OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #893636
FRACTURE,UNCONSCIOUSNESS,HOISTING MECHANISM,WORK RULES,STRUCK AGAINST,CAUGHT BY,LOCKOUT,CONVEYOR,COMMUNICATION,LEG
Event description
Employee injured when caught in pallet transporter
Investigation abstract
At approximately 7:00 a.m. on October 4, 1988, Employee #1 was sitting across th at the end of the conveyor line, where fresh bricks are off-loaded and sent into kilns, another coworker thought it was time to start his shift and hit the cont rol switch to start the conveyor. Almost instantly, Employee #1 sensed the trans porter moving and yelled for someone to shut the machine off. At the same time h e tried to climb out, but the cycle had been set in motion. Even though the main controls were hit within seconds, he was caught by the empty pallet transporter chain cross-connecting rod, lifted up, and slammed into the empty pallet hoist. He was knocked unconscious and sustained a fractured right leg above the ankle and two fractured ribs. Employee #1 was cut from the machine and transported to Prince William Hospital, where he was admitted for treatment. e empty pallet inverter of an Aberson brick press, with his feet hanging down in the empty pallet transporter. He was receiving 55 by 1 by 16 1/2 inch trays fro m a coworker who was standing adjacent to the operation, and then replacing tray s or pallets in open spaces on the empty pallet hoist. The process of shutting d own the line and replacing pallets that had jumped out during the course of a sh ift is called palletizing. The two employees had set the control switch for the pallet inverter and transporter to manual at the system control panel, believing that this was an effective lockout method. However, approximately 75 feet away
Victim
-
#1 Hospitalized Age 29 M
- Nature of injury
- 12
- Part of body
- 19
- Event type
- 2
- Source
- 26
- Occupation code
- 878
- Human factor
- 4
- Environmental factor
- 4
- Task assigned
- 2
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.