Inspection Detail

Inspection: 1469674.015 - Pac Worldwide Corporation

Inspection Information - Office: Allentown Area Office

Investigation Summary

At 11:30 p.m. on March 13, 2020, an employee was working for a packaging and labeling service. He was training a new employee. He was showing the new employee how to feed plastic into a thermal machine. It was the practice that the machine would not be running as employees fed plastic into the machine's rollers. The employees would take the plastic product and feed it underneath the overhead platform and up over a 64-in.-tall (1.62-meter-tall) guard. This process was done while the machine was off. Only after the plastic had been passed over the guard would the employees start up the machine. In this incident, the machine was running while the employee doing the training fed the plastic into the machine. The employee took the plastic material and bunched it into his hand so that he could throw it or drop it onto the moving rollers of the running machine. He climbed on the railing and leaned over the guard to drop plastic pieces onto the rollers. He was standing on the midrail of the guardrail provided on the overhead walkway as he fed the plastic into the machine. He stood on the midrail so that he could see over the guardrail while throwing or dropping the product onto the rollers. He reached into the ingoing nip point. The plastic wrapped around his hands and started to pull one of them into the moving rollers. The rollers had an electric eye beam. If the beam were broken, the rollers moved apart to prevent someone from being caught in the ingoing nip point. The employee being trained shut down the machine with the emergency stop button. The employee doing the training suffered a fractured finger and possibly a crushing injury. In addition, his hand was bruised. He was hospitalized. Following the incident, the employer did a hazard assessment and placed a clamp on the midrail post. This clamp held the product in place while it self-fed. The clamp eliminated any need for employees to hold the plastic while it went into the moving rollers.

Keywords: Abrasion, Broken Bone, Caught By, Contusion, Crushed, Emergency Stop, Finger, Fracture, Guardrail, Hand, Light Curtain, Machine Guarding, Manual Mat Handling, Midrail, Nip Point, Plastic, Plastic Mfg, Pulled In, Reach, Reaching, Roller--Mach/Part, Rotating Parts, Training, Unguarded