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 #14335707

FRACTURE,IND TRK OPERATOR,PALLETIZED CARGO,WAREHOUSE,EQUIPMENT FAILURE,INDUSTRIAL TRUCK,NECK,OFF LOADING,STRUCK BY,FALLING OBJECT

Event
FRACTURE,IND TRK OPERATOR,PALLETIZED CARGO,WAREHOUSE,EQUIPMENT FAILURE,INDUSTRIAL TRUCK,NECK,OFF LOADING,STRUCK BY,FALLING OBJECT
Linked inspection
No inspection record linked to this accident's victims.
Summary number
14335707
Report ID
418600

Event description

Employee struck by falling pallets dies of a broken neck

Investigation abstract

Employee #1 and two coworkers were stacking sacks of shelled peanuts weighing ab out 110 lb each in a refrigerated warehouse. Employee #1, the forklift operator, parked the lift near the stored sacks. He then got off the lift and began to ha mmer down loose nails in a nearby stack of pallets. The two coworkers, laborers, climbed onto the stacked sacks and began to unload the sacks from the forklift and store them. Suddenly, a forklift pallet board broke and the load shifted, th rowing three sacks off the pallet. These sacks struck Employee #1 from the rear at the neck and broke his neck. He was hospitalized and died some three months l ater.

Victim

  1. #1 Fatality Age 57 M

    Nature of injury
    12
    Part of body
    20
    Event type
    1
    Source
    27
    Occupation code
    999
    Human factor
    1
    Environmental factor
    8
    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.