1.1 Why the Focus Four kill construction workers

1 The four hazards

The Focus Four are not a ranking of how often people get hurt. They are a ranking of how often people get killed. A cut hand and a pinched finger happen far more often than an electrocution, but they do not empty a crew. OSHA built its Outreach Training Program around these four because they account for the majority of construction fatalities, and because every one of them is preventable with equipment and planning that already exist.

A single event often belongs to more than one category. A worker on a scaffold who is knocked off by a swinging load dies from the fall, but the cause was struck-by. A trench collapse that buries a pipelayer is caught-in/between, but the crew that jumped in to dig him out may end up as a second burial. That overlap is the point: fix the upstream hazard and you close several exits at once.

2 What the citation data says

OSHA publishes the standards it cites most often after inspections. The list for fiscal year 2025 — October 1, 2024 through September 30, 2025 — reads like a summary of the Focus Four, with construction standards taking half the slots even though construction is a minority of the workplaces OSHA inspects.

Fall protection has held the number one spot for more than a decade, and fall protection training — the requirement in 1926.503 that a competent person actually teach workers to recognize fall hazards and use the equipment — sits at number seven. Employers are not only failing to hang the guardrail; they are failing to tell anyone why it is there.

3 Why experienced workers still get hurt

New hires get hurt because they do not know what they are looking at. Experienced workers get hurt for four other reasons, and every incident report you will ever read is some mix of them.

1. 1
   The exposure is short. "It's a two-minute job" is the most common sentence before a fall. Fall protection takes longer to rig than the task takes to do, so it does not get rigged. Gravity does not price the job by the hour.
2. 2
   The hazard is invisible or silent. A trench wall gives no warning. An energized conductor looks exactly like a dead one. Soil that held yesterday has taken on rain overnight.
3. 3
   The task changed but the plan did not. The crew planned to set trusses and ended up patching a skylight. The pre-task plan covered the first job.
4. 4
   Nothing bad happened the last two hundred times. Every unprotected leading edge that did not kill anyone taught the crew that unprotected leading edges are survivable. That is the most expensive lesson on a jobsite.

This is why the standards are written as duties on the employer and not as advice to the worker. 29 CFR 1926.501(b)(1) does not say a worker should use fall protection above 6 feet when it seems worthwhile; it says each employee on a surface with an unprotected side or edge 6 feet or more above a lower level shall be protected. The judgment call was removed on purpose.

4 Where the rules come from

Construction work is covered by 29 CFR Part 1926. It is organized in subparts, each one lettered, and knowing four or five of them by letter will let you find almost anything. General industry — factories, warehouses, most fixed workplaces — is covered by Part 1910 instead, and the numbers are sometimes different. Where that difference matters in this course, the chapter says so.

Two general sections sit above all of them. 29 CFR 1926.20(b)(2) requires the employer's accident prevention program to provide for frequent and regular inspections of the job site by competent persons. And 1926.21(b)(2) requires the employer to instruct each employee in the recognition and avoidance of unsafe conditions and the regulations applicable to the work. Those two sentences are the legal basis for the toolbox talk, the pre-task plan, and the training you are doing right now.

5 "Competent person" is a legal term, not a compliment

You will meet this phrase in every part of this course, so learn it here. Under 29 CFR 1926.32(f) a competent person is one who is capable of identifying existing and predictable hazards in the surroundings or working conditions which are unsanitary, hazardous, or dangerous to employees, and who has authorization to take prompt corrective measures to eliminate them.

Both halves matter. Knowing that the trench is unsafe does not make you the competent person if you cannot stop the work. Being the foreman does not make you the competent person if you cannot identify a Type C soil. Subpart P requires a competent person to inspect excavations daily; Subpart L requires one to supervise scaffold erection and inspect before each shift; Subpart M requires one to train workers in fall hazards. When a standard names a competent person, the employer must designate someone real.

6 How to use this course

Part 1 takes the Focus Four one at a time. Part 2 covers the personal protective equipment that backs up the other controls when they fail. Part 3 covers ladders and scaffolds, which is where a large share of construction falls actually happen. Part 4 covers the ordinary jobsite habits — housekeeping, tools, heat and cold, reporting — that decide whether a site is a good one to work on.

Each part ends with a five-question quiz, and the course ends with a twenty-question final exam. Your progress is stored in your own browser, not on our servers, so you can stop at the end of a chapter and pick it up tomorrow.

One thing this course is not: it is not OSHA Outreach Training. In the OSHA 10-Hour Construction course, a DOL-authorized trainer must spend at least four hours on the Focus Four, with a minimum of one hour and thirty minutes on falls alone. Only OSHA-authorized trainers can deliver that class and issue the DOL card. Read this course to understand the hazards and to walk into that class already knowing the vocabulary — not to replace it.