OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #760124
HEAD,GRAIN,CONVEYOR,BURIED
Event description
Employee dies when engulfed in wheat inside silo
Investigation abstract
Employee #1 inadvertently transferred wheat into the wrong storage silo. He and e problem, but could not locate Employee #1. He searched through the wheat for 5 to 10 minutes, then went to the office to call for help. The rescue squad arriv ed and assisted the President and vice president in searching through the wheat for Employee #1. The vice president found Employee #1's body in a vertical posit ion with his head about 2 feet below the surface of the wheat; the body was 2 to 3 feet from the conveyor hose. Employee #1 died. The president stated that he h ad trained Employee #1 in the proper use of the conveyor. the president of the company climbed into the silo from the top to remove the wh eat using a pneumatic conveyor. The conveyor was being operated from the ground by two other employees. The president left the silo to obtain a part for the con veyor, leaving Employee #1 alone in the top of the silo. At the direction of the vice president, who was one of the two employees on the ground, Employee #1 con tinued to remove the wheat using the conveyor. After approximately 20 minutes of operation, the vice president noticed the conveyor piping shaking as if it was clogging up. He shut the conveyor down and went up into the silo to ascertain th
Victim
-
#1 Fatality Age 43 M
- Nature of injury
- 2
- Part of body
- 31
- Event type
- 14
- Source
- 42
- Occupation code
- 699
- Human factor
- 18
- 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.