Police were looking for witnesses, and were inquiring about whether Fox may have had a pre-existing medical condition that could have been a factor, said Deputy Chief John DiPietro of the Miami Twp. police.
Fox was an employee of Kelchner Excavating, a Springboro-based contractor which had not previously experienced an employee death on the job since its 1948 founding, said Todd Kelchner, president and chief executive officer of the family-owned company.
“We’re doing everything we can to console and help the family. All of our employees have been tremendous, in the way they’ve responded to this,” he said. “We wish we knew what happened — and can find out.”
The company notified the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration of the accident. An OSHA investigator was on the scene Monday to begin an investigation expected to take at least several days, with findings to be issued later, the agency said.
There were no immediate clues, said Dick Gilgrist, OSHA’s Cincinnati area director. The bulldozer had a cab on it, and the terrain where Fox had been working was flat, Gilgrist said.
OSHA cited the Kelchner company in 2002 for a workplace safety violation of failure to protect people working in trenches at a Springboro job site and fined the company $2,000, according to OSHA records. In 2003, OSHA cited the company for inadequate and infrequent safety inspections, and failure to have workers wear safety vests in a traffic area, at a Centerville job site and fined Kelchner $2,700. More recently, the company said it has received five consecutive annual safety awards from Associated Builders and Contractors, an industry organization.
In the minutes after Fox’s death, the 44,795-pound bulldozer kept running in reverse and headed down a slope toward I-75, then ran into a ditch which rerouted the machine parallel to the highway. The bulldozer rumbled toward nearby Interstate 675 before being stopped by a tree, Todd Kelchner said.
Another company employee jumped onto the bulldozer to take it out of gear, Kelchner said. The company knows of no employees that actually saw the fatal accident, he said.
Police said the accident occurred about 10:45 a.m. Saturday.
Fox had been working for Kelchner Excavating about three weeks, but had years of prior experience, Todd Kelchner said.
“He was a lifetime heavy-equipment operator, very skilled, very experienced — and a good guy,” Kelchner said.
Police said the Caterpillar model D6 bulldozer is 11 feet wide, 10 feet high and 13 feet long, and can travel at up to 9 mph in reverse.
A representative of a Caterpillar dealership examined the bulldozer after the accident and found no evidence of any mechanical problem, Kelchner said.
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