Falling Wood Kills Worker at Shipyard

A National Steel & Shipbuilding Co. worker was killed Tuesday morning when a piece of lumber fell 50 feet and struck his head, officials said.

Guillermo Prado, 37, had been removing scaffolding inside a storage tank aboard the tanker Exxon Valdez when a 2-by-4 that was 12 to 14 feet long came loose from a bundle being lifted out by a crane, said Fred Hallett, Nassco vice president of finance and corporate relations.

The piece of wood was part of the scaffold being disassembled.

“It had sufficient force to go through the hard hat,” Hallett said.

Prado was pronounced dead at the scene at 9:13 a.m. by a Life Flight physician.

Hallett said Prado was one of eight workmen disassembling the scaffolding, but it was not known whether the others were present when the accident happened. The tanker is under construction.

Prado was a Tijuana resident who had a permit to work in the United States, Hallett said. He had worked at Nassco for about 10 years.

Prado is survived by his wife and their 1-year-old child.

The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration has sent an investigator.

Donald Amos, district manager of Cal-OSHA in San Diego, said Tuesday’s accident was “a sort of freak accident . . . with the 2-by-4 falling like that.”

Amos said about six industrial accidents have resulted in fatalities in San Diego and Imperial counties since January.

“That’s about average, since this covers all different types of operations,” Amos said.

Hallett said, “Nassco has a good safety record. This kind of accident is very rare.”

Two Nassco workers suffocated Sept. 2, 1980, when a compartment aboard the destroyer tender Cape Cod they were working in filled with argon gas, forcing out all of the the oxygen, Hallett said.

Nassco, a subsidiary of the multinational Morrison-Knudsen Co.--a construction conglomerate based in Boise, Ida.--is the largest shipbuilder on the West Coast and is one of San Diego’s largest employers, with 3,800 workers.