So I'm the first guy on this site usually to say that jobsite safety is WAY!!!!! overblown in a lot of cases. You can't even get anything done it's so bad. I've always joked that if I ran a big company, I'd hire one group of guys to attend meetings and practice safety stuff. While they are doing that, I'd have another group of guys to actually do the work while the others are tied up, talking about things.

I've started to ease my viewpoint a bit the last year and push more safety at my company. I've been hurt a few times when I was in the field years ago. My hand was broken once and I had bad flash burns the other time, leaving some small blind spots in my vision.

Also a lot of people don't have good judgment so I've been really cracking down on proper ppe and also keeping a safe distance from construction equipment as well as using tie-offs while in the man baskets. We work around high voltage in wet environments and lots of people that don't speak English so it's inherently dangerous.

Despite this, we had one near accident and one near fatality in the last week I thought I'd share to serve as a reminder to all you guys how little it takes to get hurt.

Near Accident 1. We were trying to pick up a pallet with a feed wagon auger on it, I had adjusted the forks on a 8-10,000lb telehandler but they weren't quite close enough. I had the rack tilted down so I could slide the forks together more but I didn't tilt it enough. Another tech came back to help after a bathroom break. He hopped in the cab and asked me which button tilted it forward more.

This was a rental lift (ours was broken) so I told him which button did that. The button I said was the one on our lift, on this lift that button released the pins for the quick attach (our lift didn't have a quick attach) and the entire fork/rack assembly fell off from 10 feet in the air. EVERY OTHER time I've ever been waiting for someone to tilt the rack in that situation I was standing under the rack. That one time I didn't, it saved me from getting hurt badly.

Near Fatality 1. We were building some cow shades, a guy was standing close to the skid steer with a 24" auger attachment. They went to put it in a hole and the entire attachment came off, it wasn't latched on right or the locks were faulty (not sure which yet). The frame hit my crew foreman in the face. It broke his nose, fractured his forehead, cut his cheek up badly and knocked him unconscious. That could have easily killed him. I don't know what it weighed but I would imagine 1000 pounds or so. He is suffering from the effects of the concussion still but I imagine he will be fine a few weeks. The specialist sent him back to his family dr. so that's a good sign.

Anyone else have any near miss stories?

I was lifting some metal roofing panels with a crane down in Miami on Al Capone's old hangout. It's a country club now I think.

Anyway, I couldn't get all the panels and the pallet to fit in the bucket I made with the straps. So, I figured, take the panels out and stack them directly on the straps and lift it without the pallet. BIG MISTAKE! I figured if I went slow enough, the straps wouldn't slip and mess up my panels. Well, one did slip shearing the strap clean in two. The other strap slid to the middle and folded all my pans in half. That broke the last strap. When the panels fell, it sling shot my boom straight in the air almost turning my crane over.

It took me almost a year before I was willing to get back on that crane. All were safe, but it was an incredibly stupid decision on my part.

Yesterday a field tech was digging a hole while the rest of us stood around and watched.  He moved to take a measurement and lifted his foot off of the yellow jacket nest entrance he'd been inadvertently standing on.  Fortunately we all saw them coming and managed to get outside of the danger zone without getting stung.  Boy were they pissed.

 
OSHA is pulling up in your parking lot.

Mexican dude almost hit on the head by a falling box of CAT6 cable, because he walked under the lift that were unloading a pallet of cable at a 3rd floor window.

same jobsite
had a guy in our crew that was kind of an asshole, as were walking out of the building for a break, just as we get to the bottom of the stair landing, someone from the other trades tried to take him out with a 6 foot piece of 1 1/4" electrical conduit.

another time, walking out for break, just as we passed on of the rooms, heard a huge crash, dude was using a ladder on top of an 8 foot scaffold, and something let loose, when we got there he was on the floor with the ladder on top of him, asked if he was alright, he just grunted yes and don't tell anyone. If the jobsite foreman knew, he would have been kicked off the site for good.

I've worked in construction or manufacturing for over 30 years, and I can confirm that "common sense" is not as common as you think.

I'm seeing an uptick in the amount of small accidents in the manufacturing field, my best guess is that younger workers are not learning basic safety in shop class anymore.

I've dealt with osha before, both for my customers and myself. They aren't bad and weren't unreasonable at all. The didn't go by the book, mainly used common sense and seemed to understand that their osha guidelines are a bit ridiculous in some cases.

The epa is the one I had trouble with.

We had a guy lose his finger from an oxy bottle smashing it on a metal bench edge. A customer had a milker get killed on piece of equipment we installed. Also had another sub contractor that was followed by osha to every site for a year bc they had a guy fall off of a pallet and die instead of using a man basket.

I dealt with osha all 3 times and don't have anything bad to say about them.

I worked at an auto parts warehouse for a summer gig during college.

This guy was operating a forklift, raised it to about 15' to retrieve a pallet full of brake rotors.

The pallet was wrapped but not enough. As he pulled the pallet off the rack, it bumped into something and became unstable.

Hundreds of brake rotors rained down on and around the forklift. The metal protective bars above the seat saved his life most likely.

It was very very loud.

I once pulled a guy out from under a falling 30 foot triple tri lam beam that was coming down from about 20 feet.

I looked at my idiot boss who had caused it to fall and walked off the job site.

Don't pour a ladle of molten aluminum on a fireant hill if that anthill is directly over a PEX natural gas line.

We had a guy that was doing an engine trim on a 737-200 get sucked into the engine.


Landed on his back in the inlet guide vanes. All of his tools got sucked out of his pockets, FOD'ed out the engine.

Just cuts and bruises, back at work 3 days later.

Oh. Shit.

Near fatality:

Working a re-roofing project in Pensacola, right at the start of winter.  The whole roofing crew was from South Florida, so we didn't do too well in cold-ish weather.  A couple of guys were mounting new two bys at the roof edge to match the height of the new insulation.  They would both hold the board in place while the younger one, 18, would drill the first hole.  His partner would then hammer in the spike to hold the lumber to the concrete roof deck.  Same for a second hole down at the other end.  Once both spikes were in, the 18 year old would commence to drilling holes every foot or so and the other guy would follow along behind hammering in spikes.

The slab they were working on was actually a small canopy that hung out over a sidewalk that ran the length of the building.  It was very important that the holes weren't drilled all the way through the concrete slab because the holes would be seen from below.  Well, the kid drilled too far, and went all the way through the slab.  The sudden release of tension caused the kid to lose his balance and pitch headfirst off the ledge.  Sure they had a safety monitor watching them, but what could he do?  18 year old kid got his back broken.  

Another time, it was a hot as hell day in Fort Lauderdale and one of the guys on a different team let himself get too dehydrated.  He sat down on the parapet wall to rest for a moment, and blacked out.  Tumbled backward off the roof of a five or six story building.  He failed to survive...

Not nearly terrible, actually terrible-

When they were building the school just down the street (about 1/4 mi) from me, an equipment operator thought it would be a good idea to bring his son to work with him.

Apparently the kid was in the cab with his dad the majority of the day and at one point they were taking a break and the kid wandered behind the equipment. The dad said he thought he had seen his son off by the port-a-johns so he got back to work. And backed over his son.

Sad situation for all involved.

I fell off a ladder from about 14ft up (about 25 years ago).  Landed on my back on the client's lawn which was fortunately saturated from overwatering.  Knocked me out cold.  I estimate I was out for about 30 minutes before coming to.  Took me a week to recover from it and my upper back is still jacked up to this day unless I exercise frequently.

At the same job I was using a cutting torch without eye protection (I was young and stupid).  A bit of molten metal popped off and hit me in the eye.  It didn't hit the cornea fortunately, so no vision damage.  Could have been much worse.

Safety precautions - take them.  Especially eye and ear protection.

That's heartbreaking.

Same thing happened to me at my last job about 2 years ago.  Only from about 30'.  And they were brake drums.  For semis

 

Landed about 20 feet from where I was walking.  

Wife works in a Dr office, had a guy come in yesterday who'd had his thumb pulled off in a machine of some sort. It yanked the entire tendon out all the way up his forearm.

The shit would have been sucked out of my underware, too.

A link is deserve for this.


I've seen a forklift  dump 3, 1152 explosives containing pallets after smacking a 3 inch high pressure air line, rupturing it, raining debris everywhere...

Ironically the same guy got propellant mixed up with a heat shrink bag and blew himself up, just minor burns, he had on ppe.

Other than that, a woman who got caught up in a lathe, she was lucky her fingers got caught versus her torso.

A few months ago we had a forklift driver pick up a stack of plastic bins full of product (he was not supposed to pick them all up at once). The bottom bin gave out and about 5,000lb of printed matter dumped all over the floor.

Had a A/V guy working in the hollow ceiling setting up lights for a show.  Walkway gave out on and he fell through the ceiling, having forgotten to use any safety strap.  Mind you the ceiling was around 60 feet up and the fall probably would have killed him, but he was lucky.  Right under him was a pole used to set up curtains, which of course promptly impaled him on his way down.  The paramedics said  that the impaling slowed his fall.  He survived.

Could of been worse, I guess...

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Well, this guy Klaus joined us as a new forklift driver.  Nice enough guy, but let's just say due to some unfortunate lapses in safety procedures we ended up with some dismemberments (including a decapitation), and a couple guys getting speared by the forks.  We all learned a good lesson though, and the guy who lost both his hands ended up getting some kind of mechanical robot hands that enabled him to assemble simple parts.  That Klaus!!

Spent a handful of years as a longshoreman.....

Seen in person -
-Containers dropped on occupied trucks and UTR's (yard tractors) fatal
-UTR's picked up and dropped from about 30' due to people failing to unlock the container from the trailer and the crane picks them up to move on the ship...  Fatal and non..
- containers crushed together with someone in between.. Fatal
- signalmen run over by top handlers and RTG's (6-8' tall rubber tires) fatal
- truck driver cut in half by is 13 year old son..(son backed truck under trailer while father was in between) fatal...
- container locking cone come off a can and fall about 90', striking a signalman in the hard hat... He was lucky, the hard hat deflected the blow from his head to his shoulder... Shoulder smashed beyond repair.. Non fatal.. (Cone weights around 8-15 pounds..)

And tons of others...

When I first moved to Texas back in 01, before I started my current job, I was working on a guy's small ranch out in Royse City.  He had me cutting down some trees for him.  I was trimming the lower branches off of a tree with a small chainsaw, then I went to the larger chainsaw to cut it down.  At the last second I decided another branch needed to come off before I cut the tree down so I took a step forward to cut it, the foot I went to move forward was under a branch I'd already cut off, and the other foot was on top of that branch so it tripped me and I started to fall.  I doubled over with the chainsaw in my hands running full throttle and hit myself in the knee with it.  There was a long gash in my pants over my knee, I was almost afraid to look.  When I did it was just a couple scrapes, the chainsaw had bounced off my kneecap before it could do any real damage.  I thought I was pretty lucky that I already had the larger chainsaw when it happened, if I still had the smaller one it might have hit me in the thigh and hitting soft flesh might have had a different result.

The worst I saw was a guy run himself over with a sheepsfoot compactor while working on it. His head and upper body didn't get crushed but he was stuck under the wheel when we found him. He was still alive but didn't last long.

It was this type, not the roller type.

We were working on the refit of the Enterprise when I heard a commotion over the intercom:

Override us. Pull them back!
Boost your matter gain, we need more signal! ...More signal!
We're losing their pattern.
Oh, no! They're forming!
Next I can hear a scream and a moan!
Then I hear this...definitely freaked me out
Enterprise, ...what we got back didn't live long, ...fortunately.

Made me think twice before using a transporter!

I did that to my pinky, talk about sucks waiting 8 hours to get stitched up.

I got a paper cut once.

Sounds like some people need to be more careful out there.

I've heard of a couple of guys getting ate by a -200 and living to tell the tale, the bullet and stator IGVs saved their ass, literally.

The CFM-56 on the classic/next gen ain't as friendly...

Years back, there was a guy that fell into a lime kiln at the paper mill I worked at.
At first they tried to get him out, but there quickly came a point where...

Bad shit.

Trainee shot himself in the leg.

This is a fascinating story considering your perspective is that jobsite safety is overblown.  You've had a hand broken, suffered flash burns and partial blindness in one eye.  You almost caused a serious accident by incorrectly adjusting the forks, failed to tilt the rack properly, weren't properly trained on this piece of equipment, and gave incorrect instructions to another individual on how to do something neither of you were properly trained for.  Now you're starting to ease your viewpoint on safety and cracking down on safety by lecturing others?   Who was fault attributed to on the skid steer attachment?  I do like your comment though that a lot of people don't have good judgement.  Sorry to sound harsh or sarcastic, but I worked in a heavy QA/risk assessment environment and take safety as the most important thing on a job site.  I do appreciate your new change in attitude, so will your crew.

"Burners" are the guys who cut structural steel beams, rebar, holding tanks, etc. on wrecking jobs.  Anything metal.


When I was a burner working for Cleveland Wrecking Company in the 80's, we had a guy who cut an I beam without thinking it through properly, and instead of dropping , it scissored backwards and snipped his leg off below the knee.  The leg just fell to the ground, "standing up" boot sole down, like it was ready to walk off on its own.

Saw another guy cutting a beam he was standing on.  So did my foreman, who stopped him before it got ugly.

Also saw guys cut stuff,  above ground, without paying heed to where their hoses were hanging.

Back in the day (80s), if you were doing a partial demo, they used to mark equipment/infrastructure that stayed and went with spray paint.  On one job, somebody marked them green and blue.  Not colors you can distinguish well with a tinted visor.  I cut into a live steam pipe.  Luckily I cut a pilot hole on the back side facing away like I had been taught, or I'd look like a raisin today.

Same went for a pipe at a later job at an oil refinery that we being demo'd.  This one was supposed to come out, but they were supposed to have run some sort of agent to lessen the danger of flash fire through the pipes before we started.  I cut a bolt on the far side of a pipe that shot a flame a good 10 feet in the other direction.  I would have been immolated had I not done a "test" cut on the far side of the pipe.




Ahhh, good times.


My cousin, who's a year older than me, was on my crew.  I left to join the military.  He kept doing and still does industrial/heavy demolition.  He's 46 and looks like he's 66.

Another FORKLIFT incident!


TL;DR = Untrained newbie destroys heavy equipment...

In my younger days (early 20's), I was hired as a "Sales Trainee" at a high end lumberyard. High end meaning lots of really nice hardwoods. This was one of biggest/nicest in the country at the time. They hired us as sales trainees with the promise of eventually landing a lucrative job as an outside salesman.

Those guys got company cars, very good expense accounts and decent commission income.

What no one knew at the time they were hired is that those jobs pretty much never turned over. Sales Trainee was a way to low-ball our pay, and have us work in the warehouse for our "training" to avoid paying union wages and benefits.

We had about 20 union guys in the warehouse, and when I was there, there were 3 "Sales Trainees"

We started helping will-call customers load their lumber, then moved to helping the real warehouse guys build loads for shipping. We sold very expensive US and Imported hardwood, sometimes by the board foot, sometimes by a whole unit.

After about a week, I was given my very own forklift. I'd never driven one before, and for some reason, the union guys were not allowed to train us in their safe operation. So, one of the sales trainees who started before me gave me the lesson.

He'd been taught by his predecessor, and so on.

He showed me how the thing worked, and told me that if there was ever a problem, hold the wheel, don't jump out. That was it.

So I started moving units of lumber. The warehouse was enormous, but tightly packed. Sometimes, there would be some rare wood with piles on top of it or in front of it, so we had lots of moving and staging to do.

- I should add here, that since we were sales trainees, we had to wear slacks, button down shirts and nice shoes - The warehousemen had proper attire including steel toed boots...


Anyhow, got reasonably good/cocky on the small forklift, or so I believed. When we were bored, we'd have races through the warehouse...

But, no one had ever told me that with a big, heavy load, you really ought to consider driving backwards. Anyone see where this is going?

One day, about 2 months into my employment, we had a big load to move, so someone asked me to grab the HUGE forklift (I don't know what it was, but it was substantially larger, taller, heavier - and, it was essentially brand new) to move a couple of units of apitong (used for truck beds) from the train siding to the front. I went a grabbed the first unit, and drove it to the front. I had to keep the lift almost fully extended to clear some other lumber. And I drove forward.

On the second load, I did the same thing. I picked up a unit of apitong (20+ feet long, 4 feet tall, 4 feet wide, and very dense) and started the same process. I extended the mast of the lift to clear the other lumber, and drove forward. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw another employee behind some other piles. He was moving, so I did what I think of as a natural reaction, and I mashed the brake.

This was NOT good. Physics won that day.

The lift tipped forward with the weight of thousands of pounds of wood at the top of the mast and the nice round wheels right at the bottom of the mast. I gripped the wheel in panic as the load and forks slammed into the concrete. The unit (banded together) exploded, and slid off the forks. Absent that weight, the lift tipped back up due to the rear counter-weight and slammed back into the ground.

The guy I saw (and stopped for) was maybe 3 feet from death. He freaked out (rightly so), but asked if I was hurt. The lumber was scattered everywhere. The lift engine wouldn't start, the forks dug two deep holes in the concrete floor, and everyone in the warehouse came running.

So there I am, in my slacks, sperry top-siders of something like them, and a short sleeve dress shirt. I'm being dressed down by the warehouseman (like I said, rightly so) and all I can think to say is, "I'm glad I didn' try to jump out!"

The General manager came out of the office, asked a few questions, and told me to go home and rest and come back the next day.

The next day, all three "Sales Trainees" were "laid off" - he claimed it had nothing to do with my incident, just that the program wasn't needed. Sure.

We all got a week's pay and went to the nearest bar and discussed the whole thing.  

I learned later on that I had nearly totalled the lift. Something about the engine when the back end slammed back down.  Oops.

Let's just say that job never made it onto any of my future resumes/references.

And I've not been on a forklift since!

I got buried...it sucked.

Offshore, lots of near misses. Almost had a submar mat dropped on me while in the water, that was fun.

Unloading pallets of tool from the crewboat, had a overloaded pallet bust in half dropping about 20 "hold'em" weights (just a cast metal cube with a spot for tying rope, maybe 20-30 lbs), maybe 5 drift pins (1", 2' long) 5 8 lb and 5 12 lb sledge hammers, and a few other odds and ends.  While no one was directly under the load, it fell from about 20-25' and hit the metal deck of our boat and all that shit just scattered. THAT was fun!


One that was pretty trippy, was a dive tender who was a little over weight got hooked up to do a dive.  He gets done, does his decompression, and gets back to work. He's working for about 20 minutes after getting out of the chamber, and just fucking drops like his string were cut. Dude got bent.  So the shittiest part was, while we had two decompression chambers, they were retardedly stacked with nothing but a skinny little ladder to get to the upper one. This kid was like 250 lbs, and we couldn't get him up the ladder, so we had to stuff him in the bottom chamber that already had a diver who was in it, who was ALMOST done decompressing and now was stuck for another 6 hours riding with this kid, and had his next 24 hours locked up not able to diver for it.   It's pretty trippy when a jobsite accident is nitrogen bubbles in your blood coming out of solution blocking blood to your brain making you pass out.  Kid was fine after we got him in the chamber though.  

I cut my thumb on a French Press in my home office  

Yes, would have been a completely different story on a -300. Luckily the airline had primarily DC-9/MD-80s and only had a handful of the -200s that they picked up from Air Florida after AF went belly up.


My only close call was turning too quickly on the 3 wheeled forklift we had in the hanger and falling out near a DC-9. Of course the damn thing headed straight for the airplane after I fell out. With my foot no longer on the gas it slowed enough for me to catch back up to it and climb back in before it hit anything.

I started practicing better safety procedure before the telehandler incident. That's why that was the first time I wasn't standing under it trying to slide the forks over the second they were free.

So far it sounds like the guy that got hit was the guy that latched on the attachment but I'm not sure. My boss runs that crew so I wasn't there.

Keep in mind we are a small company in a rural area. "Training" on every piece of equipment isn't feasible in my mind as a lot of it is rented by the job and is never the same controls. Every job is different with different equipment. We might install led lights for a week, install a new 120hp chiller for 2 weeks, build a metal building for a month, do epoxy floor coatings the next week, then go install stationary feed mixers with 300hp electrical motors. That is all with the same employees.

We do electrical, plumbing, structural welding, sanitary welding, hydraulics, pneumatics, hvac, refrigeration, metal buildings, underground utilites, and concrete. That fact that we have to do everything leads to a lot of gaps in knowledge that I don't think are possible to ever close completely.

I'll never be the guy that does what the union techs do at the big plants but there is a place for some of those things.

I'll never hold a training class for a tele handler that we are using for 2 hours either. It's just not feasible.

For us, a training class is the operator of the hour jumps in, pushes every botton to see what they do and gets back to work.

I'm also not a guy to lecture people. I go over with them during our morning meeting what I expect. When I see someone break the rule I send them home for the day with no pay. Nothing else seems to work. They may not understand 80% of the words I say but they understand not getting a check.

The language barrier is the most dangerous thing I deal with by far.

Nowhere near as spectactular as it could have been.  The 2" pipe melted and burst, but blew out any embers and didn't ignite, fortunately.

We shut it off, and maintenance dug it up, then one of the guys passed out from inhaling too much NG, and now we have medical oxygen bottles in every department.

I accidentally dropped a claw hammer from about 8 feet up.  Hit a girl on the way down and cut her nose.  I still feel like shit about that.  My stupid mistake.

Lots of stupid stuff, nothing crazy

Friend from high school died when he fell in a vat of roofing tar on a job. His father in law tried to pull him out.

So, you hire people who are not intelligent enough to understand 80% of what you say (or so you claim) but you won't teach them how you use equipment if you don't have it very long, and on top of that if they fuck up and break your rules, you'll send them home without pay?

 


WOW...  I'm amazed you're still in business,  does your state not have labor laws, or are you people you hire really too dumb to fry your ass?

We had a CRJ-200 regional airliner up on jacks to swing the landing gear. For that kind of operation, someone stands outside of the aircraft, in sight of the person in the cockpit. The person outside signals when it is safe to raise or lower the gear. When we taxied airplanes, we would install pins in the landing gear as a safety measure to keep them from inadvertently retracting.



I opened the nose gear doors and got up inside to pull the nose gear pin. When I tried pulling on it, it wouldn't budge. I looked towards the back and saw the main gear legs coming up, so I let go of the pin and rolled out of the nose gear well. That kind of pissed me off, but what really pissed me off was the guy standing 15 feet away giving the mechanic in the cockpit a thumbs up. If I had gotten the pin out just before the gear went up, I would have gotten a lot skinnier.

Had a handful of times almost sliding off a roof.


Also had wind blow my ladder down one day and I convinced myself I could Spider-Man my ass to a deck railing and then hop to the deck.






I didn't hit that fucking railing, but boy did I hit the deck.


 

I work in the oil field.

Good friend was working maintenance at local factory. He had lift raised on tow motor and working below forks.

Forks fell and crushed him. DRT.