OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #823781
BATTERY,EYE,ELECTRIC ARC,E GI III,ELECTRICAL,BATTERY CHARGER,STRUCK BY,ELECTRICAL FAULT,SULFURIC ACID
Event description
Employee's eye injured when battery explodes
Investigation abstract
Employee #1, a receiving clerk working alone on night duty at a wholesale food d got and called for emergency medical services. His eyes were further flushed by police and emergency medical technicians, who then took him to a hospital. He wa s examined, treated, and released. The employee consulted his ophthalmologist an d found that he had no permanent injury. The manufacturer's instructions for tak ing off the charge are to avoid contact between the AC plug prongs and the batte ry terminals when coiling the cord on top of the charger. The clerk was not awar e of the precautions against making this contact. Terminal covers were also avai lable to preclude such contact. istribution warehouse, took an electric pallet jack off the charger, just as he had done every day for over 8 years. The jack was a Yale model MPD-30 that was u sed daily. It had four 12-volt batteries in a series, stacked two and two. Each could be plugged into a 120-volt outlet after shifting the DC plug from the oper ation and setting the timer. The grounding pole of the attached AC cord on top o f the built-in charger, which was located between the batteries, grazed the posi tive pole on a battery, causing an electrical fault. The fault blew the top of t he battery into Employee #1's face. He flushed his face and eyes at a nearby spi
Victim
-
#1 Hospitalized Age 50 M
- Nature of injury
- 21
- Part of body
- 8
- Event type
- 14
- Source
- 9
- Occupation code
- 364
- Human factor
- 4
- Environmental factor
- 18
- 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.