105,313Records 71,083Employers 85,290Hospitalizations 27,770Amputations 2015-01-01 2025-10-31
Safety Incidents OSHA Severe Injury Reports · 2015–2025

OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #971036

AMPUTATED,FINGER,WORK RULES,SAW,BLADE,UNGUARDED

Event
AMPUTATED,FINGER,WORK RULES,SAW,BLADE,UNGUARDED
Linked inspection
No inspection record linked to this accident's victims.
Summary number
971036
Report ID
854910

Event description

Employee's four fingers amputated in chop saw

Investigation abstract

At 8:20 on June 16, 1988, Employee #1 lifted the guard to thread a new line of p ipe into a chop saw and actuated the saw, but, because the guard was left up, th e saw did not make a complete cut from the bottom of the pipe in an up stroke. T hinking he could push down on the top of the pipe to get a clean cut directly ov er the saw blade, Employee #1 placed his left hand under the guard and pushed hi s own hand into the saw, amputating four fingers. Employee #1 was rushed to the hospital with his fingers. Although he had been at this job for only one month, he had been trained.

Victim

  1. #1 Hospitalized Age 21 M

    Nature of injury
    1
    Part of body
    10
    Event type
    1
    Source
    26
    Occupation code
    779
    Human factor
    9
    Environmental factor
    1
    Hazardous substance
    8880
    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.