OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #978148
JOHN W COWPER CO INC
BUFFALO, NY—
Event description
ELECTRIC SHOCK - DIRECT CONTACT WITH ENERGIZED PARTS
Investigation abstract
Two power line workers were on a service call troubleshooting a power outage. On . The transformer was energized, and the employee was electrocuted. arriving at the worksite, they observed a 7200-volt fuse that had opened. They replaced the fuse, and it also blew. This led the employees to assume that a tra nsformer in an adjacent driveway had faulted and was causing the fuses to open. (The fault was elsewhere, however.) Because the fuse was open, the employees als o (mistakenly) believed that the circuit to the transformer was deenergized. The y began working on the transformer as if it were deenergized even though they di d not check it for voltage and ground it. One of the employees put his hand on t he primary booster atop the transformer while his chest was touching the neutral
Victim
-
#1 Fatality Age 57 M
- Nature of injury
- 10
- Part of body
- 5
- Event type
- 13
- Source
- 15
- Occupation code
- 577
- Human factor
- 1
- Environmental factor
- 17
- 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.