Lafayette Amputation and Limb Loss Lawyer

Employers report fewer than half of the work-related amputations that actually happen. A Michigan surveillance program that cross-checked hospital records against employer filings found 1,366 amputations between 2016 and 2018. Employers had reported 575 of them to OSHA, which is 42.1 percent of the ones the law required them to report.

That number matters to you for one reason. If the event that took your finger, hand or arm was never officially reported, the paperwork that should prove what happened to you does not exist. Someone has to go build it.

Brandt & Sherman has more than 50 years of combined experience, including catastrophic injury claims across Acadiana and south Louisiana. Amputation cases are won on evidence that starts disappearing the day of the accident.

The official numbers understate the problem

Michigan runs one of the few surveillance systems that checks employer reports against hospital records. The same program ran the comparison again for a later period. Between 2018 and 2020 it identified 1,321 work-related amputations, while the federal survey that relies on employers to report the same injuries, in the same state, over the same three years, estimated 690.

Two different periods, two different comparisons, and the same finding both times: roughly half the cases never make it into the official count.

When Michigan's state OSHA inspected 38 worksites it learned about from a hospital report rather than from the employer, 34 of them were cited for a hazard directly connected to the amputation. The average worksite carried 2.2 violations and $6,290 in penalties. None of the hazards that caused those amputations had been corrected before the inspectors arrived.

What Louisiana's own numbers show

Louisiana private-sector employers report an average of 76 work-related amputations a year involving days away from work, a rate of 5.6 per 100,000 full-time-equivalent workers. Those figures come from the Louisiana Department of Health's occupational health indicators for 2016 through 2020, calculated from federal survey data.

The state's workers' compensation system tells a similar story from a different direction. Louisiana averaged 60 lost-time amputation claims a year over the same period, a rate of 3.2 per 100,000 covered workers, peaking at 72 claims in 2019. Those claim counts come from the Louisiana Workforce Commission.

Louisiana employers under federal OSHA jurisdiction also filed 1,679 severe injury reports between 2015 and 2021, an average annual rate of 12.4 per 100,000 full-time-equivalent workers.

Read the two Louisiana indicators together and the private-sector employer count runs higher than the compensation claim count. Not every worker who loses a limb files a claim.

Which industries produce these injuries

Federal OSHA received 9,034 severe injury reports in 2024, about 25 a day. Amputations were 2,426 of them, or 27 percent. Manufacturing accounted for 1,348 of those amputations. Construction accounted for 231.

The industry pattern matters here because of what south Louisiana does for a living. Across 2023 and 2024, the Bureau of Labor Statistics recorded amputations involving bone loss at 0.7 per 10,000 full-time workers in petroleum and coal products manufacturing, against 0.2 across private industry. Plastics product manufacturing ran 1.1. Wood product manufacturing ran 1.6.

Those are the industries along this stretch of the Gulf.

How the injury usually happens

Machinery is the leading cause, and it is not close. Body parts caught in running equipment accounted for 12,930 severe injuries reported to federal OSHA between 2015 and 2021, 18 percent of the total and the most frequently cited cause. Manufacturing accounted for 8,904 of those, or 69 percent.

Arms, hands and fingers made up 40 percent of all severe injuries employers reported in that period.

Michigan's data shows the same shape. Fingers were involved in 92.7 percent of its work-related amputations, and about one in ten of those involved more than one finger.

The common thread in nearly all of it is a guard that was removed, defeated, or never installed.

Workers' compensation is not the end of the conversation

If you were hurt on the job, workers' compensation is generally your only remedy against your employer. It pays medical treatment and two thirds of your average weekly wage, up to $903 a week for injuries from September 1, 2026 through August 31, 2027. Earn more than $1,354.50 a week and you hit that ceiling.

It does not pay for pain. It does not pay for disfigurement. It does not pay for what you cannot do any more.

That is why the third-party claim matters more in amputation cases than in almost any other kind of injury. The machine that took your hand was built by someone. It was maintained by someone. The site may have been controlled by a general contractor who is not your employer. A plant turnaround can put four companies in the same room.

Some of them can be sued for full damages even when your employer cannot, and which ones depends on the contracts between them. Louisiana gives a principal that qualifies as a statutory employer the same tort immunity your direct employer has, and that defense is routine in refinery and plant work, so the contracts are the first thing to read.

We look for that third party first, because it is often the difference between a claim that covers your medical bills and a claim that covers your life.

What your claim is worth, and the rules that decide it

Amputation is permanent, and three Louisiana rules decide what that permanence is worth. Our page on what changed in Louisiana injury law covers each one and the date it keys to.

• You have two years to file for injuries arising after July 1, 2024, rather than the one year that applied before. Civil Code article 3493.1, enacted by Act 423 of 2024.
• Fault of 51 percent or more bars recovery entirely under article 2323, as amended by Act 15 of 2025 and effective January 1, 2026. Anything less reduces recovery by your share. For causes of action that arose before 2026 the accepted reading is that fault only reduced recovery, though Act 15 does not say so itself. Expect the other side to argue that you reached past a guard or defeated an interlock, because at 51 percent that argument wins them the whole case.
• Your past medical expenses are valued according to who paid them. Where a health insurer or Medicare paid an in-network provider, the recovery for that care is what was actually paid plus your cost sharing. Where workers' compensation paid your treatment, subsection D of R.S. 9:2800.27 limits recovery of those expenses to what the comp medical fee schedule paid, which is usually well under the billed amount, and Act 466 left that limit untouched. None of it is a cap on every bill: where those limits do not reach, the statute counts the amounts still owed, including anything under a hospital lien, so if you were uninsured or treated out of network do not assume the unpaid balance is lost.

Future care is where these cases are actually valued, and none of those rules touch it. That is also why a third-party claim is built on future care and general damages rather than on past bills. A prosthesis is not bought once. It is fitted, replaced, repaired, and replaced again for the rest of your life, and the socket has to be refitted as the residual limb changes.

What to do now

• Get the machine preserved. Ask, in writing, that the equipment not be repaired, modified or returned to service. Guards get reinstalled fast after an amputation, and once that happens the condition that injured you is gone.
• Photograph everything you can, including the guard, the interlock, the lockout tags and the area around the machine.
• Report the injury to your employer in writing and keep a copy.
• Get the names of everyone who was on site, including contractors who do not work for your employer. In a plant setting those names are the case.
• Ask the hospital for the complete record. If your employer never filed the OSHA report, the hospital record may be the only contemporaneous account of what happened.

2.3 million Americans are living with limb loss

An estimated 2,309,000 people were living with limb loss in the United States in 2019, of whom 668,538 lost a limb to trauma. That population is projected to rise 145 percent by 2060, to roughly 5.6 million. Trauma-caused amputation procedures numbered 32,527 in 2019, about 6 percent of all amputation procedures performed that year.

Talk to a Lafayette amputation lawyer

Amputation claims turn on evidence that has a short shelf life and on finding the party who is not your employer. Both get harder every week you wait.

Call (337) 800-4000 or contact us online. The consultation is free, and there is no attorney fee unless we win. Clients may be responsible for costs and expenses.