OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #14379333

HEAD,CONSTRUCTION,EQUIPMENT FAILURE,VIBRATIONS,BOLT,STRUCK BY,FALLING OBJECT,HEADACHE BALL

1988-10-12T00:00:00

Event: HEAD,CONSTRUCTION,EQUIPMENT FAILURE,VIBRATIONS,BOLT,STRUCK BY,FALLING OBJECT,HEADACHE BALL
Linked inspection: No inspection record linked to this accident's victims.
Summary number: 14379333
Report ID: 524200

Event description

Employee killed when struck by falling headache ball

Investigation abstract

At approximately 3:30 p.m. on October 12, 1988, Employee #1 and three coworkers were extracting sheet piling using a vibratory hammer. The main hoist line was a ttached to the vibratory hammer and clamped onto a sheet. A secondary whip line, with two headache balls attached, was hooked to the sheet piling to raise and l ower the sheet. The vibration from the hammer caused the bolts holding the older , two-part headache ball to fail. One half, weighing approximately 53 lb, fell a nd struck Employee #1 on the head, killing him.

Victim

#1 Fatality Age 38 M

Nature of injury
6

Part of body
13

Event type
1

Source
27

Occupation code
999

Human factor
6

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.