OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #893982
FRACTURE,UNCONSCIOUSNESS,CONSTRUCTION,LACERATION,SKULL,DUMP TRUCK,FALL,BRAIN,CONTUSION
Event description
Employee dies after fall from back of truck
Investigation abstract
At approximately 4:00 p.m. on July 13, 1989, Employee #1 was at a landfill to du . He was rendered unconscious by the fall and the rescue squad was called. When they arrived, he was conscious and refused to be transported to the hospital. He went home with his brother overnight. The next morning when his brother attempt ed to wake him, Employee #1 couldn't be roused. He was transported to the hospit al, where he remained comatose until his death on July 20, 1989, at approximatel y 10:30 a.m. Injuries sustained were a skull fracture, fractured ribs, subdural hematoma, contusions, and a laceration of the brain. mp a load of construction debris. His vehicle was a 1985 GMC stake body truck wi th a dump bed 4 ft 2 in. high. A trash box measuring 15 ft long by 8 ft wide by 5 ft high was on the truck, full of trash. Employee #1 stopped the truck and cli mbed up on the trash box to remove the tarp (required by state law) covering the load prior to dumping it. He went to the front of the box and began removing th e tarp front to back and walking backward toward the rear of the truck bed, pull ing the tarp along with him. When he got to the back of the box, he apparently o verstepped and fell approximately 9 ft off the back of the truck onto the ground
Victim
-
#1 Fatality Age 49 M
- Nature of injury
- 6
- Part of body
- 13
- Event type
- 5
- Source
- 29
- Occupation code
- 804
- 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.