Abstract: At 8:00 a.m. on July 18, 2001, an accident occurred in the basement of a residential property of the California Technical Institute which was converted into an office. Employee #1 was told by his supervisor in the morning before the accident occurred, to go down to the basement with two other electricians to trouble shoot a bad electrical circuit which fed power to a computer. His coworkers had the hatch door open and they had already gone down to the basement. Employee #1 walked down the stairs into the basement and stopped momentarily on either the second or first step from the bottom of the stairs to see what his coworkers were doing. Meanwhile, Employee #1 placed his left hand on the wood frame of the hatch door to balance himself. The hatch door slammed shut and it smashed Employee #1's left hand between the frame and the hatch. Employee #1 sustained broken left ring, middle and index fingers and was hospitalized.