It’s that time of year again where snow and ice litters your job sites. It’s not just an annoyance, it’s a hazard. When snow and ice melt, it creates weak spots throughout the job site. Resulting in opportunities for carts to start puncturing the OSB floors and tipping over.
What’s the True Cost of Tipping Carts?
When heavy drywall carts roll over saturated, compromised flooring, the result can be damaged drywall, damaged job site, lost productivity, and serious injury.
Direct Costs: Injury and Property Damage
Worker injuries: Even a single injury has significant financial impact. According to national safety data, The average cost of a medically-consulted workplace injury is about $43,000, including medical care and wage loss. Workers’ compensation claims for slips, falls, and crush injuries, common in tipping incidents, average $40,000–$50,000+ per claim.
If a cart tip leads to a hospital visit or lost time from work, you’re not just paying for care, you’re paying for weeks or months of claim costs and administrative handling.
Property Damage: When carts puncture the floors and tip over it can cause damage to drywall, floors, and materials. This not only adds material costs but also labor costs to your budget. Property damage costs vary widely but even minor localized subfloor repairs can run several hundred dollars once labor is included.
Indirect Costs: The Hidden Majority
Most businesses think of injury and repair bills as the true cost, but studies show there’s much more beneath the surface.
Loss of productivity and disruption: When a cart tips, work stops while the team picks the materials up, assess the situation, repair, and find any scrap materials they can to continue the job. This can result in delays getting to other job sites.
These losses compound quickly. OSHA’s Safety Pays program notes that indirect costs, like lost productivity, overtime, extra supervision, training replacement workers, and admin time, often exceed the direct costs of the injury itself. For example, if direct costs are in the low thousands, indirect multipliers of 1.6–4.5× those costs are common depending on severity.
Insurance and administrative drag: After an incident, workers’ compensation premiums can increase, safety investigations and reporting consume management time, and OSHA recordables may affect your company’s safety profile.
All of these add soft costs that don’t appear at the moment of the accident, but hit the bottom line over time.
The most important thing though are your employees. A serious injury affects the employee’s health, income, and quality of life. Morale among crews can drop after a preventable accident. And the safety culture is undermined if hazards are ignored.
Example Scenarios of Financial Impact of Tipping Carts
Scenario A: single cart tip, minor property damage, no serious injury, estimated total cost is $4,000-$5,000.
Scenario B: cart tips, one employee medically consulted with moderate injuries + property damage. Estimated total cost $159,250.
Scenario C: severe crushing injury / major claim. Estimated costs up to $200k-$600k.
One tipping accident can cost anywhere from a few thousand dollars to hundreds of thousands. Depending on injury severity and repair needs.
Prevent Tipping Accidents
This is where Combat Construction Safety Products can help, Combat Mat and Hallway Hero both prevent carts from puncturing weak OSB floors, allowing you to deliver heavy materials safely and efficiently. Simply unfold out the mats over weak spots and cart over top. The most common places to put Combat Mat and Hallway Hero are the pull-in spot and leaving the pull-in area, these two spots the most amount of damage because that’s where most of the action is taking place.
The third spot, which is less common but is more important when snow and ice are covering your job site, are the hallways. Which is where Hallway Hero comes into play. Hallway Hero is double the length of Combat Mat and pulls apart in a few different spots so you can place the panels throughout the job site wherever you need.
Using Combat Mat and Hallway Hero will make every delivery feel like you’re on concrete floors. Most importantly, they keep your employees safe by preventing tipping carts and they keep the job site efficient. No more trying to find scrap materials or doing half-loaded carts, wasting time and money.
Conclusion
Snow and ice can really impact your job site negatively. Being prepared and having the right tools on hand can cause this hazard and inconvenience to be reduced dramatically. The most important thing is keeping your employees safe. Have the right training, inspect job sites, and have the best tools to keep your crew safe and efficient.