OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #14466072
HEAD,UNSECURED,WORK RULES,LADDER,CONSTRUCTION,DESCENDING,FALL,LOST BALANCE,SCAFFOLD
Event description
Employee killed in fall from scaffold ladder
Investigation abstract
At 4:30 p.m. on February 18, 1987, Employee #1, who had been laying brick, was d oyee #1 lost his one-hand grip on the ladder and could not recover. As he was gr abbing for a handhold, his body swung under the ladder and probably dislodged it . Had the ladder been properly secured, it might have saved him, but it cannot b e shown that the ladder became dislodged before the fall. Weather was not a fact or; the ladder was clean and dry. escending from a 22 foot Morgan scaffold at the end of the work day. He was carr ying a bucket full of small hand tools. A coworker on the scaffold saw Employee #1 descend three or four steps on the ladder and then fall. Another coworker saw him falling, face up, under the ladder. Employee #1 was killed instantly when h is head hit the metal base of the scaffold. The ladder had been secured loosely at the top by several turns of baling wire around the left side rail only. After the accident, the top of the ladder was found lying on the scaffold crossbracin g, 7 feet below the platform. The most likely cause of the accident is that Empl
Victim
-
#1 Fatality Age 45 M
- Nature of injury
- 3
- Part of body
- 13
- Event type
- 5
- Source
- 25
- Occupation code
- 999
- Human factor
- 10
- 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.