OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #14337349
ROOF,COLLAPSE,INADEQUATE MAINT,UNSECURED,BUILDING COLLAPSE,CRANE BOOM,BROKEN WELD,EQUIPMENT FAILURE,BOLT,STRUCK BY
Event description
Employee killed in building collapse
Investigation abstract
The company, which reclaims scrap metal, was disassembling a heat exchanger at t shaker table and was struck by the roof. It appears that Employee #1 was killed instantly. By design, the boom seat pins are required to be secured in place wi th a bolt. However, these pins were tack welded in place. It appears the weld ha d broken or had not been adequately molded, allowing the pin to vibrate out of p lace. The pin on the left of the boom had also been modified and tack welded. Th e company stated that it had not obtained written permission from the manufactur er to modify the cranes. The company did state that the crane was in this condit ion when purchased. he time of the accident. Two employees were cutting the tubes from the heat exch anger with an acetylene cutting torch. The operator of the American crawler cran e, model 797, with a magnet lifting head, attempted to roll the heat exchanger o ver so the two employees could cut the tubes without difficulty. As the operator started pulling sideways with the boom, the right boom seat pin came out and th e boom fell approximately 90 degrees to the crane. It came to rest on top of the shaker building. The force of the falling boom caused the roof of the shaker bu ilding to collapse onto the shaker table. Employee #1 was standing on top of the
Victim
-
#1 Fatality Age 33 M
- Nature of injury
- 12
- Part of body
- 19
- Event type
- 1
- Source
- 27
- Occupation code
- 889
- Human factor
- 9
- 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.