Tree work incident report 16CA003: two electrocuted in an aerial lift bucket, California

This page reports what the official source says. It is not legal advice: ask the office named here. This page restates one official fatality report in our own words: case 16CA003 from the California Department of Public Health's Fatality Assessment and Control Evaluation program, dated December 1, 2016. It covers two tree trimmers electrocuted on March 12, 2016 while pollinating date palms. No one is named here or in the report. The table of every report we read is in the official case library for tree work incidents.

The job and the employer

The employer was a local tree service that specialised in trimming and pollinating date palms. The report says it had been in business for 20 years and was in practice a father and son, neither of them a licensed contractor. Other workers were hired by the season and let go when a project ended. Both men who died had worked for the company for two months, had experience with date palms and also worked for other tree companies, and neither was a certified tree trimmer. Their first language was Spanish, and the company's safety instructions were generic and given verbally in that language when they were hired. There was no written injury and illness prevention program and no written procedure for any task or machine.

Pollinating, as the report describes it, means cutting strands of male flowers from a freshly opened spathe and tying two or three of them between the strands of a female flower cluster after pollen has been shaken over it. An aerial lift with a bucket is often used to reach the top of the tree. The site was a nursery of hundreds of date palms across several acres, reached by dirt roads. The weather was clear and sunny with 7 mph wind and a high of 85F.

What happened

The two men had started the pollination job five days earlier. They checked in at the company yard at about 10:30 a.m., took the keys to the aerial lift truck and drove to the orchard. They parked the truck under high voltage lines. Both climbed into the bucket and raised it with the bucket controls directly under the lines until it made contact. The report says one man reached out to move the line, and the contact produced a large arc. The arc started a fire in the bucket and the second man fell out to the ground. Both were electrocuted.

The owner and his son were busy elsewhere in the yard and did not know. A relative arriving with lunch saw the raised bucket on fire and one man on the ground and called the owner, who called 911 and drove out. Emergency services secured the scene and the electric utility was notified. The fire department put out the fire and cut the hydraulic lines of the lift to lower the bucket and reach the second man. Both were pronounced dead at the scene, and the death certificates give electrocution as the cause.

Contributing factors the report lists

The report lists four: no daily hazard analysis was done, the work was close to high voltage lines, there were no safety policies or procedures, and the electric utility was not contacted before the work began. It adds that the lines ran about 15 feet from the tops of the palms being pollinated, so raising the bucket into them was foreseeable, and that parking on the far side of the palms would have left a greater distance.

What the report recommends

The report recommends that companies and self-employed trimmers working near high voltage lines run a daily job hazard analysis that includes electrical hazards, keep at least ten feet between the aerial lift bucket and the lines, train workers on electrical hazards in a language and at a literacy level they understand, and tell the electric company whenever work will be close to its lines. It cites the California high voltage electrical safety orders, which it says require the person responsible for the work to promptly notify the line operator and bar work near energized lines until the danger is guarded against. It adds that the utility and employer can discuss de-energizing and grounding the lines or covering them with insulating hose or blankets. It also notes that proximity warning devices that sense electric fields do not give consistent warning and are not recommended at this time. The wider rules for work near lines are in the guide to working near power lines, and the same program's palm report from the same state is on report 18CA001.

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