One person died in a construction accident in Boston on Thursday morning and a second person was taken to the hospital, police said.
Officers responded to the city's Seaport District at about 5:30 a.m. for reports of an accident, Officer Andre Watson said.
The victim was pronounced dead at the scene. Injuries to the other person are not considered life-threatening, he said.
The Massachusetts Coalition for Occupational Safety and Health said the worker was crushed by heavy blocks of street curbing material that was being unloaded. No information about the victim was made public.
The death is under investigation by police, the Suffolk district attorney's office and the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
The fatality is the latest workplace death in the Boston area recently, and comes the day after a 60-year-old overnight security worker at The Country Club in Brookline was found dead by coworkers after apparently falling from a decking area, authorities said.
A worker was killed in March when a floor deck gave way at the Government Center Garage in Boston. A worker died in October at an under-construction apartment building in East Boston.
But despite the several recent stories of construction worker deaths, Jeff Newton, the communications director for MassCOSH, says the state is on track for an average amount of worker deaths on the job.
"It just so happens that we're in a slight uptick in workers being killed on the job," Newton told GBH News. "But we here at MassCOSH really feel that this is something that we may have just come to accept — that construction workers die on the job. And that's something that we believe that can be completely avoided, and so does OSHA.”
He says that with OSHA’s low staffing, it makes it difficult for safety to be enforced and deaths to be investigated in a timely way.
Of the 62 workers in Massachusetts who lost their lives on the job in 2021, 15 worked in construction, according to a report released in April by MassCOSH.
