OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #221428089
TYSON FOODS, INC.
ALBERTVILLE, AL·
Event description
Employee amputates finger in chain and sprocket
Investigation abstract
At 11:00 a.m. on January 6, 2022, an employee opened the door of the band strap does not work properly, maintenance is supposed to be called. However, maintenance does not always come in a timely manner. Employees (and according to interviews, supervisors/maintenance) knew how to open the door and re-align the band strap so that the machine would continue running. There was an interlock on the door that was supposed to stop the machine when the door opened. Frequently (and on the day of the accident), a piece of band strap was placed in the interlock so that the machine would not stop running when the door was opened. (According to interviews, maintenance and supervisors were aware that the interlocks had been tricked.) If the fix was to move the band strap back into its feed slot, then moving it with the machine running saved time. machine to push the strap back into position while the machine was running There were triangular shaped yellow/black warning decals on the band strap machine at each door. because the interlock had been tricked. The employee accidently reached farther into the machine while wearing a white cotton glove on his hand. The glove caught on the chain/sprocket and the employee's finger was pulled into it. The employee's finger was lacerated and amputated in the chain/sprocket. The employee was treated without hospitalization. The conveyor rollers on the work surface of the band strap machine were powered by chains/sprockets which continued to run if the interlock had been tricked. When the band strap machine
Victim
-
#1 Non-hospitalized injury Age 33 M
- Event type
- 2
- Occupation code
- 889
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.