OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #221578206
KANZA COOPERATIVE ASSOCIATION
PRATT, KS—
Event description
Employee is killed when tire blows out
Investigation abstract
At 11:30 a.m. on June 21, 2023, an employee was in the process of changing a the two pieces of the wheel together. Once just enough of the bolts were loosened, the pressure of the still inflated tire, ripped the wheel in two. The front part of the wheel tore the remaining nuts off the bolts, impacted the employee in the upper and right part of the head (forehead/eye area) and had enough force after impacting the employee, to fly through a window (located approximately 15 feet north of the worktable) and outside onto the taxi area/parking lot. While not impacted by the wheel or debris, the witness, who was standing just to the right of the employee during the wheel blow-out, was blow down to the floor by the force of the blow out. The tire blew itself off the wheel during the process and ended up upright, against the window that was tire on a crop duster. One of the first steps, when removing a tire from an blown out by the wheel (15 feet north of the worktable). The back part of the wheel, that had the bolts attached, ended up on the ground in front of the worktable. The employee was killed due to blunt force head trauma and a large gash from the bridge of nose up to the forehead. The right eye and the area around the eye suffered severe bruising. aircraft, is the deflating of the tire before a tool ever touches the tire. This particular step was skipped. During the process from tire/wheel removal and placing it on the worktable, the employee was distracted by another person in the hangar. This distraction was admitted to by the hangar employee (incident witness). This distraction allowed for the tire to remain inflated, and an initial step to be skipped in the overall process. Once the employee had the tire/wheel on the worktable, he began to loosen the nuts on the bolts that held
Victim
-
#1 Fatality Age 59 M
- Event type
- 14
- Occupation code
- 519
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.