OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #607978
BURN,UNSECURED,BARRIER GUARD,STEAM,FALL,FLOOR OPENING,HOT WATER,POOR VISIBILITY
Event description
Employee dies after falling into hot water
Investigation abstract
At approximately 9:30 a.m. on March 10, 1987, Employee #1, a skein dye beck unit operator, was walking behind a carpet dye beck unit in a carpet mill when he fe ll through a 58-in. by 15-ft opening in the floor into hot water. The floor was being replaced, and the maintenance workers had placed an unsecured piece of 2-i n. angle iron about 38 in. above the floor and 50 in. from the opening to serve as a barrier. Employee #1's vision was obscured by steam created by hot water be ing dumped from two beck units at the same time. He died 13 days later from thir d-degree burns over the lower half of his body. There were no eyewitnesses and n o police or fire department reports.
Victim
-
#1 Fatality Age 45 M
- Nature of injury
- 5
- Part of body
- 19
- Event type
- 5
- Source
- 41
- Occupation code
- 999
- Human factor
- 4
- Environmental factor
- 13
- Task assigned
- 2
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.