OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #676494
CHAIN,SEVERED,AMPUTATED,REPAIR,WORK RULES,LOCKOUT,CAUGHT BETWEEN,CONVEYOR,ARM,COMMUNICATION
Event description
Employee's arm amputated in chain and sprocket drive
Investigation abstract
At approximately 2:00 p.m. on March 5, 1990, Employee #1 was repairing a damaged . Just seconds later, the button was pushed again, and the conveyor pulled his a rm through the remainder of the rotation, severing his arm just below the should er. He was hospitalized for his injuries. support strut that was located between the drive sprockets on the #4 bull chain conveyor. He failed to lock out the system before welding the damaged strut. At the same time, a millwright and the chipper operator were unclogging the convey or to the sawdust bin. When the millwright sent the chipper operator down to the control panel to bump the sawdust conveyor, the operator accidentally hit the b utton next to the sawdust conveyor control, activating the #4 bull chain conveyo r. The first time the button was pushed, the conveyor pulled Employee #1's left arm into the chain and sprocket drive to approximately one third of the rotation
Victim
-
#1 Hospitalized Age 28 M
- Nature of injury
- 1
- Part of body
- 22
- Event type
- 2
- Source
- 27
- Occupation code
- 518
- Human factor
- 13
- Environmental factor
- 4
- 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.