OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #14262026
STEPLADDER,WORK RULES,LADDER,CONSTRUCTION,FALL,LOST BALANCE
Event description
Employee killed in fall from stepladder
Investigation abstract
At 1:30 p.m. on Friday, November 14, 1986, Employee #1 was on a 12 ft heavy-duty face, unbalancing the load above and to the side of the ladder. Gravity caused t he ladder to tip to the right, away from the beam. Employee #1 fell to the left between the base of the ladder and the vertical plane beneath an overhead convey or. He was injured and died the next day. The ladder had been borrowed on the jo b site; normally, 8-ft wooden ladders and other equipment, such as a forklift ba sket or scaffold, were used. fiberglass stepladder (manufactured by the Louisville Ladder Company), clamping a 4-in. by 1-in. by 10-ft channel beam before welding it. The beam was 15.5 ft above the floor, and Employee #1 was 9.5 ft up the ladder, handling a clamp, a r einforcement clip, a level, and the end of the beam. The ladder was positioned u nder a fixed beam where a 90-degree joint was to be made; its steps were paralle l to the beam. Employee #1 was handling the channel beam from the left side of t he ladder, while its opposite end rested on fixed equipment. While positioning t he beam, Employee #1 inadvertently pulled its resting end off the stationary sur
Victim
-
#1 Fatality Age 38 M
- Nature of injury
- 6
- Part of body
- 13
- Event type
- 5
- Source
- 25
- Occupation code
- 544
- Human factor
- 11
- Environmental factor
- 6
- Hazardous substance
- 8880
- 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.