RWC – Caught between: Finger smashed by tooling
- Safety Flash
- Published on 22 October 2015
- Generated on 22 February 2025
- 1 minute read
IADC has recently published a safety alert in which a crewman suffered multiple fractures on his right ring finger.
What happened?
His hand was caught in the jaws of a tong latch device used to handle drill pipe.
The immediate causes of the incident were found to be:
- Inappropriate or incorrect tools used for the job
- Procedures not followed – handles (green in illustration) were provided but were not used
- Complacency – no Job Hazard Analysis (JHA) was performed as the task was seen as ‘routine’
- The tooling was so placed such that the supervising driller could not see what was going on.
The report can be downloaded from iadc.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/SA-15-05.pdf.
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