OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #14337687
TREE LIMB,STRUCK AGAINST,TREE,FALL,TREE TRIMMING
Event description
Employee killed when swings into tree on lanyard
Investigation abstract
On January 8, 1990, Employee #1, an experienced tree trimmer, was trimming the e rown of the tree, Employee #1 swung back into the tree trunk like a pendulum. He suffered serious injuries and died on January 11, 1990. Unknown to anyone there was an interior rotten spot in the section that broke. It was surrounded by liv e wood. nd of a large tree branch that overhung a porch. He was wearing the standard cli mbing harness, which was tied off at the crown of the tree, and carrying a letdo wn rope to attach to the part of the branch he was to cut off. He attached the l etdown rope to the branch, snubbed it up in a secondary fork of the branch he wa s standing on, and cut the branch. Until this point, the branch had held his rel atively static weight; however, when the part of the branch he had just cut dyna mically loaded the branch where the letdown rope was snubbed, the branch broke o ff behind him. Being out on the breaking limb with his safety line tied at the c
Victim
-
#1 Fatality Age 31 M
- Nature of injury
- 21
- Part of body
- 19
- Event type
- 6
- Source
- 42
- Occupation code
- 999
- Human factor
- 14
- Environmental factor
- 13
- 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.