OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #14254205
FRACTURE,TREE,STRUCK BY,CONCUSSION,BACKHOE
Event description
EMPLOYEE KILLED WHEN STRUCK BY TREE
Investigation abstract
At 10:00 a.m. on September 29, 1989, Employee #1 had just cut a fallen tree, 8.5 ees death. inches in diameter by 21 feet tall, at a point 4 feet above the root system. Th e trunk of the tree was suspended in a horizontal position, about 4 feet off gro und, in the bucket of a Caterpillar backhoe. Employee #1 misjudged the hazardous situation and walked between the bucket and the main part of the backhoe to mak e another cut on the tree trunk. The top of the tree was wedged between standing trees. Tension on the tree trunk caused it to slip over the teeth of the backho e bucket and strike Employee #1 on left side of the head. This resulted in blunt trauma injury to the head with a basilar skull fracture which caused the employ
Victim
-
#1 Fatality Age 43 M
- Nature of injury
- 12
- Part of body
- 13
- Event type
- 1
- Source
- 40
- Occupation code
- 599
- 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.