OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #221401938
LA CITY WATER AND POWER
LOS ANGELES, CA·
Event description
Employee amputates fingertip when caught between drum winch
Investigation abstract
At 10:00 a.m. on July 2, 2021, an employee working as an electrical system pulling line. Coworker #1 was operating the controls of the capstan remotely while standing approximately 15 feet way from the employee and keeping a visual on the employee. Coworker #2, a journeyman, was inside the vault maintaining verbal communication with the employee and Coworker #1. Coworker #4, the crew supervisor, was also nearby travelling back and forth checking on another crew working approximately 100 feet away. Coworker #4 asked the employee to add another wrap to the capstan to increase the tension on the pulling line. The employee was handling the rope with his left hand as he approached to the drum and added the wrap. The employee noticed that the rope was riding on top of the other rope in the drum. He used his left hand to push the rope to keep it in installer for a municipal power company was part of a crew pulling underground place at which time his Hyflex glove was caught between the two ropes. Coworker #1 saw the employee pulling his hand from the drum and so he stopped the winch immediately. No one else on the crew, including Coworker #4, saw the incident occur. The employee received medical treatment without hospitalization for a distal tuft amputation to his middle fingertip with exposed bone but no bone loss. cable. The crew was pulling the cable from a maintenance vault into a transformer at a customer site. The crew was pulling the cable horizontally with a winch which was fixed and secured to one side of a utility truck. The employee was working his first day assigned to this crew. The winch was rotating clockwise at a slow speed pulling the line from the vault. The employee was standing by the winch drum (capstan) holding the slack in the 1-inch silver lawn rope while and adding more wraps into the drum to increase tension to the
Victim
-
#1 Non-hospitalized injury Age 36 M
- Event type
- 2
- Occupation code
- 577
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.