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 #686998

BEAM,CHAIN,UNSECURED,WORK RULES,EQUIPMENT FAILURE,BOLT,STRUCK BY,WALKING ON BEAM

Event
BEAM,CHAIN,UNSECURED,WORK RULES,EQUIPMENT FAILURE,BOLT,STRUCK BY,WALKING ON BEAM
Linked inspection
No inspection record linked to this accident's victims.
Summary number
686998
Report ID
855610

Event description

Employee killed when struck by walking beam

Investigation abstract

Employee #1 had been contracted to remove a tail bearing housing on a National 4 56 oil pumping unit, type D325b-456DW. He stopped the unit, secured the walking beam with chains, then climbed up to the walking beam and walked down to the tai l bearing housing. He had removed the U bolts and nuts when the walking beam rot ated. The rear position swung downward, contacting an upright Sampson post, whic h caused the four saddle bolts at the pivot point to fail. Employee #1 fell to t he base of the unit and was struck by the falling walking beam and killed. Causa l factors include not securing the down chain on the front of the walking beam i n order to prevent it from sliding down the beam.

Victim

  1. #1 Fatality Age 30 M

    Nature of injury
    21
    Part of body
    5
    Event type
    1
    Source
    43
    Occupation code
    999
    Human factor
    1
    Environmental factor
    6
    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.