OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #14481816
HOPPER CAR,OBSTRUCTED VIEW,WORK RULES,CAUGHT BETWEEN,CRUSHED,LOCOMOTIVE,TRAIN,COMMUNICATION,RAILROAD
Event description
Employee caught and killed between rail cars and locomotive
Investigation abstract
At about 11:50 a.m. on January 1, 1987, Employee #1 was working as a mix equipme mployees decided to push all the cars forward 2 to 3 feet. There was an estimate d 6 foot clearance between the parked mixmobile and the first car parked on the track. Employee #1 finished a conversation with a coworkers and approached the r ail cars from the blind side; he was not seen by either the Traffic Department e mployees or by the head mix unloader. Employee #1 did not know the cars were goi ng to be moved and was not given any warning. He was crushed and killed between the parked locomotive and the rail cars as he passed between them. Employee #1 h ad been employed sporadically as a mix equipment operator since April 30, 1979. nt operator in Department #077 of the Elkem Metals Company. The head mix unloade r had asked some employees of the Traffic Department to bring in three railroad hopper cars full of mix materials. Two of the three cars were to be positioned o ver the #1 rail crossover on track #1, and the last car was to be located on the straight track. The mixmobile (a small locomotive) and a string of four cars co upled together were already parked on track #1 inside the building. The Traffic Department employees pushed the last three cars over the #1 crossover, but the m iddle car wouldn't clear the straight at the crossover. The Traffic Department e
Victim
-
#1 Fatality Age 38 M
- Nature of injury
- 21
- Part of body
- 19
- Event type
- 2
- Source
- 38
- Occupation code
- 999
- Human factor
- 10
- Environmental factor
- 8
- 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.