OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #14202782
FOREHEAD,TREE SECTION,STRUCK BY,FACE,FALLING OBJECT,LOGGING
Event description
Employee killed when struck in face and forehead by snag
Investigation abstract
Employee #1, a log truck owner/operator, was standing near the left front wheel the load, a 20 ft long short end dropped out of the grapple and hung on the tra iler stake and the ground on the shovel end. Two other logs, 55 ft and 71 ft lon g, also dropped from the grapple and landed on the ground in an angular position . After it had slid down, the log hung on the stake and extended forward to the front of the load. Employee #1, apparently fearing the rest of the logs were goi ng to fall out of the grapple, bolted toward the logs that were on the ground. A s the loader operator set the remaining three logs down, a piece of a dead snag' s top (3 1/2 in. on the big end by 2 in. on the small end by 5 ft long) flipped out of the pile and struck Employee #1 in the face and forehead. He died at the scene. and the oil cleaner of another truck. He was engaged in conversation while the t ruck was being loaded with logs. The truck had been loaded to the top of the sta kes and required only two or three more logs to finish the load. To clean the sk id chute on the opposite side, the load operator gathered up five lodgepole logs in the grapple of the DICO hydraulic log loader and started to swing them over the partially loaded truck. He was going to place them in an area where five or six other lodgepole logs were already lying about 20 ft from the loading chute d river's side, waiting to be cleaned by the knotbumper. As the grapple swung over
Victim
-
#1 Fatality Age 61 M
- Nature of injury
- 6
- Part of body
- 13
- Event type
- 1
- Source
- 39
- Occupation code
- 496
- Human factor
- 1
- Environmental factor
- 5
- 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.