OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #736421
COMMUNICATION TOWER,WORK RULES,FATIGUE,CONSTRUCTION,NAUSEA,OVEREXPOSURE
Event description
Employee loses sight after exposed to TV radiation
Investigation abstract
On October 17, 1988, Employee #1, of Summit Communications, a subcontractor for d been informed about the wattage and its hazards before sending Employee #1 up the tower. Delphon, which had been hired to construct a television transmitting tower, was atop the WLKT tower in Lexington, Kentucky. While there, he worked for 1 1/2 hou rs within 10 feet of the base of a television antenna that was transmitting 4.43 million watts of radiofrequency radiation. Employee #1 was hospitalized with ac ute hypertension, loss of visual acuity, nausea, dizziness, inability to concent rate, etc. The vision loss was permanent, along with chronic fatigue, and possib ly impaired fertility. The full extent of the damage to Employee #1's health wil l become evident with time. At the time of the accident, management officials ha
Victim
-
#1 Hospitalized Age 24 M
- Nature of injury
- 19
- Part of body
- 19
- Event type
- 10
- Source
- 37
- Occupation code
- 599
- Human factor
- 14
- Environmental factor
- 12
- Hazardous substance
- 8350
- 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.