OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #14535470
BLACK HILLS POWER & LIGHT COMPANY
KEYSTONE, SD·
Event description
STRUCK BY FALLING TREE
Investigation abstract
Two employees were felling trees to clear a 24.9-kilovolt overhead power line as d across the fall area as the two trees fell. The falling dead tree struck him o n the head and killed him. part of a project to upgrade the power line from single phase to three phase. T hey had removed about eight trees. They threw a 6-millimeter-diameter rope into the next tree to be removed, then tied to a second tree 18.3 meters away and abo ut 5 meters from the intended fall location. One employee was at the base of the tree, felling it with a chain saw. The second employee was 18.3 meters away, at the anchor point. When the tree fell it struck a 10-meter-tall, 150-millimeter- diameter dead tree, which had its top broken out. The falling tree knocked the d ead tree over. The second employee was seen moving away from the anchor point an
Victim
-
#1 Fatality Age 55 M
- Nature of injury
- 3
- Part of body
- 13
- Event type
- 1
- Source
- 39
- Occupation code
- 999
- Human factor
- 1
- Environmental factor
- 6
- 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.