OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #802967
LIMBING,TREE,STRUCK BY,LOGGING
Event description
Employee Killed by Falling Tree
Investigation abstract
On November 22, 1989, employees were cutting pine trees for pulpwood. Employee # The employees were not instructed to stay twice the height of the trees apart a nd in addition, the lodged trees were not pulled down prior to felling the next tree. 1 had just finished felling a tree and was walking from the base (stump) of the tree to the top to limb it. During this time another employee was felling a tree and was about halfway through when he looked over and saw Employee #1 walking i n the direction that the tree was leaning. The other employee yelled at Employee #1 but he was not heard. A gust of wind caused the tree to start falling in Emp loyee #1's direction. Employee #1 was standing about 78 ft from the other employ ee. The tree being felled hit a lodged tree and followed it down. The tree struc k Employee #1 and killed him. The tree that hit the victim was about 93 ft long.
Victim
-
#1 Fatality Age 48 M
- Nature of injury
- 21
- Part of body
- 19
- Event type
- 1
- Source
- 43
- Occupation code
- 496
- Human factor
- 1
- Environmental factor
- 6
- 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.