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 #891788

REBAR,IMPALED,WORK RULES,SLIP,CONSTRUCTION,METAL POLE,FALL,UNGUARDED

Event
REBAR,IMPALED,WORK RULES,SLIP,CONSTRUCTION,METAL POLE,FALL,UNGUARDED
Linked inspection
No inspection record linked to this accident's victims.
Summary number
891788
Report ID
352440

Event description

Employee injured when impaled on steel reinforcing rod

Investigation abstract

At about 8:00 a.m. on June 23, 1989, Employee #1, a crane operator for Williams e vertical reinforcing rods. He sustained an approximately 6 in. long puncture w ound into his groin area, for which he was hospitalized. The rods were not guard ed to eliminate the hazard of impalement and safe access was not provided from t he abutment wall to the bridge deck. Construction Co., Inc., was stepping onto a concrete bridge abutment wall from t he end of the bridge deck. There were two rows of steel reinforcing rods install ed in the 50 ft long wall; the rods were evenly spaced, 18 in. apart, across the wall. There was a 6 in. opening between the wall and the end of the deck. The r ow of rods adjacent to the deck protruded 2 ft vertically from the wall and were 20 in. below the deck. The other rods were each 4 ft long and protruded at abou t 45 degrees away from the first row. As Employee #1 lowered his left foot to st ep onto the wall, he slipped into the 6 in. wide opening and fell onto one of th

Victim

  1. #1 Hospitalized Age 67 M

    Nature of injury
    18
    Part of body
    31
    Event type
    5
    Source
    8
    Occupation code
    849
    Human factor
    1
    Environmental factor
    2
    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.