OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #14234041
CHAIN,HEAD,PIN,ENGINE,CAUGHT BETWEEN,LOCOMOTIVE
Event description
Employee suffers massive head injury
Investigation abstract
At about 7:30 p.m. on December 13, 1989, Employee # 1 and three others were in a two railcars and attempted to open the coupler. The uncoupled railcar number #44 , which weighed approximately 110 tons, was setting on a grade of tangent equali ng 0.3, rolled toward Employee #1 was not blocked, scotched or secured. The Rail car squeezed Employee #1's head between the two couplers and causing a massive h ead injury resulting in his death. locomotive switch engine pushing three railcars loaded with billets on an in pl ant railroad track. The employees attempted to couple an additional car to the t hree-car line. Railcar number 30, at the end of the line was bumped twice into a n uncoupled railcar number 44 in order to be coupled, however, the coupler on ca r number 30 failed to open. Employee #1 dismounted the switch engine and walked between the railcars to manually open the coupler and allow the hook-up. The cha in that connected the drawbar to the coupler pin was broken and was missing, and caused the coupler drawbar to become in operable. Employee 1 squat between the
Victim
-
#1 Fatality Age 45 M
- Nature of injury
- 12
- Part of body
- 13
- Event type
- 2
- Source
- 38
- Occupation code
- 779
- Human factor
- 12
- Environmental factor
- 4
- 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.