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According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 5,070 occupational injuries recorded in 2024 in the United States were fatal. This number is 4.0 percent lower than the previous year’s 5,283 documented cases. This data demonstrates the dangers involved in the construction industry.
Construction workers are far more likely to encounter such risks than people in any other line of work. According to statistics from the Electrical Safety Foundation International (ESFI), the construction sector was responsible for the highest number of industrial electrical fatalities between 2011 and 2024. The rate of these deaths was approximately 0.73 fatalities per 100,000 workers.
There were 5,180 cases of electrical incidents that turned out to be non-fatal across 2023 and 2024, an increase of 59% as compared to the previous two years. Burns are also the most common form of shock-related injury on job sites.
The aftermath of electrical burns on a construction site can be devastating. A burn injury from electricity may seem like a simple fact pattern with one obvious cause, but identifying the proper responsible party in any injury case can be more of a complex inquiry than it might seem initially. Several parties may share responsibility for this particular injury. There are multiple ways through which workers can be compensated. Understanding all these routes and acting swiftly to guarantee that none of them get shut is the key thing in the initial days that follow the accident.
Let’s look at the rights workers have after sustaining electrical burn injuries on construction sites.
What Makes Electrical Burns Different From Other Construction Injuries
Workers injured on the job are mostly covered by workers’ compensation. But according to Lake Charles work injury lawyer Paul J. Cox, workers’ compensation only provides basic coverage, which covers time off the job and medical costs. It doesn’t compensate for loss of earning power, rehabilitation, career retraining, or pain and suffering.
Electrical burns sort themselves into three categories. Thermal contact burns happen when someone is too close to an arc or flame that gets lit by an electrical discharge. Arc flash burns show up when an electrical fault triggers a strong burst of energy that can injure skin severely even if there’s no direct touch. True electrical burns happen when the current actually moves through the body between entry and exit points. This movement causes damage to tissues that are in its path.
OSHA’s construction electrical incident data points to five of the more common causes of electrical injuries on job sites: contact with power lines, lack of ground-fault protection, a missing or discontinuous route to ground, equipment used in the wrong way, and improper handling or use of extension cords and flexible cords.
The injury level is often more extensive than it seems at first. Current passing through the body can cause internal harm to nerves, muscles, and organs, but that damage may not be obvious on the skin’s surface. A worker who thinks they only had a small burn might actually be carrying deeper injuries that only become clear later on. Delayed medical evaluation is also one of the biggest reasons electrical burn claims end up disputed or valued too low.
Workers Compensation: The First Track
Workers’ compensation acts as the basic shield for most construction workers who get hurt while they’re working. It takes care of medical bills, rehabilitation, and lost wages, but it really doesn’t ask the injured person to prove the employer was at fault. The whole thing is run under OSHA’s recordkeeping and reporting rules, meaning employers have to log injuries and often submit reports to OSHA for serious injuries. These actions usually need to be accomplished within 24 hours.
Knowing what workers’ compensation does not do matters just as much. It doesn’t pay for pain and suffering and typically doesn’t cover disfigurement beyond the scheduled benefit amounts that some states set. Workers’ compensation doesn’t allow for the recovery of damage brought about by reduced earning ability. Workers who have suffered severe burns, nerve damage, or injuries that affect their ability to return to their trade should know that workers’ comp may only cover a small part of their total losses.
Different states have different schedules for reporting workers’ compensation cases. Filing a claim after the deadline can cause the person to lose a portion or all of the benefits they would have received in the first place, such as insurance coverage and medical treatment. An employee is to inform his/her manager about an injury immediately no matter how small a burn may be.
Third-Party Claims: The Second Track
Workers’ compensation covers the employer, but construction site injuries are never that simple since there are so many other parties involved that do not have an employee-employer relationship with the injured worker. For an electrical burn injury, a general contractor might not be the only one liable. Subcontractors, equipment manufacturers, property owners, and utility groups could have a liability exposure, depending on the circumstances of the incident. Each of these groups can also face a separate civil claim that is entirely different from the workers’ comp matter.
General Contractors and Subcontractors
On multi-party job sites, general contractors usually have a duty to keep the overall site safe and to provide reasonable oversight over subcontractors. If the subcontractors’ work created an electrical hazard, or if the general contractor didn’t really enforce safety procedures or coordinate enough supervision, then liability can follow. In that kind of setup, these actions count as third-party negligence claims. These claims are somewhat independent of the employer relationship.
Equipment Manufacturers
If the electrical burn happened after using a defective tool, a faulty wiring system, or some malfunctioning piece of equipment, then the company that made the item or sold it as a distributor may face product liability exposure. This liability framework can still apply even when the employer has already installed or operated the equipment. A product liability claim usually does not hinge on proving negligence in the old traditional way. Instead, showing that the product was defective and that this defect caused the injury is often enough to move the claim forward.
Property Owners
The property owner where the construction is happening owes a duty to deal with known electrical dangers that are on the premises. If the property owner knew about the risky conditions and then failed to resolve the problem or give workers a timely warning, the owner could share liability for any injuries that result.
OSHA Investigations and Their Role in a Claim
When a construction worker takes a serious electrical hit, OSHA might do a workplace inspection and then issue citations for safety violations. Those citations are not, by themselves, automatic proof that someone is civilly liable. Still, they do a lot of documentation work—pointing to what specific safety rules were violated by which party and describing the dangerous conditions that were around at the time of the incident, kind of like a snapshot. An OSHA citation that gets issued to a general contractor, a subcontractor, or even a property owner can end up being pretty valuable evidence in a later civil case.
Workers also have the right to ask for OSHA inspection records under the Freedom of Information Act. In some cases, it may be possible to retain the incident report, take photographs immediately after the event to document the scene, and obtain a list of names of co-workers who can provide objective descriptions of the workplace at the time of the incident.
Steps to Take After an Electrical Burn Injury
- Seek medical treatment as soon as possible, regardless of how the burns look. The victim must explicitly tell the treating team that the injury came from an electrical burn and not a thermal injury only
- Notify your employer the same day and see to it that the incident report is actually filled out. A copy of the report must be kept and preserved somewhere safe
- As soon as it is safe, take photographs of the scene, the equipment that was involved, and your injuries
- Collect contact information for witnesses, including co-workers from other subcontracting companies, if there were any people nearby who saw what happened
- Do not repair anything, do not remove the equipment, and do not allow any modifications to the equipment or the site conditions until the incident has been documented properly
- File a workers’ compensation claim promptly, but don’t agree to settle before the full scope of the injury is known, and before any third-party liability has been looked at
Both Tracks Can Be Pursued Together
Workers compensation and a third-party civil claim aren’t really mutually exclusive. For example, a construction worker injured by an arc flash from equipment installed by a subcontractor can receive workers’ comp benefits through their employer’s carrier. At the same time, he or she can also pursue a product liability lawsuit against the equipment manufacturer and a negligence claim against the subcontractor. The workers’ comp carrier will usually assert a lien on any third-party recovery but overall, the combined payout from both paths is almost always higher than workers’ comp by itself.
Electrical burn injuries tend to come with lasting, day-to-day consequences that workers compensation was never meant to cover in full. That gap, between what comp pays and what the actual losses look like, keeps widening as the injury gets more serious. Closing that gap is really about finding every responsible party early on and preserving the evidence that supports each claim. ESFI’s workplace safety data kind of backs this argument up, showing that most electrical fatalities happen in non-electrical occupations. So the workers who are most at risk are often the same people who are least familiar with the hazards and with the legal protections that can be available to them.
