The Minnesota Department of Labor and Industry is investigating the accident that led to the death of a 38-year-old construction worker at the site of the Highway 169 Nine Mile Creek project in Minnetonka.

David Earl Hyde, of Fulton, Missouri, was struck Monday afternoon by a heavy metal pipe that fell off a trailer near the southbound Highway 169 ramp to Londonderry Drive, according to the Minnesota State Patrol.

At about 2:30 p.m., Hyde was “in the process of assisting in the unloading of large metal pipes from a trailer when a pipe came off the trailer” and landed on the worker, the State Patrol said. The State Patrol said Hyde died at the scene.

The pipe weighed between 2,200 and 2,500 pounds, said Minnesota Department of Transportation spokesman David Aeikens.

Aeikens said no work was being performed on the highway project Tuesday. He didn’t know when work would resume.

The $64 million project will replace the Highway 169 Nine Mile Creek Bridge with a causeway and reconstruct 6 miles of pavement between highways 62 and 55.

Burnsville-based Ames, the contractor on the project, said in a statement Monday that its “preliminary information indicates that the worker was delivering pipe to the project and a section of pipe may have rolled off the delivery truck when the worker unstrapped it.”

“Workers at the site rendered immediate first aid until paramedics arrived and transported the individual to a local hospital,” according to the statement.

Finance & Commerce reports, the Minnesota Occupational Safety and Health Administration unit investigated a similar workplace fatality last October, when a truck driver was struck and killed by a pipe that fell off a trailer, according to an agency report. In that case, the truck driver and a forklift operator were unloading pipes from the flatbed trailer, and the truck driver had been loosening the straps that were holding the pipes, the report said.

Seventy-four work-related fatalities were recorded in Minnesota in 2015, an increase from 62 in 2014 and 69 in 2013, according to the Minnesota Department of Labor and Industry. The statistics are from the annual Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the U.S. Department of Labor.

Those numbers include fatalities caused by traffic accidents, airplane crashes, mining accidents, farm accidents, and accidents to the self-employed, federal workers and railroad workers, none of them covered by Minnesota OSHA enforcement.

Among the 92 fatalities investigated by Minnesota OSHA between 2011 and 2015, 33 percent were in the construction industry and about 42 percent (39 fatalities) were caused by “contact with object/equipment.”

Ames was fined $3,000 after an employee fell while working on the Dresbach bridge project in 2013, according to Minnesota OSHA records. The employee suffered a serious injury after falling 40 feet to the ground in a coffer dam while preparing to set a twin wall form, the Department of Labor and Industry said.

By: Brian Johnson


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