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 #14470157

WORK RULES,SCRAP YARD,INEXPERIENCE,SCRAP METAL,STRUCK BY,FALLING OBJECT,COMMUNICATION,CRANE

Event
WORK RULES,SCRAP YARD,INEXPERIENCE,SCRAP METAL,STRUCK BY,FALLING OBJECT,COMMUNICATION,CRANE
Linked inspection
No inspection record linked to this accident's victims.
Summary number
14470157
Report ID
317500

Event description

Employee injured when struck by falling steel plate

Investigation abstract

At approximately 6:15 a.m. on October 15, 1987, Employee #1, a utility man, was g the north side of the scrap box, to notify the operator of the north crane to remove the scrap metal from the tracks. At this point, the operators of the nort h and south cranes both stopped their machines. When the south crane stopped, it dropped a cobble or a 1,000 lb piece of scrap metal that struck Employee #1, wh o was not visible to the crane operator. Employee #1 was hospitalized. At the ti me of the accident, he had had 3 weeks of training and approximately 5 weeks on the job. working at a scrap yard. His job was to move the scrap bucket and buggy from the scrap yard to the furnace for changing once the two overhead magnet cranes fill ed the bucket with scrap steel and cobble. At no time was he or any other employ ee permitted to enter the scrap yard area during the loading of the scrap box un less the operators of both the north and the south cranes were told to stop oper ations. Employee #1 noticed a large piece of scrap metal or cobble lying on the utility buggy; this would have prevented him from moving the buggy and scrap box to the furnace when the box was filled. He entered the scrap yard, walking alon

Victim

  1. #1 Hospitalized Age 48 M

    Nature of injury
    12
    Part of body
    4
    Event type
    1
    Source
    27
    Occupation code
    999
    Human factor
    1
    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.