OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #14291819
WORK RULES,CONSTRUCTION,TRENCH,DYNAMITE,EXPLOSION,ARM,FACE,LEG
Event description
Employee injured when dynamite explodes
Investigation abstract
On February 17, 1988, workers for the Prillaman and Pace Company encountered roc sustained injuries to his legs, arms, and face, and was hospitalized. Subsequen t investigation revealed that three more sticks had never exploded. k while digging a trench for an 8 in. sewer line. They decided to break up the r ock to finish the trench, and drilled nine 2 ft holes with an air-operated hamme r. Two 1/2 in. by 8 in. sticks of explosive (40 percent nitroglycerin) were plac ed in each hole, covered with 4 ft of dirt, and detonated at 3:40 p.m. that same day. At 8:00 a.m. on February 18, 1988, a backhoe operator uncovered the holes and determined that the rock had not been split apart. He sent Employee #1, a 19 -year-old laborer, into the trench to drill more holes. When Employee #1 started to drill, an unexploded stick of dynamite under his feet detonated. Employee #1
Victim
-
#1 Hospitalized Age 19 M
- Nature of injury
- 7
- Part of body
- 19
- Event type
- 1
- Source
- 14
- Occupation code
- 615
- Human factor
- 4
- 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.