OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #14337463
FRACTURE,HEAD,WORK RULES,CLEANING,LACERATION,SKULL,FALL,SAWMILL,CONVEYOR BELT,UNSTABLE POSITION
Event description
Employee killed in fall onto conveyor belt
Investigation abstract
At approximately 3:30 a.m. on April 6, 1989, Employee #1 and a coworker were ass igned to clean overspill of cypress mulch from underneath an inclined belt conve yor at a sawmill. The conveyor continued to operate while the two workers cleane d up the spill. The coworker left the area to go to the bathroom. During his abs ence, Employee #1 apparently climbed onto the conveyor's supporting framework an d fell onto the lower return belt. He was killed. According to the medical exami ner's report, he sustained a basilar skull fracture and brain lacerations. Polic e photographs indicate that Employee #1 struck his head against the framework wi th sufficient force to kill him.
Victim
-
#1 Fatality Age 24 M
- Nature of injury
- 12
- Part of body
- 19
- Event type
- 5
- Source
- 27
- Occupation code
- 999
- Human factor
- 10
- Environmental factor
- 13
- Task assigned
- 2
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.