OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #1434976
TREE FELLING,WORK RULES,LODGED TREE,STRUCK BY,LOGGING
Event description
Employee killed when struck by lodged tree
Investigation abstract
Employee #1, a tree feller, had cut a cedar tree at its base but it became hung up in the limbs of a hemlock tree. He then proceeded to cut down the hemlock whi le the cedar was still caught in it. He made a face cut in the hemlock and then started the back cut without cleaning out the wood in the face completely. Altho ugh there was still a 3 in. thick piece of holding wood, the hemlock went over a nd the cedar dropped. It struck and killed Employee #1, driving him into the gro und. He should not have been underneath the cedar while the hemlock was being cu t. The employee should have used another tree to dislodge the cedar or he should have consulted with the bullbuck (supervisor).
Victim
-
#1 Fatality Age 31 M
- Nature of injury
- 2
- Part of body
- 4
- Event type
- 1
- Source
- 43
- Occupation code
- 496
- Human factor
- 11
- 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.