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 #980615

TRAFFIC ACCIDENT,OBSTRUCTED VIEW,WORK RULES,UTILITY POLE,POOR VISIBILITY

Event
TRAFFIC ACCIDENT,OBSTRUCTED VIEW,WORK RULES,UTILITY POLE,POOR VISIBILITY
Linked inspection
No inspection record linked to this accident's victims.
Summary number
980615
Report ID
551800

Event description

Mail clerk dies in car accident

Investigation abstract

At 5:30 a.m. on March 27, 1990, Employee #1, a mail clerk employed by Bethlehem . Steel Corp., was driving a 1987 Ford Econoline van (company #K-367) en route to the data center from the main office at Bethlehem Steel. Before leaving the main office he had scraped approximately 10 square ft of frost from the windshield a nd turned on the defroster, but did not wait for the windshield to clear. As he traveled northeast around the parking lot for the main office, Employee #1 start ed to cut the corner of the parking lot and struck a light pole head-on. There w ere no tire marks to indicate whether he had applied the brakes. Employee #1 was transported to the hospital, where he died during surgery for internal injuries

Victim

  1. #1 Fatality Age 45 M

    Nature of injury
    3
    Part of body
    5
    Event type
    6
    Source
    29
    Occupation code
    356
    Human factor
    14
    Environmental factor
    18
    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.