Causal Factors in Thresher Accidents in Turkey

Farm machinery offers many benefits for the farmers; however, they present important occupational safety concerns when they are not designed and used safely. Previous studies in Turkey concentrated on accidents of farm tractors and general farm machinery. No study was available on thresher accidents which cause significant number of casualties and injuries in Turkey. Hence, the aim of this study was to investigate the thresher accidents to determine main causal factors towards reducing the accidents, fatalities, injuries and monetary losses. Data on thresher accidents were collected based on accident news stories. A total of 103 thresher accidents were identified between 2002 and 2017 of which 90 were on-field and 13 were on-road incidents. It was observed that fatality rate was very high at about 39.6%. Accidents were higher in some regions such as Central Anatolia region (28.2%) and Black Sea region (25.2%). Majority of the accidents were in summer months (77.7%). Most of the on-field accidents occurred as entanglement of body parts (63.3%) to thresher’s moving parts followed by entanglement of clothes (16.6%) and fall into thresher (13.3%). The percentage of children with an age of less than 10 was considerable (13.0%). Safer material intake and safer power transmission designs are needed. Farmers need training on how to safely operate a thresher and how their clothing should be for safer work. Also, precautions are needed to distant children from work area of the threshers