OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #14412548
HEAD,DRILLING MACHINE,WORK RULES,STRUCK BY,INATTENTION,PUNCTURE
Event description
Employee Killed When Drill Bit Penetrates Head
Investigation abstract
Some employees were assembling wooden pallets. They arranged precut boards on to pallets had butted together in such a manner that the center holes could not be reached for bolting from a standing position. As was common practice in this sit uation, Employee #1 went under the conveyor table to insert the bolts. As he was putting bolts into a pallet, a drill bit penetrated the pallet from above and p rotruded out the bottom, striking him in the head. Employee #1 was killed. p of a roller conveyor to make a pallet. They then used a drill with a 16-in.-lo ng by 0.5-in.-diameter bit to make holes through the 8.5-in.-thick wood. The dri ll bit would protrudes 7.5 in. below the bottom of the trays after it passed thr ough the wood. The workers attached the drill to a flexible drive steel cable ar m, approximately 6 ft long, making it easy for an employee to drill all the hole s in a pallet as it was assembled. After the holes were drilled, the workers wou ld push the pallet toward the bolting area. (The drilling and bolting areas were 6 ft apart, without any physical separation.) At the time of the accident, the
Victim
-
#1 Fatality Age 18 M
- Nature of injury
- 18
- Part of body
- 13
- Event type
- 1
- Source
- 21
- Occupation code
- 999
- Human factor
- 18
- 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.