OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #14341523
AGRICULTURE,OBSTRUCTED VIEW,WORK RULES,EQUIPMENT OPERATOR,COLLISION,TRACTOR,BUSH HOG
Event description
Operator killed when two farm tractors collide
Investigation abstract
At approximately 2:30 p.m. on August 27, 1987, Employee #1 and a coworker were o high, dense grass. perating two John Deere tractors equipped with bush hog cutters. They were cutti ng a field of 7 to 9 ft high sorghum sudan grass. The tractors collided head on, killing Employee #1. Visibility was restricted due to the height of the sorghum -cereal grass, which has corn-like leaves and grows in dense terminal clusters. Native to Africa, sudan grass was introduced to US farmers for hay and pastures. It has been used as a cover crop for potato fields and recently has been used f or a cover crop for tomato and bean fields. Investigation revealed that there ar e no safety guidelines for tractor operators to follow for cutting this type of
Victim
-
#1 Fatality Age 48 M
- Nature of injury
- 2
- Part of body
- 13
- Event type
- 1
- Source
- 30
- Occupation code
- 999
- Human factor
- 1
- Environmental factor
- 4
- Hazardous substance
- 8880
- 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.