OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #893487
LUNG,COLLAPSE,CRANE BOOM,OBSTRUCTED VIEW,WORK RULES,CONSTRUCTION,CRANE COUNTERWEIGHT,FALL,CRANE,INATTENTION
Event description
Employee injured in fall when crane boom collapses
Investigation abstract
At approximately 8:20 a.m. on April 18, 1988, Employee #1, a carpenter, was oper when the back of the crane came up. He tried to pull back on the boom but it had gone too far down and the west side draped across clarifier #8. When Employee # 1 saw that he had lost the load, he stood. The counterweights tore loose from th e rear of the crane, causing Employee #1 to fall to the ground. He suffered hip injuries and a collapsed lung, for which he was hospitalized. In the opinion of the OSHA inspector, this accident was the result of human error. The employee ha d 30 years experience as a crane operator and should have realized that he was o ver the side of the crane on the last lift. He could have repositioned the track s so that the fifth lift was over the front like the first four. A load limit ch art, signal chart, and boom angle indicator were accessible to the operator and ating a 225 ton capacity Manitowoc 4100W crane, serial #41364, at a sewage treat were all in good condition. Because the employee could not see clarifier #6, he may have been too intent on observing his foreman giving him directions and not realized he was over the side. ment plant under construction. The crane was located just south of clarifier #8 and was being used to move 200 lb scaffold bucks from clarifier #7 to clarifier #6. The crane had 220 ft of boom, with a 60 ft jib on the end. The foreman was s tanding on the northwest side of clarifier #8, where he could see the employee a nd could see down into clarifier #6, where the scaffold bucks were being set. Th e four lifts had been over the front of the crane and the fifth lift was to be o n the crane's right and over the side. The employee was lowering the fifth lift
Victim
-
#1 Hospitalized Age 53 M
- Nature of injury
- 3
- Part of body
- 19
- Event type
- 5
- Source
- 27
- Occupation code
- 844
- Human factor
- 1
- Environmental factor
- 8
- 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.