105,313Records 71,083Employers 85,290Hospitalizations 27,770Amputations 2015-01-01 2025-10-31
Safety Incidents OSHA Severe Injury Reports · 2015–2025

OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #14449326

TRUCK,ELEC UTILITY WORK,DECAPITATED,UTILITY POLE,WINCH

Event
TRUCK,ELEC UTILITY WORK,DECAPITATED,UTILITY POLE,WINCH
Linked inspection
No inspection record linked to this accident's victims.
Summary number
14449326
Report ID
552700

Event description

DECAPITATION CAUSED BY WINCH

Investigation abstract

A 61-year-old employee of an electric utility company was found decapitated on t he bed of a pole-delivery truck. A powered winch, which had caused the decapitat ion, was still revolving at a rate of 4.6 meters per minute. The winch was gener ally used to pull poles onto the truck. However, the truck was fully loaded, and the employee, who had many years experience with his company, had not been assi gned to work in the area. The accident was not witnessed.

Victim

  1. #1 Fatality Age 61 M

    Nature of injury
    1
    Part of body
    13
    Event type
    2
    Source
    24
    Occupation code
    848
    Human factor
    14
    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.