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Lost a Finger, a Hand, or a Limb on a Construction Site?
An amputation takes seconds and lasts the rest of a working life.
Federal law treats it with matching gravity: an employer has 24 hours to report a work-related amputation to OSHA.
Saws, presses, conveyors, pinch points, and crush events do most of the taking, and nearly all of them sit behind a guard, a lockout rule, or a procedure that existed on paper.
The gap between the paper and the machine is where these cases are won.
If a jobsite took part of your hand, the law owes you more than a comp schedule's price for it.
Your hand was not priced by the hour. It should not be valued that way either.
Call (888) 713-6653 while the machine is still guarded the way it was. You pay nothing unless we win.
- Employers must report any work-related amputation to OSHA within 24 hours
- Amputations rank second among all severe injuries employers report, and fingers lead the body-part count
- A 98% recovery rate across 40,000+ cases, with free 24/7 consultations
Amputations Are Serious Enough That OSHA Gives Employers 24 Hours
Since 2015, federal rule 29 CFR 1904.39 has required every employer to report a work-related amputation, in-patient hospitalization, or eye loss to OSHA within 24 hours.[1] Only a death gets a shorter clock.
In the years of severe-injury data that rule has produced, amputations rank second among all reported injury types, behind fractures, and fingers and fingertips lead every body-part count.
Construction sits with manufacturing at the top of the reporting industries.[2]
That report matters to your case beyond its symbolism. It fixes the employer's own description of the event within a day of it happening, before any defense theory develops, and it often triggers an OSHA inspection that documents the machine, the guarding, and the procedures while everything is still in place.
Asking for the report and the inspection file is one of the first moves in every amputation case we build.
"The 24-hour report is the government's way of saying an amputation is never a minor incident. Neither is the claim."
The Unguarded Machine: Where Construction Amputations Happen
The construction standard is blunt: moving parts of equipment that are exposed to contact, or otherwise create a hazard, must be guarded.[3] The amputations that reach this firm map to a short list of failures against that rule and its cousins.
- Table saws, chop saws, and grinders running with guards removed, pinned back, or missing since the day they arrived on site.
- Pinch points on conveyors, compactors, and material hoists that were never guarded because "everyone knows" to stay clear.
- Machines that started while hands were inside them, because de-energizing procedures existed in a binder and nowhere else.
- Crush events: a load shifting onto a hand, a hydraulic gate closing, rigging that parted, a trench box settling onto a worker's arm.
- Nail guns and powder-actuated tools destroying fingers, covered in detail on our nail gun and power tool injury page.
Guard Removal Is a Decision With a Fingerprint
Guards do not remove themselves. Somebody unbolted the guard, somebody supervised the site while it ran open, and somebody inspected the equipment weekly and wrote nothing. In a serious amputation case each of those somebodies gets identified, because the company that owns the removal decision is often not the company that employed the injured worker: rented equipment, another sub's saw, a GC's site-wide tolerance for open blades. That is what turns a comp file into a full-value case.
What a Hand or Finger Amputation Case Must Pay For
The medicine does not end at the emergency room. Amputations mean revision surgeries, neuroma pain, prosthetics that cost thousands and wear out on a schedule, therapy to relearn a trade or leave it, and phantom pain that medicine manages rather than cures. For a tradesperson, the hand was the career: a missing index finger changes what a carpenter, an electrician, or an operator can do every working hour, and the earnings loss compounds across decades.
Workers' compensation pays for an amputation from a schedule: a fixed number of weeks per digit or limb, set by statute, the same for a concert guitarist and a night watchman. A third-party claim is where the injury gets valued as yours: your trade, your dominant hand, your age, your future. The distinction between the two systems is covered on our page about claims against companies beyond your employer; the injury-side depth lives with our amputation injury lawyers and the practical rebuilding covered under limb loss injury claims.
The Comp Schedule Pays in Weeks. The Lawsuit Values the Hand.
Every state's comp system prices an amputation in scheduled weeks of benefits, and every state's schedule underprices what the loss does to a working life. That is not an argument against taking comp; those benefits arrive first and fund the treatment. It is the reason the third-party investigation runs in parallel from day one: the equipment preserved before repair, the guarding photographed, the rental and maintenance chain identified, the OSHA file requested, and every company that touched the machine mapped against its duties.
The order of operations matters because the machine gets fixed fast. A saw back in service with a new guard is a case that has lost its best exhibit, which is why the preservation demand goes out before the demand for money ever does.
