OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #823682
STATE HIGHWAY ADMINISTRATION, MARLBORO FAC
SUITELAND, MD·
Event description
Employee's eye cut by broken glass
Investigation abstract
A state highway road maintenance/grass cutting crew had just begin work at an in curbs, opening a 2 in. gap at the top. After about five minutes of mowing, he w as backing his mower out of the ditch with his back to the intersection when som ething struck him in his right eye. His eyeball was cut and required stitches. A n examination of the area a month later showed a few broken bottles in and aroun d the ditch. Safety goggles or glasses were available but seldom to never used d ue to reported sweat, fog-up, and general discomfort. The bent guard was repaire d the next day. tersection with a grassy island, a grassy median strip on one road, and grassy s houlders all around. The supervisor was using a weedeater on the median and Empl oyee #1 and two coworkers were using Gravely walk-behind rotary self-propelled c ommercial mowers. The coworkers were on the island and Employee #1 was on a shou lder that included a drainage ditch. The mowers were designed with a 32 in. diam eter blade cover that included a 360 degree skirt to fully enclose the blade to within 1 in. of the ground. About 8 in. of the right rear periphery of Employee #1's machine blade guard had been bent inward at the bottom from backing up over
Victim
-
#1 Hospitalized Age 61 M
- Nature of injury
- 7
- Part of body
- 8
- Event type
- 1
- Source
- 21
- Occupation code
- 889
- Human factor
- 9
- Environmental factor
- 5
- 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.