104,543Records 70,659Employers 84,666Hospitalizations 27,563Amputations 2015-01-01 2025-09-30
Safety Incidents OSHA Severe Injury Reports · 2015–2025

OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #14300396

EXCAVATION,FRACTURE,WORK RULES,CONSTRUCTION,BACK,STRUCK BY,FALLING OBJECT

Event
EXCAVATION,FRACTURE,WORK RULES,CONSTRUCTION,BACK,STRUCK BY,FALLING OBJECT
Linked inspection
No inspection record linked to this accident's victims.
Summary number
14300396
Report ID
951510

Event description

Employee's back injured by falling chunk of dirt in trench

Investigation abstract

Employee #1 was standing outside of a 15 ft by 15 ft excavation that had just be en backfilled to a depth of approximately 4 ft. The excavation was shored with s heet piles and workers had started to pull these out with a backhoe when Employe e #1's shovel accidentally fell in and he jumped in to retrieve it. When he bent down to pick up the shovel, he felt something hit his lower back and he fell fo rward onto the dirt. Employee #1 remained conscious but he was in pain. The two coworkers who jumped in to help stated that an approximately 1 ft by 1 ft chunk of dirt had fallen off the wall and struck Employee #1 on the lower back. He was admitted to a hospital with fractures of his first and eighth right rib.

Victim

  1. #1 Hospitalized Age 51 M

    Nature of injury
    12
    Part of body
    3
    Event type
    1
    Source
    12
    Occupation code
    869
    Human factor
    10
    Environmental factor
    6
    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.