OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #707414
WIRE ROPE,WORK RULES,BROKEN CABLE,CONSTRUCTION,SCAFFOLD COLLAPSE,FALL,BRIDGE,SET UP,SCAFFOLD
Event description
Employee killed in fall from scaffold under bridge
Investigation abstract
Employee #1 of the Kaitis Painting Company, and a coworker, his father, were san , pulling it tight, and three wire rope clips were put on each end to create the loops that held the wire rope. They moved to the fourth beam and repeated the s ame procedure. Then Employee #1 and his father hung from the wire ropes as a mea ns of load testing them. They put the scaffold slings/hooks on each wire rope an d then placed a metal scaffold through the sling hooks. Employee #1 got under be am #1 and his father was under beam #4. They both were facing south and started to pull themselves hand-over-hand on the wire rope, heading toward the northern end of the bridge. They were then going to start stringing a second wire rope un der each beam to be used as a safety line. About 30 ft out from the southern end of the bridge, the wire rope under beam #1 suddenly snapped, causing the scaffo dblasting the old paint off the eight beams that hold up the Bentalou Street Bri ld to fall with Employee #1. He fell horizontally and struck his back on an upri ght metal railroad track that was sticking 3 ft 3 1/2 in. out of the ground. He then rolled off onto the ground. His father was able to hold onto his wire rope under beam #4 and then jumped to the ground and ran to his son. After about one hour, Employee #1 was brought up to the road level and taken to Bon Secors Hospi tal, where he died of his injuries. dge, which crosses over the Western Maryland railroad tracks. Once they had fini shed sandblasting, they were to repaint the beams. The company had taken off 198 6 and this was its first job since the end of 1985. After bringing all of the eq uipment under the bridge, Employee #1 and the coworker proceeded to set up their wire ropes and scaffold. They used 1/2 in. wire rope and secured it at the sout hern and northern shoes that held beam #1 (starting on the eastern side of the b ridge). A come-along applied 1,000 to 1,200 lb pressure/tension on the wire rope
Victim
-
#1 Fatality Age 21 M
- Nature of injury
- 21
- Part of body
- 3
- Event type
- 5
- Source
- 43
- Occupation code
- 999
- Human factor
- 1
- Environmental factor
- 13
- 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.