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

OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #14400253

PETROFAC INC

Event
HEAD, TRUCK CRANE, WORK RULES, NECK, STRUCK BY, WORK PLATFORM, HEADACHE BALL, CRANE
NAICS
000000
Inspection type
Accident-driven
Activity number
#100315373
Employer profile
PETROFAC INC
Summary number
14400253
Report ID
626300

Event description

Employee killed when struck by headache ball

Investigation abstract

Employee #1 was using a truck mounted crane to lift a 35,000 lb skid. He had bee n having trouble with the whipline creeping down and had to keep pulling it up. When Employee #1 lifted the load and swung it to the left, a jib crane was in hi s line of travel, requiring him to bring down the skid he was moving. He placed the skid down, leaving some tension on the attached slings. Prior to the swing-o ver, Employee #1 had run the headache ball whipline all the way to the stop. He had started to boom down without feeding the whipline when the approximately 350 lb headache ball came over the top, down the boom, and into the cab, striking E mployee #1 on the back of the neck and head. He was killed.

Victim

  1. #1 Fatality Age 56 M

    Nature of injury
    6
    Part of body
    13
    Event type
    2
    Source
    24
    Occupation code
    999
    Human factor
    9
    Environmental factor
    6
    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.