Inspection Detail

Inspection: 1438306.015 - Blue Harvest Fisheries, Llc

Inspection Information - Office: Boston South Area Office

Investigation Summary

At 11:00 a.m. on October 3, 2019, an employee was working for a firm that processed and sold, at wholesale, fish and seafood. She was feeding fish into a Baader model 417 fish head cutter. Fish were caught on pin chains and fed the fish into the cutter. The machine was 48 in high (1.22 m high) where the fish were taken up by the chains. The fish were fed vertically. There was a 4 in by 3 in (102 mm by 76 mm) finger guard. There was a 10 in high (254 mm high) opening from the top of the fish guide. There was a 5.5 in (140 mm) space blow the finger guard. It was 7.5 in wide (191 mm wide) at the guide area. There was a distance of 3 in (76 mm) from the bottom warning sign to the guide. The height of the warning sign area was 7 in (178 mm). There were two slanted saws and a splitter bar. The finger guard moved from the seven o'clock to the nine o'clock position. It bent backward 60 degrees. The employee was feeding fish into the machine, when a cutting blade amputated one of her fingertips. The employee was treated without hospitalization. In a later interview, she said that feeding the fish to the machine was not her regular job. She also said that she had not been trained to feed the fish into the machine. She said that she did not know how she had contacted a cutting blade. She says she was not reaching for a fish head stuck on a cutting blade. The injured worker's incident report says that she had reached in too far when she fed the fish in. It was suspected that a fish head had become caught on the cutting blades and that the worker had reached in to remove it from the saw blades. One operator had seen the employee reach into the machine ten to fifteen times. That operator stated that there was a stick for freeing a stuck fish head. The machine's manufacturer was attempting to design a new guard for the machine or to install a light curtain.

Keywords: Amputated, Amputation, Blade, Cleaning, Conveyor, Fingertip, Food Preparation, Food processing, Instantaneous amputation, Machine Guarding, Machine operator, Reach, Reaching, Saw, Sawblade, Struck Against, Training, Traumatic Amputation, Untrained, Work Rules