105,313Records 71,083Employers 85,290Hospitalizations 27,770Amputations 2015-01-01 2025-10-31
Safety Incidents OSHA Severe Injury Reports · 2015–2025

OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #14273114

CHEST,KICK BACK,TREE FELLING,LODGED TREE,CRUSHED,INEXPERIENCE,TREE,STRUCK BY,FALLING OBJECT,LOGGING

Event
CHEST,KICK BACK,TREE FELLING,LODGED TREE,CRUSHED,INEXPERIENCE,TREE,STRUCK BY,FALLING OBJECT,LOGGING
Linked inspection
No inspection record linked to this accident's victims.
Summary number
14273114
Report ID
111100

Event description

Employee killed when struck by tree that kicked back

Investigation abstract

A father had been training his 18-year-old son, Employee #1, to be a chopper and ree and the butt of the maple kicked back and struck Employee #1, driving him to the ground. had had him under close supervision for about six weeks. The father had warned Employee #1 about trees falling into hung trees and the potential for a falling tree to kick back if it hit a hung tree. The father left the son for about 5 to 10 minutes to check a boundary and returned to find Employee #1 under a 14 in. d iameter maple tree, dead of severe chest injuries. The father surmises that Empl oyee #1 had used a wedge to prevent the maple tree from hitting a windblown hung tree but apparently either cut too much of the tree or the tree broke off at so me point while being felled. The falling maple tree apparently struck the hung t

Victim

  1. #1 Fatality Age 18 M

    Nature of injury
    2
    Part of body
    5
    Event type
    1
    Source
    39
    Occupation code
    999
    Human factor
    1
    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.