OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #759928
BURN,RAILROAD TANK CAR,WORK RULES,FIRE,TORCH,CUTTING AND BURNING
Event description
Employee burned in fire in railroad tank car
Investigation abstract
Employee #1 was part of a five man crew removing the rubber lining of a railroad his assigned scraper getting into the car. The heat torch caused the rubber lini ng at the end of the car to catch on fire because it was not being scraped clear of the heating. Although the safety observer yelled to warn him, Employee #1 su ffered burns on 70 percent of his body before getting out of the car. tank car to prepare the car for relining. The new process for removing the lini ng involved an employee on the outside of the car with a gas torch heating the c ar shell and another employee on the inside of the car scraping off the lining o f the shell, loosened by the heating. There were to be two teams heating and scr aping and a safety observer. Employee #1 began as the scraper for one pair. The scraper for the other pair had trouble fitting his respirator and had not yet go tten into the car to begin scraping. For some reason, the heater for the other p air began heating the shell of the car at the opposite end of the car, prior to
Victim
-
#1 Hospitalized Age 26 M
- Nature of injury
- 5
- Part of body
- 19
- Event type
- 2
- Source
- 16
- Occupation code
- 864
- Human factor
- 4
- 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.