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Safety Incidents OSHA Severe Injury Reports · 2015–2025

OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #14232144

PINNED,SAFETY BELT,TREE,STRUCK BY

Event
PINNED,SAFETY BELT,TREE,STRUCK BY
Linked inspection
No inspection record linked to this accident's victims.
Summary number
14232144
Report ID
316400

Event description

EMPLOYEE KILLED WHEN STRUCK BY SPLIT TREE

Investigation abstract

On May 8, 1989, Employee #1 was cutting down a red oak tree having three indepen dent leaders growing approximately 9 feet from ground trunk level. Two smaller l eaders were cut and the third one was being back cut, after notching, when the t ree split as a result of its heavy weight at the top and the fact that it was le aning. Employee #1 performing the cutting operation was tied in by a safety clim bing rope and a safety strap. When the tree split it came down and struck Employ ee #1 who could not move out of the way due to double tie off which pinned him i n.

Victim

  1. #1 Fatality Age 23 M

    Nature of injury
    21
    Part of body
    13
    Event type
    1
    Source
    39
    Occupation code
    999
    Human factor
    4
    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.