OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #785071
PARALYSIS,GUARDRAIL,CONFINED SPACE,SPINE,WORK RULES,CONSTRUCTION,TWO PT SUSP SCAFFOLD,FALL,FALL PROTECTION,SANDBLASTING
Event description
Employee paralyzed in fall from scaffold
Investigation abstract
Employee #1 and a coworker were sandblasting the inside of a 1 1/2 million gallo independent safety line, which could have prevented the fall; inadequate confin ed space entry procedures for a potentially toxic flammable combustible atmosphe re; lack of adequate breathing air to sandblast hoods; and inadequate supervisio n of employees by management. n capacity water tank from a two point suspended scaffold. It appears that the s caffold did not have adequate planking and guardrails, and most importantly, no independent safety lines were installed. While the employees secured the scaffol d, one of the wooden 2 by 4 guardrails broke, causing the scaffold to move. Empl oyee #1, who was not secured by the required independent safety line, fell appro ximately 30 ft from the scaffold to the tank floor. He suffered a fracture to hi s spinal cord and is currently in the hospital paralyzed from the chest down. Th e following factors contributed to the accident: inadequate scaffold; lack of an
Victim
-
#1 Hospitalized Age 26 M
- Nature of injury
- 12
- Part of body
- 3
- Event type
- 5
- Source
- 24
- Occupation code
- 579
- Human factor
- 9
- Environmental factor
- 7
- 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.