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 #14486765

WORK RULES,RUPTURE,EXPLOSION,RESTRAINING DEVICE,INFLATING,MULTIPIECE RIM WHEEL,STRUCK BY,FLYING OBJECT,AIR LINE,FACE

Event
WORK RULES,RUPTURE,EXPLOSION,RESTRAINING DEVICE,INFLATING,MULTIPIECE RIM WHEEL,STRUCK BY,FLYING OBJECT,AIR LINE,FACE
Linked inspection
No inspection record linked to this accident's victims.
Summary number
14486765
Report ID
215600

Event description

Employee killed when struck by exploding wheel rim

Investigation abstract

Employee #1 was inflating a multipiece wheel rim truck tire. The employee placed the tire on its side on the floor of the garage instead of using the pipe rack restraining device, which was standing on the floor approximately 20 ft away. Ap parently, because the wheel was not properly assembled, the tire exploded in the employee's face. Employee #1 was struck in the face, throat, and head by pieces of the rim, causing fractures of the skull and facial bones as well as aspirati on of the blood. Employee #1 died approximately 1 1/2 hours later in the hospita l. The air line was not equipped with a clip-on chuck or an air gauge.

Victim

  1. #1 Fatality Age 18 M

    Nature of injury
    12
    Part of body
    13
    Event type
    1
    Source
    43
    Occupation code
    999
    Human factor
    11
    Environmental factor
    5
    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.