OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #14568653
HIGH WIND,TREE FELLING,WORK RULES,INEXPERIENCE,STRUCK BY,LOGGING,INATTENTION
Event description
Employee killed when struck by falling tree
Investigation abstract
Employee #1 and a coworker were felling trees. Employee #1, the senior cutter an d company owner, instructed the coworker to fell a clump of small trees while he was doing some saw maintenance and filing his saw's chain. The second tree the coworker attempted to fell split and barber-chaired; it fell uncontrolled in the direction of Employee #1, striking and killing him. The causal factors contribu ting to the accident include Employee #1 was only approximately 70 ft away and t hus within reach of the tree to be felled; Employee #1's attention was on his ta sk rather than on the falling tree; the wind made it difficult to fell small tim ber in a controlled manner; and the cutter was inexperienced.
Victim
-
#1 Fatality Age 51 M
- Nature of injury
- 21
- Part of body
- 19
- Event type
- 1
- Source
- 43
- Occupation code
- 96
- 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.