brushes past it. Tear-off lumber, formwork, pallets, and crating are the usual sources, and the nail is always pointing the wrong way. The rule is simple and old: when you pull a board, the nails come out or get bent flat right then, while the board is in your hands.

Bending the nail over is faster than pulling it and it removes the point, which is what does the damage. Pulling it is better when the board gets reused or stacked, because a bent nail still catches. Either way the board does not go back on the floor point-up. A foot driven onto a nail through a boot is a deep puncture in a dirty environment, which is a tetanus and infection risk on top of the immediate injury.

Impalement on protruding rebar is the higher-stakes version of the same hazard, and it gets its own control. Exposed rebar that a worker could fall onto or against gets capped with rebar caps rated for impalement protection, or the ends get bent over or otherwise guarded. The detailed fall and impalement rules sit alongside the broader safety program, and the construction safety program guide covers how those controls get planned and documented. On the floor, the habit is the same: a point that can puncture gets covered, bent, or removed before it finds someone.

Clean spills now

A spill is a slip with a delay timer. Oil, coolant, hydraulic fluid, adhesive, water, mud tracked in from outside, all of it kills traction and all of it gets walked into without warning. The rule is to clean it when it happens, not when you get to it, because the person who slips on it is rarely the person who spilled it and never the person who decided to deal with it later.

Keep absorbent on hand where the spill is likely, near the equipment, the fuel, the adhesive station. Spread it, sweep it up, and bag it as the contaminated waste it is. For a wet floor that cannot be dried immediately, mark it. A wet-floor sign or a cone is not bureaucracy, it is the only warning the next worker gets that the traction they are counting on is not there.

Mud is the spill that crews forget is a spill. A site after rain tracks mud onto every hard surface, and a muddy boot on a smooth deck or a metal plate has almost no grip. Scrape boots at the transition, keep a clean path defined, and knock the mud off the high-traffic surfaces before it becomes the slick that puts someone down. The first slip on tracked mud is the one nobody saw coming, because the floor looked fine.

Lighting: you trip on what you can't see

You trip on what you cannot see, and a lot of a construction site is dark, especially interior work, stairwells, basements, and the early and late hours when the crew is still moving. Adequate lighting is housekeeping, because a clear path you cannot see is the same as a blocked one. The cord you would have stepped over in daylight is the cord that drops you in a dim stairwell.

Temporary lighting goes where the work and the travel are, with task lights at the work and string or area lights along the paths and stairs. The stairs in particular earn their own light, because a missed step in the dark is a fall, and a stairwell is where a fall does real harm. Keep the temporary lighting maintained, replace the dead lamps, and protect the strings so they are not the next trip hazard themselves.

Lighting also doubles as a housekeeping check. A well-lit path shows you the spill, the scrap, the nail, and the level change while there is still time to deal with them. A dark path hides every one of those until a foot finds it. Light the work and you find the hazards before they find a worker.

Cover and mark floor holes and openings

Floor holes and openings are the housekeeping hazard that goes from a trip to a fatal fall, so they get the strictest treatment on the floor. An uncovered hole is a step into nothing. The control is a cover that is secured so it cannot slide or be kicked off, rated to carry the load that will cross it, and marked so everyone knows what it is. Under the OSHA construction fall-protection rules, covers have to be color-coded or marked with the word HOLE or COVER to warn of the hazard.

The thresholds matter. A hole is defined as a gap of 2 inches or more in its least dimension in a walking or working surface. Workers have to be protected from tripping in or stepping into a hole by a cover, and from falling through a hole more than 6 feet above a lower level by a cover, a guardrail, or a personal fall arrest system, under 1926.501. A skylight counts as a hole for this purpose, which is the roofing case people forget until someone steps onto one.

The cover itself has to be real. A scrap of plywood thrown over an opening is not a cover, it is a trap that looks like a floor. Covers get secured against displacement, sized and rated to hold the worker or the load that will cross them, and marked. The piece that disappears on real jobs is the marking and the securing. A crew cuts a hole, drops an unmarked board over it, and the next trade walks onto a cover that slides. The fall-protection detail and the rated-cover requirements run alongside the broader program, and the construction safety program guide covers how those controls get managed. On the floor, the rule is: never leave an opening that is not covered, secured, rated, and marked.

Stable material storage out of the path

Material has to land somewhere, and where it lands decides whether it is housekeeping or a hazard. Stacked stable and out of the path, it is storage. Stacked in the walkway, leaning, or piled too high, it is a trip hazard, a fall hazard, and a struck-by hazard at the same time. Stack it square, band or block it so it cannot shift, keep the height sensible so it does not topple, and set it out of the paths and exits.

Set material back from edges, openings, and the leading edge of a roof or floor. A stack right at the edge is a fall hazard for the worker who reaches for it and a struck-by hazard for anyone below if a piece goes over. On a roof, material staged near the eave or a skylight is the everyday version of this, and it gets set back and secured against wind and slope.

Storage also has to leave the path clear as the stack shrinks and grows. A pile that started clear of the walkway sprawls into it as the crew works off it, so the discipline is to keep the working face of the stack tidy, not just the first delivery. The goal is the same one that runs through this whole guide: the floor people walk on stays clear, and the material lives somewhere it is not underfoot.

Keep stairs and ladders clear

Stairs and ladders are travel paths under load, and the housekeeping rule on them is absolute: nothing stores on the steps or the rungs, ever. A tool, a coil of cord, a bundle of material left on a stair tread is a trip on a surface where a trip becomes a fall down a flight. The housekeeping standard names stairs specifically for this reason. Keep them clear, keep them clean of mud and debris, and keep the path to them open.

The temptation is real because a stair landing is a convenient flat spot to set something down for a minute. The minute becomes an hour, the next person carries a load down with their view blocked, and the thing on the step is the thing they do not see. The same goes for the foot and top of a ladder, where dropped tools and gathered debris make the most dangerous spot on the access even worse.

Ladder setup and the access decision itself, the right ladder, the angle, the tie-off, three points of contact, sit in the ladder safety guide. The housekeeping piece is narrower and just as important: keep the steps, the rungs, and the base clear, and keep the path to the access open so a worker climbing under load is not also picking their way through a mess to get there.

Slip-resistant footwear and traction

Housekeeping controls the surface, but the boot is the last line between the worker and the slip. Slip-resistant footwear with a sole rated for traction holds where a worn or smooth sole lets go, and on a wet, muddy, or dusty site that difference is the difference between a recovered step and a fall. A worn-out tread is a smooth sole, so footwear is something to inspect, not just issue.

Match the boot to the surface. A lug sole sheds mud and bites on uneven ground. A flatter, fine-tread slip-resistant sole grips better on smooth interior surfaces and metal plate, where a deep lug can actually float on a thin slick. On a roof, the membrane and the slope set their own traction problem, and the right footwear for the surface is part of the access plan, not an afterthought.

Footwear is a control the worker carries everywhere, which is its strength and its limit. It backs up good housekeeping, it does not replace it. A perfect boot on a floor covered in spilled oil still slips. Clean the floor and put the right boots on the crew, and the slip has to beat both.

Winter, ice, and snow

Ice and snow turn every walking surface on the site into a slip hazard at once, and they do it overnight, so the morning crew meets a site that was fine when they left it. The controls are the same ones used elsewhere, applied harder. De-ice and sand the paths, stairs, and access points before the crew is on them. Clear snow off the travel routes and the work surfaces, not just the parking lot.

Roofs and raised surfaces are the serious case, because ice removes the traction that slope and height already make dangerous. A frosted roof deck or a snow-covered low-slope membrane hides the edge, the skylight, and the slick all at once. Winter work on a roof is a plan, not a default, and the access and fall-protection rules carry more weight when the surface is iced.

Keep the de-icer, the sand, and the snow tools staged before the storm, not after. A site that goes looking for ice melt at 6 a.m. after a freeze is a site whose crew walks the ice while someone finds the bucket.

Combustible debris and fire

Combustible debris is fuel, and housekeeping is fire prevention. Sawdust, packaging, scrap felt and membrane, cardboard, and dried adhesive collect where the work happens, and so do the torches, grinders, heat guns, and hot-air welders. Put fuel and ignition together and you have the start of a fire. The housekeeping answer is to keep combustible scrap cleared from the area, especially anywhere hot work is happening, and to remove it at regular intervals so it never builds into a real fuel load.

Hot work gets a clear zone. Before a torch or a grinder lights up, the combustible debris comes out of the area, and the zone stays clear for the duration and after, because smoldering scrap can flare up well after the work stops. Roofing torch and hot-air work over a deck littered with loose felt scraps is the everyday version of this hazard, and clearing the deck first is the control. The hot-work permit and fire-watch procedures sit with the broader safety program.

Oily and solvent-soaked rags are their own hazard, because they can self-heat and ignite without any spark at all. They go in a covered metal can rated for the purpose, not in a pile, not in an open trash bag, and not stuffed in a pocket. The housekeeping standard calls for covered containers for oily and flammable waste for exactly this reason. A pile of oily rags in a warm corner is a fire that starts itself.

A place for everything: designated areas

A clean site is easier to keep clean when everything has a home. Designate spots for tools, for material, and for trash, and the crew stops leaving things wherever they finished using them. A tool with a place gets returned to it. A tool with no place gets set down on the floor, which is where it becomes a trip and where it gets lost. The same logic runs through material staging and waste collection.

Mark the areas and keep them where the work is. A trash bin two hundred feet from the work does not get used, and the scrap ends up underfoot instead. A material laydown that is out of the path keeps the path clear. A tool station near the work keeps tools off the floor and keeps the crew from wandering the site to find them, which is the productivity payoff hiding inside the safety habit.

The discipline is to reset the areas, not just establish them. A designated spot drifts back into chaos by the end of the day if nobody maintains it, so the end-of-shift walk includes putting the designated areas back to designated. A place for everything only works if everything goes back to its place.

The end-of-shift walk

The last task of the shift is leaving the site safe for whoever comes next, which might be the next crew, the next trade, or your own crew in the morning walking in tired and not looking. The end-of-shift walk is a quick pass to clear the floor, coil and stow the cords, empty or stage the bins, cover and mark any open holes, and put the designated areas back. It takes a few minutes and it prevents the first injury of the next day.

This is where the clean-as-you-go habit and the scheduled tidy meet. If the crew cleaned as they went, the end-of-shift walk is short, because there is little left to clear. If they did not, the walk turns into the Friday blitz in miniature, and things get missed because everyone wants to go home. The walk is a backstop, not the only cleanup.

Leaving it safe for the next crew is also how a site builds the standard. When every crew walks onto a clean site each morning, clean becomes the baseline they protect. When they walk onto yesterday's mess, the standard resets to whatever they find, and it only goes one direction from there.

Housekeeping on the daily inspection and toolbox talk

Housekeeping does not hold up on goodwill. It holds up because someone looks for it, names it, and follows up. Put housekeeping on the daily site inspection, walked by the competent person or the foreman, and on the toolbox talk where the crew hears why it matters and what changed. A hazard noted on the inspection and fixed by the end of the shift is a hazard that did not hurt anyone. A hazard nobody wrote down is a hazard that gets stepped over until it gets someone.

The inspection looks for the same short list this guide has been working through: paths and exits clear, cords and hoses managed, debris bins not overflowing, nails down, holes covered and marked, spills cleaned, material out of the way, stairs clear. It is a five-minute walk if the site is clean and a much longer one if it is not, which is itself the signal.

The toolbox talk is where the why lands. A crew that understands clean-as-you-go keeps it without being chased, because they have seen what the mess costs. The daily inspection, the competent-person role, and the toolbox-talk cadence are part of the written safety program, and the construction safety program guide covers how those pieces fit together and what the records have to prove.

A clean site is a faster site

Housekeeping pays for itself in time, not just in injuries avoided, and this is the argument that gets a skeptical crew to buy in. A clean site is a faster site because people and material move freely, tools are where they belong, and nobody loses an hour hunting for the thing that got buried. The time a crew spends looking for a misplaced tool or moving a stack out of the path is time billed to nothing, and on a messy site it adds up to real hours every week.

Quality rides along with it. A clean work surface is a surface you can see and inspect, so the defects show up while they are still cheap to fix instead of after they are covered. A cluttered surface hides the bad seam, the missed fastener, the substrate that was not ready. Clean is how you catch the problem before it becomes the callback.

The crews that run clean are usually the crews that run on time, and it is not a coincidence. The same discipline that keeps the floor clear keeps the schedule honest: deal with the small thing now. Treat housekeeping as the cost of working fast, not a tax on it, and the math comes out ahead every job.

What to document and log

The pattern is what hurts you, and you only see the pattern if you write it down. Log the housekeeping inspection and any slip or trip incident, even the near-miss that did not put anyone down, because the cord that almost dropped someone Tuesday is the cord that breaks an ankle Friday. A record turns a string of small events into a visible problem you can fix at the source instead of cleaning up after it again.

Capture what the hazard was, what control fixed it, and a note on the cause, so the fix sticks. If the same trip hazard shows up in the same place three weeks running, the record is what tells you the answer is not another cleanup but a routed cord or a relocated bin. A field tool like FieldOS keeps the inspection, the photo, and the corrective action together with a date and a name, so the record is something an insurer, a general contractor, or an inspector can actually read, and so the recurring hazard stops being invisible.

Write down enough that the next person understands the call. The hazard, where it was, the control applied, who walked it, and the date are the minimum. When a slip or trip does cause an injury, that record also feeds the incident reporting and the OSHA 300 log obligations, which the construction safety program guide covers in detail.

Field checklist

Common mistakes

• Running a Friday blitz instead of cleaning as you go, so the mess hurts someone Tuesday.
• Cords and hoses dropped across walkways instead of routed overhead or under a cover.
• Protruding nails left point-up on tear-off lumber and pallets.
• Uncovered or unmarked floor holes, or a loose plywood scrap passed off as a rated cover.
• Spills left on the floor for later, with no absorbent staged and no wet-floor warning.
• Material and tarps stacked in front of exits, stairs, and passageways.
• Making housekeeping one person's punishment detail instead of everyone's task.
• Treating the end-of-shift walk and a clean-as-you-go habit as the same thing instead of both.

Standards and references

OSHA 1926.25 is the housekeeping standard for construction. It requires scrap with protruding nails and all other debris to be kept cleared from work areas, passageways, and stairs, combustible scrap and debris to be removed at regular intervals with a safe means provided to get it down, and containers for waste and refuse with covers on the containers used for oily and flammable waste. The companion rule on disposal of waste materials covers chutes and controlled drops when debris comes down from height.

Slips, trips, and falls on walking and working surfaces are addressed in the general industry walking-working surface rules at 29 CFR 1910 Subpart D, which the construction rules and good practice draw on, while floor holes and openings are governed by the construction fall-protection rules at 1926.501, including the requirement that hole covers be secured, rated, and marked with HOLE or COVER. Cords kept clear of walkways and ground-fault protection on construction circuits come from the construction electrical rules, including 1926.416 and the GFCI and assured-grounding requirements.

The numbers and the exact section text shift between standards and code cycles, and a state-plan jurisdiction can adopt stricter rules than federal OSHA. The project safety plan and the general contractor's site rules often require more than the federal minimum. Confirm what the adopted standard and the AHJ actually require before you treat any single citation as the whole obligation. Throughout, the consistent message is the same one this guide leads with: clean as you go, keep walkways and exits clear, and cover the holes and pull the nails. The written program that ties these controls together lives in the construction safety program guide, and access and ladder housekeeping live in the ladder safety guide.

Units and terms

Housekeeping and slip-trip-fall work carry a handful of terms that show up across OSHA text, inspection forms, and safety plans, and the same idea sometimes goes by more than one name.

Slips, trips, and falls are often grouped as STF on logs and reports. Same-level falls are distinguished from falls to a lower level, which are the falls-from-height the fall-protection rules target. A hole and a floor opening are defined by size in the standards, with a hole being a gap of 2 inches or more in its least dimension. Housekeeping itself is the umbrella term for keeping the site clean, clear, and orderly, and clean-as-you-go is the practice of doing it continuously rather than on a schedule.

STF

Slips, trips, and falls, the grouped category for same-level loss-of-footing injuries

Same-level fall

A fall onto the surface the worker is standing on, distinct from a fall to a lower level

Slip vs trip

A slip is loss of traction; a trip is the foot catching an object or a level change

Hole / floor opening

A gap of 2 inches or more in its least dimension in a walking or working surface

Clean-as-you-go

Removing debris and hazards continuously as part of the task, not in a scheduled blitz

Combustible scrap

Burnable debris such as packaging, sawdust, and felt that has to be cleared at regular intervals

AHJ

Authority having jurisdiction, the agency that adopts and enforces the applicable rules

Related tools

Calculators and readiness checks for this work

Compare your options

FAQ

People also ask

• What is a construction safety program?
• What is the 4 to 1 ladder rule?
• What is construction robotics?
• What should you photograph on a jobsite?
• What is the OSHA noise action level?