OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #14481782
HEAD,TREE FELLING,WORK RULES,CONSTRUCTION,TREE,STRUCK BY,COMMUNICATION,INATTENTION
Event description
Employee killed when struck by branches of falling tree
Investigation abstract
Employee #1, the acting field supervisor, stopped by a site to assess his crew's uphill. The sawyer immediately pulled his saw to keep it from becoming wedged be tween the tree and the tree stump and then backed away from the tree. He looked in the direction in which it was moving and saw Employee #1 running parallel to the path on which it was falling. The two coworkers who last spoke with Employee #1 went over the hill and found him lying under some large branches of the fall en tree. He had been wearing head protection, but it was either lost while runni ng or knocked off by the branches. Employee #1 died as a result of severe head i njuries. progress in a tree cutting operation. The site was being prepared for a new gas /oil well for a petroleum development corporation. Employee #1 instructed two co workers to move a previously felled tree and then walked away from them, down a small hill. He entered into the blind side of a sawyer who was felling a 90 ft t all, 33 in. diameter oak tree. Before notching and cutting the tree, the saw ope rator looked behind him and accounted for the people on site, including Employee #1. He then notched and cut the large tree from right to left. He lacked about 6 in. of cut when the tree snapped and started falling to his left and slightly
Victim
-
#1 Fatality Age 50 M
- Nature of injury
- 6
- Part of body
- 13
- Event type
- 1
- Source
- 43
- Occupation code
- 999
- Human factor
- 18
- Environmental factor
- 6
- 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.