The single most expensive mistake I see after a bad accident is not the accident. It is the report that went in late, or did not go in at all, because someone applied a rule that changed six years ago.
What California requires
8 CCR section 342(a) requires an employer to report immediately — “as soon as practically possible but not longer than 8 hours after the employer knows or with diligent inquiry would have known” — any serious injury or illness, or death, of an employee occurring in a place of employment or in connection with employment. The report goes to the nearest Division office by telephone or through the Division’s online mechanism. Only exigent circumstances extend it, and then only to 24 hours.
Note the phrasing: or with diligent inquiry would have known. A supervisor who hears that a worker was taken to hospital and does not follow up does not stop the clock. He starts it.
The definition changed in 2020
Labor Code section 6302, as amended by AB 1805, defines a serious injury or illness as in-patient hospitalization of any length for other than medical observation or diagnostic testing, amputation, loss of an eye, or a serious degree of permanent disfigurement.
Three things went away with that amendment. The old 24-hour hospitalization threshold is gone. Injuries caused by a violation of the Penal Code are no longer excluded. And accidents on a public street or highway in a construction zone are expressly covered. I still find decision trees in binders that run on the pre-2020 rule, which means the employer is deciding not to report cases that must be reported.
Federal sites
Under 29 CFR 1904.39(a)(1) a work-related fatality is reported within 8 hours. Under (a)(2), an in-patient hospitalization, an amputation or the loss of an eye is reported within 24 hours. Employers operating across state-plan and federal-jurisdiction sites should not run one procedure and hope.
The first seventy-two hours
I came to this work from twenty-five years in the fire service, and a serious industrial accident behaves like any other incident scene. Evidence degrades quickly, and it degrades in a particular order: physical position first, then witness memory, then documents, as people begin to look for them and to explain them.
- Make the area safe, then leave it alone. Do not clean, do not repair, do not re-set a guard.
- Photograph wide, then close, with a scale in frame.
- Record equipment settings, lockout status and the position of every energy isolation device before anyone touches them.
- Take witness accounts individually and early, before the shift has talked it through.
- Pull training records, the maintenance file for the equipment, and the inspection log for that area on day one.
That file is what a section 6432(c) rebuttal is built from months later. It cannot be reconstructed after the fact, and an investigator will notice that it was.
Michael Karl McNeil — former Fire Battalion Chief, industrial hygienist, environmental health and safety. General information, not legal advice.
Michael Karl McNeil 