OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #766378
HEAT,WORK RULES,EXPLOSION,CHEMICAL REACTION,NITRIC ACID,SLUDGE
Event description
Employee killed when dried precious metal sludge explodes
Investigation abstract
Employee #1 was handling sludge from waste silver nitric acid that had been bein g air dried outdoors for several days in preparation for further processing to r emove the metal. The sludge exploded violently, killing him. Apparently, the dri ed sludge became a heat- and shock-sensitive explosive, which went off when Empl oyee #1 was moving the tray of material. The employer is in the business of proc essing and reclaiming precious metals from industrial wastes.
Victim
-
#1 Fatality Age 30 M
- Nature of injury
- 6
- Part of body
- 19
- Event type
- 13
- Source
- 28
- Occupation code
- 999
- Human factor
- 1
- Environmental factor
- 9
- Hazardous substance
- 2240
- 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.