Tree work incident report 17MI136: a fallen tree pushed with a tractor loader, Michigan

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 17MI136 from Michigan State University's Michigan Fatality Assessment and Control Evaluation program, dated September 13, 2019. It covers a part-time farm worker who died while moving a fallen tree out of a field. 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 cattle and crop farmer scaling down his farm in preparation for retirement, who had gone from 80 acres to a smaller operation. The worker had farmed his own land for over 40 years, then worked part-time for this employer for about 50 years, around 20 hours a week in the last five. The employer said he had over 1,000 hours on the tractor and moved brush with the loader three or four times a year. He had used a grapple to lift downed trees so the employer could cut them for heat or sale. The farm had no written safety plan. The employer described verbal instruction on tractor operation and said he had never dealt with Michigan's workplace safety agency before the incident. On the day, the worker's only task was to mow a 10-acre former crop field being kept tidy for sale, 4.5 miles from the farm.

What happened

The worker mowed about half the field, ate lunch with a neighbouring homeowner and went back to mow the second half, starting at the edge. Near the tree line he came to a dead tree that had snapped 3 to 4 feet above the ground and fallen into the field. The employer put its length at 25 to 30 feet and its trunk at about two feet across, with branches about 14 inches thick forming a Y, and said it was tangled in wild grape vines. Forestry specialists at Michigan State University judged from police photos that it was likely a red oak, black oak or a hybrid of the two, with some uncertainty because the tree was dead and bare.

Marks on the tree and orange paint transfer from the tractor arms showed he made several attempts to push it with the loader bucket, used like a bulldozer, with the tractor nearly square to the mowing path. The tractor had its rollover protection structure up and its seatbelt in place. Nobody saw the last attempt. About an hour and a half after lunch the homeowner noticed the tractor was no longer running, walked over and found the worker pinned in the seat by a branch, and called for help. Responders cut the limb to free him and he was declared dead at the scene. The death certificate gives traumatic asphyxia, and toxicology was negative. The report sets out three hypotheses about how the branch came over the bucket and the hydraulic arms, all involving the Y rolling or releasing as the tree was pushed against a stump, brush and grape vines.

Citations as the report gives them

The state agency issued two other-than-serious citations. One was for not reporting the death by telephone within 8 hours. The other was for withholding the contact details of a former employee the inspector wished to interview, and the report says the agency vacated it in a settlement after the employer appealed.

Contributing factors the report lists

Four: a loader bucket used instead of a grapple, brush rake or root rake; the length, weight and shape of the tree; limited awareness of what a loader bucket can safely do with a tree; and brush, a stump and dead wood where the tree was being pushed.

What the report recommends

The report recommends that employers make sure workers use the right tractor attachments for the job, noting a bucket is built to lift rather than push and that either a grapple or a brush rake would likely have prevented the death. It recommends a written farm safety plan with a job safety analysis for each task, and says Michigan does not require farms to have one. It notes the farm held a grapple and a chainsaw, either of which could have reduced the hazard. It also recommends regular training on complacency for experienced workers. A second Michigan farm case from the same program is report 18MI213, and the rules for tree work are summarised in the guide to OSHA standards for tree work.

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