Preventing occupational accidents and occupational safety in shipyards: Tuzla shipyards

Occupational accidents, with negative effects on economical sustainability and descending impacts on efficiency in both macro and micro economic scales, are fundemantal problems decreasing the competitiveness of enterprises with direct and indirect costs. Within the scope of this study, some statistical results are acquired and evaluated after examining 46 fatal and 34 non-fatal accidents out of the labour accidents happened in Turkey shipyards. Occupational accidents caused by fire, explosion and electric current in shipyards are in average more than those country- wide overall accidents caused by the same factors in Turkey. Besides it is found out that one fifth of the employees exposed to occupational accidents in shipyards were not the ones who are actually doing that work on the workside where the accident occurred, they were incidentally there. Besides in summer, shipyard accidents were 43 percent more compared to any other season average. And after that the causal relationship of occupational accidents and seasons were defined.Key Words :shipyard, occupational accident, fatality, injury