# Accidents at work — contact mode of injury (EU, 2023)

Canonical, citable source document for the IACE risk-frequency/severity anchors.
This file is the versioned artifact that is ingested into the core RAG
collection `bp_iace_accident_stats` so seeding can full-text search the evidence
and surface the figure with its citation.

## Primary source — Eurostat ESAW

- **Source:** Eurostat — European Statistics on Accidents at Work (ESAW)
- **Dataset:** `hsw_ph3_08` — accidents at work by contact / mode of injury
- **Reference year:** 2023 (Statistics Explained, Figure 7)
- **License:** CC BY 4.0 (reuse permitted, source acknowledgement required)
- **Attribution:** `Quelle: Eurostat (ESAW) hsw_ph3_08, Bezugsjahr 2023, CC BY 4.0`
- **Retrieved:** 2026-06
- **URL:** https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Accidents_at_work_-_statistics_on_causes_and_circumstances

### Contact mode of injury — EU shares, 2023

| Contact mode | Non-fatal | Fatal |
|---|---|---|
| Physical or mental stress | 24.7 % | — |
| Impact with a stationary object (victim in motion) | 24.0 % | 21.4 % |
| Contact with a sharp / pointed / rough-coarse agent | 14.5 % | — |
| Being struck by an object in motion / collision | 13.0 % | 23.8 % |
| Being trapped or crushed | — | 13.8 % |
| No contact / no information | 9.6 % | 15.1 % |

Reading: the non-fatal column anchors the **frequency / probability tier (W)**
of a contact mode; the fatal column (and the fatal-vs-non-fatal gap) anchors its
typical **severity (S)**. Struck-by and trapped/crushed are comparatively rare
among non-fatal but over-represented among fatal accidents — i.e. lower
frequency, higher severity.

## Supplementary context — US OSHA (public domain)

- **Source:** OSHA — Commonly Used Statistics (U.S. Government work, public domain)
- **Retrieved:** 2026-06 · **URL:** https://www.osha.gov/data/commonstats
- 2023: **5,283** fatal work injuries in the US (3.5 per 100,000 FTE workers).
- Most frequently violated standards: Fall Protection, Hazard Communication,
  Control of Hazardous Energy (Lockout/Tagout).

US BLS CFOI/SOII event-level tables (public domain) are an intended further
supplement; the BLS site blocks automated retrieval, so those figures are to be
added from a manually downloaded release.

## How these numbers are used

1. **Anchor (ordering):** the relative frequency/severity ordering of contact
   modes above sets the *direction* of the W and S tiers in `risk_estimation.go`
   (`contactModeTable`).
2. **Calibrate (values):** tier *values* are adjusted to BreakPilot ground truth;
   well-sampled modes use the GT mean, sparse modes use conservative defaults —
   no overfitting to a small GT sample.

No standard's risk-graph table, decision tree or SIL/PL matrix is reproduced.
Excluded by license: DGUV statistics, DIN/Beuth/ISO/IEC tables.
