Abstract: At 1:40 p.m. on August 11, 2004, Employee #1, a palletizer operator, was working at a pet food packaging company. The facility receives palletized loads of canned pet food and packages them in retail containers. Employee #1 was operating the depalletizer portion of line 4 at the time of the accident. The pallets contain layers of canned pet food separated by sheets of thick paper. After the pallet is placed in the palletizer, a sweep arm pushes the top layer of the cans onto a roller conveyor. A carriage with vacuum cups then picks up the paper separation sheets to store them. The pallet then rises slightly until the next layer of cans is at the height of the roller conveyor, and the process begins again. Without deenergizing the mechanized portions of the palletizer, Employee #1 reached into the depalletizer area to sweep away one remaining can and the vacuum carriage came down on the tip of his left ring finger. Employee #1 suffered a soft tissue avulsion and loss of the tuft of the distal phalanx. He believed that a depression in the surface of the pallet under the separation paper caught the can and prevented it from sliding.