OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #707430
ROOF COLLAPSE,FRACTURE,ROOF,CONSTRUCTION,BACK,FALL
Event description
Employee fractures back in fall from porch roof
Investigation abstract
Employee #1, who had been hired two days before, had previously worked in constr n to University Hospital Shock Trauma Center, where it was determined that he ha d a broken back. He will be off work six to nine months. Employee #1 said that h e checked the porch top when he first got on top of it as did the owner of the b usiness. Both felt that the porch top was sturdy enough from which to work, and the porch roof gave no indication of pulling loose before it gave way. Leg suppo rts had been placed under the existing porch roof; no other safety precautions w ould have been feasible under the circumstances. The employer took reasonable sa fety steps before having work done on the porch roof and was not cited. uction, carpentry, and roofing work. On this day, he stripped and repapered a si de porch and then moved to do the same to the back porch. He stripped the old sh ingles off the porch top, reaching what he could from a ladder. He finally had t o climb onto the porch top to remove the remaining shingles. Employee #1 had wor ked 45 minutes to one hour and was almost done when he felt the porch top pullin g away from the house. He had time to turn around, but could not get off before the whole porch top pulled loose from the house and fell 11 ft to the sidewalk. He fell with the porch top to the ground. Paramedics were called and he was take
Victim
-
#1 Hospitalized Age 41 M
- Nature of injury
- 12
- Part of body
- 3
- Event type
- 5
- Source
- 42
- Occupation code
- 999
- Human factor
- 14
- 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.