OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #893388
SIGNALMAN,OBSTRUCTED VIEW,PINNED,WORK RULES,CONSTRUCTION,TRENCH,WALKING BACKWARD,BACKHOE BUCKET,COMMUNICATION,INATTENTION
Event description
Employee injured when pinned between bucket and trench box
Investigation abstract
At approximately 8:35 a.m. on April 15, 1988, Employee #1 and coworkers were ins omentarily pinned him against the crossbeam, bruising his chest. He was hospital ized for observation. The main cause of this accident was human error on the par t of Employee #1. He overlooked how close he was to the end of the trench box an d backed himself into a corner. Because the backhoe operator's view was partiall y obscured, he had to act at the direction of Employee #1. The employee had been performing this job all along the trench and had experienced no problem until t he accident. talling 8 in. sanitary sewer pipes in a 48 ft long by 50 in. wide by approximate ly 15 ft deep trench. Employee #1 was working from inside an 8 ft high by 16 ft long trench box that had an identical trench box stacked on top, directing the o perator of a John Deere model 792 backhoe with bucket, serial #CKO7921001029. Em ployee #1 was standing inside the north end of the trench box, using his right h and to direct the backhoe operator so that the bucket would not strike the pipe that had already been laid. He moved backward as the bucket got closer and backe d up against the bottom crossbeam. The bucket continued to move toward him and m
Victim
-
#1 Hospitalized Age 25 M
- Nature of injury
- 3
- Part of body
- 5
- Event type
- 2
- Source
- 26
- Occupation code
- 599
- Human factor
- 1
- Environmental factor
- 4
- 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.