OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #1000264
HEAD,TREE FELLING,TREE,STRUCK BY,FALLING OBJECT,LOGGING
Event description
Employee struck in the head and killed by falling tree
Investigation abstract
Employee #1 was on the first day at a site where a company had contracted to rem ove storm damaged trees from a half acre lot in the aftermath of Hurricane Hugo. Employee #1 cut a 40 ft tall, 2 in. diameter (at the top) yellow pine tree whic h had set down on its stump and was not immediately pulled to the ground. A shor t time later, as the owner of the company hooked a tree to the bulldozer for rem oval, he realized that Employee #1 was missing. He then found that the yellow pi ne tree had fallen and struck Employee #1 in the head. He died as a result of op en head trauma. Although there were some saw logs, most of the removal involved pulpwood, which was later delivered to area pulp mills.
Victim
-
#1 Fatality Age 56 M
- Nature of injury
- 12
- Part of body
- 13
- Event type
- 1
- Source
- 39
- Occupation code
- 496
- Human factor
- 1
- Environmental factor
- 6
- Task assigned
- 1
Codes shown verbatim from OSHA's accident-investigation database. A human-readable decoder is coming in a future release once the accident_lookup2 dictionary is loaded.