105,313Records 71,083Employers 85,290Hospitalizations 27,770Amputations 2015-01-01 2025-10-31
Safety Incidents OSHA Severe Injury Reports · 2015–2025

OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #608216

REPAIR,COUNTERBALANCE,CONSTRUCTION,LOCKOUT,CRUSHED,ELEVATOR,ELEVATOR SHAFT,INATTENTION

Event
REPAIR,COUNTERBALANCE,CONSTRUCTION,LOCKOUT,CRUSHED,ELEVATOR,ELEVATOR SHAFT,INATTENTION
Linked inspection
No inspection record linked to this accident's victims.
Summary number
608216
Report ID
418100

Event description

Employee crushed and killed by elevator counterweights

Investigation abstract

On the morning of February 27, 1990, Employee #1 acquired the independent servic e key for elevator #1 from building management. He then took elevator #1 to the second floor where he opened its doors, put the elevator on independent service, and installed a sign that read, "Temporarily out of service, men working below. " Employee #1 returned to the elevator pit where he climbed over into the counte rweight rail system. He was installing fish tape in a conduit located inside the wall when a building patron entered elevator #1 on the second floor and proceed ed to move the elevator to the fifth floor. This caused the counterweights to lo wer, crushing Employee #1. He died.

Victim

  1. #1 Fatality Age 43 M

    Nature of injury
    12
    Part of body
    19
    Event type
    1
    Source
    24
    Occupation code
    999
    Human factor
    1
    Environmental factor
    1
    Task assigned
    1

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.