A struck-by incident is an event in which a person is hit by a moving object, vehicle or piece of equipment, such as a forklift, its load, or material falling from a rack or the forks.
Struck-by is a standard hazard category in OSHA guidance and BLS injury coding, and OSHA’s warehousing overview lists being struck by powered industrial trucks among the most common warehouse injuries. In forklift operations, struck-by incidents include pedestrians hit by a truck at a crossing or rack end, workers hit by reversing trucks whose operators have limited rear view, and people hit by loads that fall from raised forks.
In BLS injury data, the way such an event is coded depends on its details, so forklift struck-by events can appear under transportation incidents or under contact with objects and equipment. This matters when comparing data sets. Controls follow the hierarchy: separate people and trucks, control speed, improve visibility at blind spots, and add pedestrian detection or proximity warning as a further layer. Caught-between and crushed-by events are related but separate categories. See forklift accident statistics.