OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #14197586
METAL RAIL,PPE,GLOVE,WORK RULES,FOREARM,LACERATION,MANUAL MAT HANDLING
Event description
Metal rail cut employee's forearm
Investigation abstract
A sheet metal worker was assisting another employee in spot welding 3.5-ft. leng not require their use. (After the accident, management instituted a rule requir ing use of forearm guards and gloves during this operation.) The injured employe e had been using neither. ths of metal rails used to construct the underbody frame of GM vans. The employe e would take one rail from a stacked pallet, hand it to the spot welder, and res tack the rail on another pallet after the welding was completed. While gathering a rail for welding, one of them stuck to another. Without asking the other empl oyee for help, the sheet metal worker tried to separate the two rails. When the rails separated, one struck her forearm, cutting it. The employee was hospitaliz ed and received stitches to close the laceration. Management had provided forear m guards and gloves for use to protect against such injuries, but apparently did
Victim
-
#1 Hospitalized Age 27 F
- Nature of injury
- 7
- Part of body
- 17
- Event type
- 1
- Source
- 28
- Occupation code
- 653
- Human factor
- 1
- Environmental factor
- 18
- 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.