OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #14352363
EJECTED,PILE LEADS,PILE DRIVER,CRANE BOOM,WORK RULES,STRUCK AGAINST,CONSTRUCTION,FALL,ENTANGLED,CUTTING AND BURNING
Event description
Employee killed in fall from fixed ladder
Investigation abstract
Employee #1 was a member of a pile driving crew. The crew had placed a hollow st crane boom, pulling it down toward the lead. When the job foreman realized this, he attempted unsuccessfully to hammer at the whip-line and knock it up the pili ng. When all methods failed to unravel the line, the foreman instructed Employee #1 to climb on top of a shed adjacent to the lead and to cut/burn the shackle o n the whip-line. Employee #1 climbed the lead ladder, was handed the cutting tor ch, and began to cut/burn the whip-line itself, which was not what he had been i nstructed to do. As the whip-line was severed, the crane boom, which was under t ension toward the lead (ground), suddenly sprang upward with great force and lif ted the lead approximately 1 1/2 to 2 feet off the ground. This threw Employee # 1 off the lead ladder, into the side of the adjacent shed, and onto the ground. eel pile into the lead. The initial blow of the continuous ram diesel pile-drivi He was killed instantly. The job superintendent stated that it was unusual for t he pile to have been driven so far into the ground because other piles had sunk no more than 12 to 18 inches on the initial blow. ng hammer drove the pile 2 to 3 feet into the ground. This caused the wire rope cable (whip-line) to peel rapidly off the crane drum and wrap around the outside of the drum. The whip-line, also referred to as the power line, is choked aroun d the piling and is used to hoist the pile into the lead and to steady the pile while it is being driven. As the crew tried to free the cable, they continued to hammer the piling, assuming that the whip-line cable would unravel if the pilin g were forced lower into the ground. Instead, this action placed tension on the
Victim
-
#1 Fatality Age 56 M
- Nature of injury
- 21
- Part of body
- 4
- Event type
- 5
- Source
- 43
- Occupation code
- 999
- Human factor
- 1
- Environmental factor
- 18
- 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.