OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #221665086
S AND K ENT, LLC
HINTON, VA·
Event description
Employee is killed when struck by falling log
Investigation abstract
At 3:15 p.m. on January 23, 2024, an employee was using a chain saw to manually standing tree trunk just enough to keep the tree from binding Employee #1's chainsaw blade. The smaller trunk being used as a lever by the foreman's Sennebogen machine snapped in the machine's claw arm and fell onto the head, neck and shoulder of Employee #1. Employee #1 was immediately rendered unconscious and suffered abrasions to his face, contused abrasions of the posterior head and neck, fractures of nasal skeleton, vertebrae and skull, and laceration and hemorrhage of the brain. Employee #1 was pronounced dead at the scene. fell a tree trunk. The tree was leaning away from the road. The Sennebogen equipment operator, who was the foreman, wanted the tree to fall toward the road so that he could lift it onto a waiting dump truck. The tree was too far away and too far down slope to only use the Sennebogen material handler. Employee #1 used his chain saw to make a first cut, but the angled tree was binding his blade when he tried to make the second cut. Using radio communications, the foreman and Employee #1 worked out a method where the foreman would use the Sennebogen to lift a smaller log, previously cut, over Employee #1 and pull the
Victim
-
#1 Fatality Age 19 M
- Event type
- 1
- 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.