OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #14488936
FRACTURE,STEEL BEAM,DEMOLITION,COUNTERBALANCE,PINNED,WORK RULES,FIRE ESCAPE,CONSTRUCTION,LACERATION
Event description
Employee killed when crushed between fire escape and beam
Investigation abstract
At approximately 10:00 a.m. on January 15, 1988, Employee #1 was assigned the ta sk of removing a fire escape from a two-story, 75 ft by 75 ft building that was being demolished. The metal counterbalanced stairway was at the rear of the buil ding and led from the second floor to the ground. Employee #1 positioned himself on the upper half of the stairway and proceeded to cut it in half with a 36 in. torch fueled by oxygen and propane. When the cut was complete, the stairway bec ame unbalanced and top portion rose with Employee #1 on its steps. He became tra pped between the stairway and an upper steel beam that supported the fire escape . Employee #1 sustained multiple fractures and lacerations, and was killed.
Victim
-
#1 Fatality Age 39 M
- Nature of injury
- 12
- Part of body
- 4
- Event type
- 2
- Source
- 8
- Occupation code
- 999
- Human factor
- 10
- 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.