OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #221432487
ENTACT, LLC
LAWRENCEVILLE, IL·
Event description
Employee suffers burns from energized utility line
Investigation abstract
At 7:55 a.m. on November 17, 2021, an employee was repositioning orange plastic switch. Under the bypass condition, the line had approximately 10 kV of electricity. The employee was hospitalized for treatment of burns to right hand, with hole under middle finger through palm, burns to left hand, exit hole on left forearm. fencing markers on the line from an aerial lift basket within one foot of an electric utility line. After engaging an air brake on the line approximately 430 feet away, a coworker verified that the brake was engaged, and a multi-hasp lock and tag were placed on the air brake control. However a voltage detector was not used to verify that the line was de-energized. As the employee threw the fencing on to the line, an arc occurred between the line and the employee. A jumper wire on the utility side of the switch had moved out of position and made direct contact with the switch, bypassing the air gap created by the ground
Victim
-
#1 Hospitalized Age 54 M
- Event type
- 13
- 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.