OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #841023
BURN,ELECTRICAL VAULT,POURING,HATCH,FIRE,EXPLOSION,PROPANE,TANK,DOOR
Event description
ONE EMPLOYEE KILLED ANOTHER CRITICALLY INJURED IN EXPLOSION
Investigation abstract
At approximately 8:50 a.m. on March 14, 1990, Employees #1, #2, and #3 were prep d, and hospitalized as a result of the explosion. aring to finish pouring the floor of an underground utility vault at a water pum ping station, when an explosion and flash fire occurred. The Salamander device a nd 100-lb propane tank had been placed in the 20-ft by 30-ft by 10.5-ft-deep vau lt the day before and left burning overnight to dry condensation. Upon arrival t o the site, the crew discovered that the burner had gone out and the employees c ould smell propane gas. They attempted to ventilate the vault by leaving the hat ch doors open for a while. The explosion was apparently ignited by a match struc k inside the vault. Employee #1 was killed and Employee #2 was critically injure
Victims (2)
-
#1 Fatality Age 57 M
- Nature of injury
- 5
- Part of body
- 19
- Event type
- 14
- Source
- 16
- Occupation code
- 999
- Human factor
- 18
- Environmental factor
- 10
- Task assigned
- 1
-
#2 Hospitalized Age 47 M
- Nature of injury
- 5
- Part of body
- 19
- Event type
- 14
- Source
- 16
- Occupation code
- 999
- Human factor
- 18
- Environmental factor
- 10
- 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.