105,313Records 71,083Employers 85,290Hospitalizations 27,770Amputations 2015-01-01 2025-10-31
Safety Incidents OSHA Severe Injury Reports · 2015–2025

OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #813758

SAFETY LATCH,TRAILER HITCH,CRUSHED,TRUCK,TRAILER

Event
SAFETY LATCH,TRAILER HITCH,CRUSHED,TRUCK,TRAILER
Linked inspection
No inspection record linked to this accident's victims.
Summary number
813758
Report ID
552700

Event description

Employee crushed by trailer while hooking trailer to truck

Investigation abstract

At 7:45 a.m. on Friday, October 20, 1989, Employee #1 was helping another worker oyee #1 reached under the flat bed of the truck and over the trailer tongue to l ock the trailer coupler to the truck hitch ball. When Employee #1 was in this po sition, the trailer tongue snapped from the weight of the rear of the Bobcat, cr ushing Employee #1's head. hook up a 14 foot Lowboy utility trailer to a Ford F-350 truck. After guiding t he truck up to the trailer tongue, Employee #1 proceeded to hook-up the safety c hains and to guide the trailer down to the hitch ball, which was located approxi mately 2 feet under the flat bed of the truck. At the same time the other worker was lowering the trailer jack, Employee #1 proceeded to drive the Case (Bobcat) Ni-Loader 1845C up on to the trailer. The employee noticed that the trailer was off the hitch ball and that the safety latch on trailer was not in the down pos ition. While the other worker was maneuvering the Bobcat on to the trailer, Empl

Victim

  1. #1 Fatality Age 22 M

    Nature of injury
    21
    Part of body
    13
    Event type
    2
    Source
    27
    Occupation code
    804
    Human factor
    1
    Environmental factor
    1
    Task assigned
    2

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.