OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #893875
CONFINED SPACE,FLAMMABLE VAPORS,WORK RULES,AIR MONITORING,FIRE,CONSTRUCTION,TRENCH,EXPLOSION,PIPE,UNTRAINED
Event description
Employee injured in flash fire inside pipe
Investigation abstract
At approximately 8:00 a.m. on March 14, 1989, Employee #1 and his foreman entere from the flammable gases that had accumulated inside the pipe overnight. He sust ained second-degree burns to his hands, face, and neck. Causal factors related t o this accident were the lack of training on confined space entry procedures and the employee's failure to monitor the air quality inside the pipe prior to entr y. d a 12 ft wide by 43 ft long by 13 ft deep trench to check a joint on a 24 in. d uctile iron water line pipe that had been laid the previous day. They were prote cted by a trench box. The pipe section had been maneuvered around that morning t o get it in the proper alignment with the pipe section toward which it was headi ng. Employee #1 crawled 20 ft inside the pipe to check that the gasket between t he new section and the pipe to which it was connected had not been pushed out by the shifting of the pipe. When Employee #1 reached the gasket, he struck a matc h to see what he was doing, resulting in a spontaneous explosion and flash fire
Victim
-
#1 Hospitalized Age 47 M
- Nature of injury
- 5
- Part of body
- 19
- Event type
- 14
- Source
- 19
- Occupation code
- 585
- Human factor
- 1
- Environmental factor
- 7
- 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.