OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #14447973
EJECTED,FRACTURE,CHAIR,WORK RULES,CONSTRUCTION,BACK,FALL,FALL PROTECTION,SANDBLASTING,MECH MALFUNCTION
Event description
Employee suffers fractures in fall from suspended chair
Investigation abstract
At about 12:00 noon on July 1, 1985, Employee #1 and his foreman were sandblasti ng the inside of a one million gallon water tower, a job they had started around 9:00 a.m. The whirly jig suspended chair suddenly dropped a few feet and Employ ee #1 was thrown out of the chair, falling approximately 20 ft to the floor of t he tank. He suffered multiple fractures to his back, left foot, and ankle. A rop e across the front of the chair had been used as a safety device. Employee #1 st ated that he had been using this homemade rigging device for two weeks prior to the accident, and that it was tested every morning to ensure that it was working properly. It is not known why the chair suddenly dropped a short distance.
Victim
-
#1 Hospitalized Age 21 M
- Nature of injury
- 12
- Part of body
- 19
- Event type
- 5
- Source
- 24
- Occupation code
- 579
- Human factor
- 12
- Environmental factor
- 6
- Hazardous substance
- 9010
- 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.