OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #744904
HEAD,WORK RULES,EQUIPMENT OPERATOR,CONSTRUCTION,CRUSHED,INEXPERIENCE,BULLDOZER,LOST CONTROL,SLOPE,OVERTURN
Event description
Employee killed when head crushed by overturned bulldozer
Investigation abstract
Shortly before 9:30 a.m. on March 2, Employee #1, a foreman with 12 years experi e wide open or nearly so. The hinged seat mount had become unlatched, probably o n impact, and the seat was tipped back. Employee #1's head had been crushed by t he roof, and he was dead. The seat belt, which was attached to the seat plate, h ad not been used; the use of seat belts was not required on dozers. There was no evidence that Employee #1 had lost consciousness; apparently he misjudged a rap idly deteriorating situation and did not correctly shift to neutral. Employee #1 had operated this D3 at least 20 times, probably more. The D3 had been bought n ew 10 years ago and had been fitted with a seat belt, a straight blade, and an a pproved rollover-protective canopy on the rear. ence as an equipment operator, told two men that he was going to do some work wi th the Caterpillar D3 bulldozer and disappeared behind a dirt stockpile. He was working on site preparation for a small industrial park that included a storm ce nter with a 5-ft-high berm around three sides. This berm was complete except for a 25-ft-wide spillway that was to be cut in the 12-ft-wide top of the berm. Sub sequently, a county employee reported a tractor on top of a man, so one of the t wo other operators looked behind the stockpile and found the D3 on its rear end. It was resting at the foot of a 27-degree slope in second gear with its throttl
Victim
-
#1 Fatality Age 61 M
- Nature of injury
- 21
- Part of body
- 19
- Event type
- 1
- Source
- 27
- Occupation code
- 843
- Human factor
- 1
- Environmental factor
- 18
- 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.