Dangerous incident examples on a worksite

The incident nobody went to hospital for

Most people know a serious injury when they see one. The harder call is the event where everyone walked away. A drum split and the floor ran wet. The shoring held, by luck. Nobody was hurt, so it feels like nothing worth writing down.

Regulators have a name for these events: dangerous incidents. They matter because the same thing can happen again with someone underneath. This guide shows what the lists look like in a regulator’s own words, and how to record one properly on site.

What the lists look like

NT WorkSafe’s page is a good example because it gives worked cases. It says some types of dangerous incident are notifiable even if no-one is injured. The rows below quote it word for word. The page also has a longer list of event types, which is worth reading in full on the regulator’s site.

Read the examples for what they share. Each one is a serious risk to people nearby, right now. A frayed lead is a hazard. A lead arcing against a wet pipe is much closer to the line, because someone could be hurt in seconds.

Examples from the regulator

NT WorkSafe gives worked examples, and they’re quoted in the table. A hand tool falls from a building under construction onto a person below. A scaffold collapses and puts people next to the site at risk. An awning collapses onto someone standing underneath. In each, a serious risk is what puts it on the list, not how it ended.

Risks that show up later

Some exposures don’t hurt anyone on the day. NT WorkSafe’s page says a dangerous incident also covers exposure to a substance likely to create a serious risk in the future. It gives asbestos and hazardous chemicals as examples. Say a crew disturbs old lagging and nobody knows what it was. Write it down that day, with a photo, so the question can be answered later.

The page also deals with people who aren’t workers. The last row quotes what it says about visitors and bystanders: the same list applies when the incident arises out of the business.

Writing one up on site

A good record answers five questions in the worker’s own words. What happened, where, when, who was close by, and what was done straight after. A photo of the spot helps. So does a timestamp from the phone, which nobody can argue with later.

• Where it happened, with a pin or a level and gridline
• The time, and roughly how long the hazard was live
• Who was within reach, by name or by role
• What was done to make it safe, and who did it
• Photos of the area, taken before anything was cleaned up

Haznote takes this as a voice report with photos and a GPS point. The AI suggests a category and flags anything that looks notifiable. A manager checks it and makes the call. Haznote doesn’t notify the regulator for you.

Telling the right people

Whether an event is notifiable is decided by your regulator’s rules and your manager, not by a guide. Each state page in our notifiable incidents series gives the regulator’s number and wording. Keep that number where the crew can see it.