Safety Incidents OSHA Severe Injury Reports · 2015–2025
105,991Records 71,450Employers 85,836Hospitalizations 27,959Amputations 2015-01-01 2025-11-30

OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #221363989

CALPINE OPERATING SERVICES COMPANY, INC.

Event
Blunt force, Blunt force trauma, E PTD (power generation), Electrical, Fall, Flying Object, Inadequate Maint, Natural Gas, Pressure Vessel, Scaffold, Struck By, Training, Traumatic
NAICS
221118
Inspection type
Federal Agency
Activity number
#345371660
Employer profile
CALPINE OPERATING SERVICES COMPANY, INC.
Summary number
221363989
Report ID
0626000

Event description

Power plant worker is killed when struck by vessel lid

Investigation abstract

At 6:30 p.m. on June 18, 2021, an employee was working for a firm that operated bolts that should have been tightened to 354 lb-ft (480 newton-meters) of torque. The workers were not aware of the manufacturer's torque requirements. They used crescent wrenches to tighten the bolts. They did not use a torque wrench or a pneumatic tool. There were additional spacing tolerance requirements of which the workers were unaware. When they placed the natural gas coalescing filter vessel back into service, the vessel lid blew off. It struck the employee and knocked him off a scaffold. He suffered blunt force trauma, and he was killed. electric power generation facilities. He was working at a natural gas-fired power plant. He and a coworker were restoring a natural gas filter system at the power plant, by aligning valves after a maintenance crew had replaced filter media. This system separated liquids from the natural gas before the natural gas was burned as fuel gas to heat water and produce steam for turbines. This was Filtering Unit A. It had been taken offline for the filter media replacement. It was a model number 95V-W12A-I-18-550-WP vertical dry gas scrubber, with tag number ONG01FA. Once the filter change had been completed, there were two draw

Victim

  1. #1 Fatality Age 37 M

    Event type
    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.