OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #707307
CARPENTER,WORK RULES,CLEANING,SAFETY BELT,CONSTRUCTION,LANYARD,FALL,BRIDGE,ELEVATED WORK PLAT,TIE-OFF
Event description
Employee injured in fall from scaffold plank
Investigation abstract
Employee #1, a carpenter foreman, and a coworker, a carpenter, were assigned to nyard attached. After the first beam was finished, the platform was taken down a nd put up again on the next beam. They were one-third of the way through cleanin g the second beam when they stopped for lunch. After lunch, both employees began manually chipping the concrete, again without their safety lanyards attached. S omehow Employee #1 fell approximately 30 ft from his scaffold plank to the groun d, landing between the railroad tracks and the concrete base of the protection s lope of the bridge. He was hospitalized and will lose six to eight weeks of work . The carpenter saw and heard nothing. Neither Employee #1 nor the carpenter fel t that it was practical to attach the lanyards. Both had been present at a safet y meeting held at the job site on December 13, 1986, when a film about working f chip splashed concrete off the underside beams of the Owings Mills Bridge, which rom elevations was shown. When a situation such as this arises in which employee s feel they can not normally attach their safety lanyards, C-clamps are provided . In this case, they were in a vehicle at the accident site. The employees did n ot follow the employer's policy, which they had been taught as recently as two w eeks before the accident, of using all available safety methods in erecting a sa fe work platform. crosses the Western Maryland railroad tracks. This was not the employee's norma l job, but since the work was 99 percent complete and no other employees were av ailable, he and the carpenter were assigned to finish it. Pieces of 2 by 6 and 2 by 8 lumber were cut and placed between the beams, which were about 8 ft apart. Two 2 by 12 scaffold planks (8 to 10 ft long) were laid across the 2 by 6s and 2 by 8s. Each employee worked from the scaffold planks. While the first beam was being cleaned, neither Employee #1 nor the carpenter had his safety belt and la
Victim
-
#1 Hospitalized Age 30 M
- Nature of injury
- 12
- Part of body
- 11
- Event type
- 5
- Source
- 42
- 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.