A 17-year-old died after getting caught in a wood chipper Tuesday in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania.
Isiah Bedocs was working for a commercial tree company when debris he was feeding into the chipper snagged his clothes, partly pulling him into the machine, according to officials, NBC Philadelphia reported Wednesday.
It happened that afternoon on Excelsior Road in North Whitehall Township. When Pennsylvania State Police arrived at the scene, officers administered first aid.
The young man was then airlifted to the Lehigh Valley Hospital where he died of his traumatic injuries.
Federal investigators were looking into what happened at the scene, according to ABC 6.
“It’s unnerving it happened right there in your neighborhood like that,” one neighbor told the outlet. “I don’t want to think about just what a wood chipper can do. It’s very unsettling.”
“My heart just goes out to that poor family because of what that young man went through,” she added:
The death was ruled an accident.
Wood chippers are known to be powerful machines and accidents involving them are common, according to United Rentals:
The combination of speed and torque allows commercial wood chippers to pull in branches at 20 inches per second. As an operator manually pushes brush and tree limbs through the infeed chute or hopper collar into the hopper, the feed mechanism and drum blades grab anything within reach. “Anything” can include long hair, loose jewelry, rope, an arm or fingers.
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Statistics tell a sobering story. Five workers died in chipper-related accidents in 2020, and two died in 2019, OSHA accident records show. Most fatalities result from being caught in the chipper; a smaller number occur when an object kicks back from a chipper and strikes the operator.
Bedocs was described as a happy person who went to work on a regular basis, according to a GoFundMe page created to help the family with expenses.
“Isiah was going to be a senior at Whitehall Coplay High School this year. He was working his way through summer with a tree company with a friend. & He actually just brought another friend on to help the same day he died,” the page read.
“This accident had taken the community of Whitehall and beyond in devastation,” it stated.
As of Friday afternoon, the page had raised $11,120 of its $20,000 goal.
