OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #14256069
FLAMMABLE VAPORS,STORAGE TANK,WELDING,EXPLOSION,SPARK,GASOLINE,ARC WELDING
Event description
Employee killed by empty gasoline storage tank explosion
Investigation abstract
At approximately 5:30 p.m. on February 4, 1989, Employee #1 was attempting to we ld a 2 inch coupling onto the front side of an empty 10,000 gallon gasoline stor age tank that had not been purged. No test was made for the presence of flammabl e vapors in the tank's atmosphere. When Employee #1 struck the welding electrode with the welding rod against the coupling and tank, sparks ignited the vapors i n the tank. The explosion killed Employee #1.
Victim
-
#1 Fatality Age 49 M
- Nature of injury
- 1
- Part of body
- 13
- Event type
- 1
- Source
- 43
- Occupation code
- 783
- Human factor
- 1
- Environmental factor
- 18
- Hazardous substance
- 1340
- 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.