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 #14558092

LONGSHORING,SUFFOCATED,WORK RULES,COAL,CLOGGED,CONVEYOR,FALL,COAL HOPPER,BURIED,COMMUNICATION

Event
LONGSHORING,SUFFOCATED,WORK RULES,COAL,CLOGGED,CONVEYOR,FALL,COAL HOPPER,BURIED,COMMUNICATION
Linked inspection
No inspection record linked to this accident's victims.
Summary number
14558092
Report ID
418500

Event description

Employee killed when buried in coal hopper

Investigation abstract

At approximately 7:45 a.m. on March 23, 1987, Employee #1, a maintenance worker, was on the load rack observing coal being loaded by a conveyor belt into a rail car. The dual chutes became clogged. Employee #1 apparently climbed a ladder to the top platform and got on the conveyor belt to look into the hopper. The belt was restarted and carried Employee #1 into the hopper. He was buried under the c oal and died of suffocation. There were no witnesses to the accident.

Victim

  1. #1 Fatality Age 29 M

    Nature of injury
    2
    Part of body
    28
    Event type
    5
    Source
    43
    Occupation code
    999
    Human factor
    1
    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.