OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #14482285
N & A DREDGING INC.
SALT ROCK, WV·
Event description
Employee drowns while shifting dredger
Investigation abstract
At approximately 5:00 p.m. on August 14, 1987, Employee #1 and three coworkers w the bulldozers began to winch in the cables, the employees at the north end of t he dredger were holding up the wire rope to help guide it into position. When Em ployee #1 crossed the wire rope, he stepped or slipped off the sandy shallow int o the area of water that was 10 to 11 ft deep. He yelled that he couldn't swim. A coworker grabbed Employee #1 twice but couldn't hold onto him. Employee #1 wen t under and drowned. ere standing in 3 to 4 ft of water, preparing to shift a sunken dredger from its side to an upright position. Sand had previously been pumped away from the side s of the dredger, increasing the surrounding water depth from 3 to 4 ft to 10 to 11 ft. The employees had installed a block and tackle assembly in the water, se cured to two different trees on the west river embankment and connected to point s on the dredger assembly by two lines. They had also run two wire rope winch li nes from two different bulldozers through a switch block to two other trees on t he west embankment and attached them to a block and tackle out in the water. As
Victim
-
#1 Fatality Age 28 M
- Nature of injury
- 21
- Part of body
- 4
- Event type
- 14
- Source
- 41
- Occupation code
- 999
- Human factor
- 1
- Environmental factor
- 13
- 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.