OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #14481709
DISMANTLING,WORK RULES,HOIST,CRUSHED,FALL,STRUCK BY,UNTRAINED,CRANE
Event description
Employee killed while dismantling crane gearbox
Investigation abstract
Employee #1 and three coworkers, the morning maintenance crew, were assigned to ng on the hoist drum when the gears disengaged. Although there were no witnesses , it is believed that Employee #1 was knocked across the drum when the gearbox s eparated. He was either crushed by the sudden movement of the free-wheeling drum , or beaten by the cable as it backlashed. Employee #1 was killed. change the hoist drum on a "stiff-leg" type overhead crane. The JSP was not revi ewed with the employees prior to their starting the task. They tried to remove t he bolts from the main hoist drum gearbox while the main hoist was still under l oad. An approximately 18-ton load was on the hoist, and when 16 of the 18 bolts had been removed, the gearbox separated enough to allow the pinion gear to disen gage. The cable drum started to rapidly free-wheeling, and the load dropped to t he floor. As the load reached the floor, the momentum of the free-wheeling drum started rewinding the cable backward. Employee #1 was either straddling or sitti
Victim
-
#1 Fatality Age 50 M
- Nature of injury
- 12
- Part of body
- 5
- Event type
- 11
- Source
- 24
- Occupation code
- 999
- Human factor
- 4
- Environmental factor
- 4
- 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.