Understanding Occupational Injury and Illness Classifications
Our Safety stats are reported through July 2025, and we’ve revamped the report with new slides, graphics and charts.
Let’s talk about safety stats and lagging indicators! We have completely revamped the monthly Safety report with new slides, new visualizations & updated charts!! We’ve made these changes for a couple of reasons:
- To adjust our focus from lagging indicators to incident severity.
- To align with the new SH&E software platform - coming in Q1 2026!
Through July 2025, we have had 50 OSHA Recordable Injury/Illness Events. Of those 50 events, 28 of them have resulted in a lost-time injury where a Team Member missed one or more workdays due to the occupational injury/illness. Using this statistic, you have greater than a 50% chance that when you get injured at Olympic Steel, you will miss work.
Classifying injuries/illnesses as DAFW (Days Away From Work) is not new for Safety tracking, but it is new for Olympic Steel to use this term. You often hear us refer to Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR) or DART when we talk about occupational injuries and illnesses. DAFW is a subset of DART illustrated in the graphic below.
Looking at the company-wide snapshot of January to July for the last three years, we have 22% fewer OSHA recordable events in 2025 vs 2024, but the number of Days Away From Work (DAFW, also known as lost time) recordables increased 13% in the same period.
Not everyone is expected to understand the numbers, but we’re all able to understand how consciously trying to think safe and work safe will make a difference – the difference between cutting your finger (medical only injury) and cutting your finger off (DAFW injury).
As we wrap-up the summer months, let’s implement the concepts introduced during National Safety Month – Think Safe, Work Safe and Live Safe – to further develop our Safety mindset and identify opportunities to reduce the severity of any future occupational injury/illness events.
If you want to learn more about our Safety stats, please reach out to Brent Smallwood, SH&E Data Analyst, at Brent.Smallwood@olysteel.com or internal extension 33440.
Safety First. Always. And, it starts with me.
