Worst workplace incident/accident?

[Gareth1974]

TonyRPH said:

Back in the 80's I worked in a plumbing warehouse as a general labourer.

We were unloading a container full of baths on pallets with a forklift truck...

Speaking of forklift truck incidents, this German health and safety video is a bit of a classic (bear with it, it takes a minute or two to get going):

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-oB6DN5dYWo

[E24man]

TGTiff said:

E24man said:

TGTiff said:

Are you refering to HMS Trenchent circa 1992?

Trenchant, no. Turbs IIRC.

Yeah. Probably was. Is a few years ago now. I was on HMS Courageous when it happend we were parked astearn of her.
A right mess was made of the switchboard room apparantly.

I was on either Swifty or Superb parked just round the corner. I'd known one of the guys from basic training and he was unbelievable levels of hopeless except exam technique, the other had a couple of back-classes and was too full of himself and st to notice what was going on around him.

[dfen5]

Long, deep bore internal grinding spindle (air spindle, so a bit fast), basically plunges into a cylindrical component in a spinning chuck, think like a powered tailstock on a lathe moving in.

Guy leans in to load a component and manages to trigger the 'two hand' start buttons (guards removed).
Hydraulic piston advances spindle into his elbow, along inside his arm, happily keeps going until it's grinding the part through his hand apparently. Ouch.


Eta. Good one i saw was a guy leaning with his forhead on the glass screen of a cnc lathe. Part came out and hit the safety glass, which cracked outwards and then closed the cracks as the part moved off. Cue forehead skin on glass, windscreen style. This is why most cnc lathes now have steel grids in front of the glass

Edited by dfen5 on Thursday 20th September 21:22

[bearman68]

I worked in a start up factory in my late 20's as a mechanical engineer. The place was an absolute nightmare from a H&S point of view.
Lifting a 2 tonne skip through a small hole in the ceiling one nightshift, and the hook on the crane failed, dropping the load to within a foot of me. It landed in a foot of water and paper pulp, and the splash completely knocked me over.
Same place a scissors lift fixing cladding popped into a small space behind a crane. As the crane slewed around, the counterweight knocked over the scissors lift, that came to rest against the cladding.
One evening, an electrical short in the control panel room resulted in an electrical explosion ripping the panel door off, and propelling it through a 9 inch solid concrete wall.
I witnessed a conveyor carrying metal frames drive the frame into the legs on a man standing inside the conveyor tracks. Broke both his legs, and could have been so much worse. An almost identical accident happened a week later, and broke someones arm.
A steam explosion killed one of the other mechanical engineers there one afternoon shift. He was in hospital for 3 months or so before succumbing. Left a wife and 2 kids, one about 11. That must have been a terrible result for them.

All the above was in the space of a 6 month period, and as I'm thinking about it, I'm remembering incidents with huge circular saws, bad isolation techniques on wood chippers, steam leaks and blow offs and probably a load more things I can't even remember.

The HSE wasn't even notified of the crane failure, which was probably illegal then, and even more so now.

[eck c]

Couple of nasty fatalities from drilling rigs that I was a regular on back in the day and had worked alongside both men.

Ultimately led to the demise of the Drilling Contractor.

https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/12132620.Firm_...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/118905...

[98elise]

FiF said:

RTB said:

Another truck related story: My dad used to drive oil tankers (4 and 6 wheelers) delivering heating oil. He'd come back from a delivery in south Manchester (to a factory I think) and was coming down the A6 through Hazel Grove and Highlane, with lots of traffic as it was school chucking out time. The wagon steering didn't feel right so he went steady. When he got back to the yard he drove the wagon into workshop and had one of the fitters jack it up to check it. As soon as the fitter touched the front wheel it fell off...

Not sure of the current stats but every year 7 people used to die from wheels coming off large goods vehicles. Here's a sobering quote from the Inst Road Transport Engineers on wheel security "When a wheel becomes detached from a heavy vehicle it may simply come to rest without causing any further damage or harm. However, in the wrong circumstances, when wheels become detached from a moving vehicle, they can accelerate up to around 150 km per hour, going out of control like a bouncing bomb, reaching a height of 50 metres before colliding with other vehicles or road users at an equivalent force of 10 tonnes."

After investigating some incidents and seeing CCTV footage of these things whanging into oncoming traffic I got utterly paranoid about motorway night driving for a time. Thanks to better procedures and improved design it's less of a risk, but even so, one chimpanzee with an air impact nut driver can undo all the good work.

How does a wheel accelerate once it's left a truck?

[FiF]

bearman68 said:

The HSE wasn't even notified of the crane failure, which was probably illegal then, and even more so now.

Not going to recount the level of gore comparable to some tales, however a near miss that could have been disastrous.

Steel melting shop referenced earlier, two 100plus tonne electric arcs, casting side serviced by two 250 tonne SWL cranes.

One Monday one of the cranes nearly dropped a full ladle of molten steel, 110t tonnes plus the weight of the ladle. Investigation showed that the bolts holding the drive and brake gear to the cable drum had almost failed, classic shear fractures, no issues with design or material spec, so it appeared as if there had been an overload.

Production swore that the crane had never been overloaded according to the massive load cell display hanging off the crane. They maintained this story through fairly intense questioning. No way could we find anything physically wrong, had to be overload.

Eventually somebody coughed to what had happened. On the weekend clean down shift they had been clearing out the slag pit, this is where the slag pots sat to catch the slag being tapped off before tapping into the ladle. There was always some splashing and spillage, so they used to pile some scaffolding poles into the pit so that any spillage would solidify around the poles, which would give something convenient to hook onto to lift it all out during clean down.

Apparently they'd had a bit of trouble shifting the debris on the Saturday and had been working the crane a bit hard. The lift cable had stranded, they'd replaced the cable and carried on, finished the job and left things for Monday. So what was the load when the cable stranded, err we don't know load cell had been reading max for some time. So a 250t SWL crane had been used consistently in excess of 499.9 tonnes load.

[PopsandBangs]

Pretty tame compared to most anecdotes here however as a young excitable and half pissed 21 year old after a liquid thursday lunch, i clinched my "first deal" over the phone and, swept away in sales floor bravado, lept out of my seat to punch the air..... However caught my knee on the edge of my desk and shattered my right kneecap

What a tt

[LaurasOtherHalf]

98elise said:

How does a wheel accelerate once it's left a truck?

Gravity

[FiF]

LaurasOtherHalf said:

98elise said:

How does a wheel accelerate once it's left a truck?

Gravity

For ages I argued that the notion a lost wheel accelerated wasn't true, simply a matter of perception, wheel comes loose, it has momentum, vehicle slows, wheel appears to accelerate in front.

Then I was shown a video which appeared to show a wheel could accelerate. What was suggested to me was that sometimes the wheel doesn't detach and roll smoothly along, but it bounces. The next time it lands the tyre grips the road surface and some of the angular momentum is converted into linear momentum so the wheel accelerates.

However they didn't have an answer to my next point that on the next bounce the wheel will have lost some of the rotational velocity due to the transfer of energy and so next time when the tread hits the tarmac it will have a braking effect.

Unfortunately the discussion got diverted by the notion that regardless of actual linear velocity you don't want a massive truck wheel bouncing free anywhere in your path. Which is true.

Anyone for a conveyor belt style thread?

[Pete102]

Jasandjules said:

I believe it was the fumes coming out of the top of the bowser - it was a case from Uni which was rather a long time ago now so I don't recall the finer points. I would have said the driver had gone onto the bowser to check it was empty but I can't recall if that is right.

It'll be this. Liquids are generally not ignitable off the bat, its the flammable vapor directly above the surface that is readily mixed with oxygen and doesn't take a great deal of heat input to ignite it.

[drdino]

Gareth1974 said:

Speaking of forklift truck incidents, this German health and safety video is a bit of a classic (bear with it, it takes a minute or two to get going):

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-oB6DN5dYWo

Bloody hell!

[RTB]

TooMany2cvs said:

Mebbe. If the driver in the anecdote in question had had a quick glance, he'd either not have driven off, or not continued driving.

This was in the late 1950s.

Wagon safety in those days meant making sure your fags and matches were within easy reach

[TonyRPH]

Gareth1974 said:

Speaking of forklift truck incidents, this German health and safety video is a bit of a classic (bear with it, it takes a minute or two to get going):

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-oB6DN5dYWo

Very funny and makes a good point, if a little gory!

[Origin Unknown]

glenrobbo said:

I knew a bloke who once got a paper cut on his tongue when licking an envelope in order to seal it.
Gruesome stuff.

Luckily most envelopes these days are self sealing, but you all still need to be careful when sealing envelopes for greetings cards.
Using a moist sponge eliminates a lot of the risk.

Please be careful out there.

[Trophy Husband]

The nearest bad sheet situation for me was working on a scissor lift as an engineer. I'd been setting out the capping beam 30m up on a building in Manchester, working with the steel fixers as the beam was reinforced.
Having finished the setting out the fixer asked me to help him take the link bars up (300mm x 300mm rebar, approximately 300kgs in total). It was a 4m platform with the 1.8m hydraulic floor extenders on the platform (we called them magic carpets). Seamus, mad gambling, mad drinking, great craic paddy and I loaded up the platform with the rebar links and ventured upwards. Reaching the roof we could then off-load the links to the roof through the scaff tubes. I was stood on the left side of the platform and Seamus had the controls. All good...…..until Seamus decided to extend the platform to get the steel nearer to where he wanted it! Suddenly, 300kgs were moving 1.5m further away from the side of the platform. It wobbled, leaned right. I screamed like fooook to the mad paddy, "Bring it back in, bring it back in!!!" I reckon we were 12" of extension from going over due to the eccentric weight. My ar5e went proper threepenny bit, 50 pence. I did my IPAF after that and have never gone up in a cherry picker or scissor lift where I was not in control. There are some proper divvies in construction!

[Vaud]

TonyRPH said:

Gareth1974 said:

Speaking of forklift truck incidents, this German health and safety video is a bit of a classic (bear with it, it takes a minute or two to get going):

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-oB6DN5dYWo

Very funny and makes a good point, if a little gory!

That's brilliant.

[RC1807]

FiF said:

RTB said:

Another truck related story: My dad used to drive oil tankers (4 and 6 wheelers) delivering heating oil. He'd come back from a delivery in south Manchester (to a factory I think) and was coming down the A6 through Hazel Grove and Highlane, with lots of traffic as it was school chucking out time. The wagon steering didn't feel right so he went steady. When he got back to the yard he drove the wagon into workshop and had one of the fitters jack it up to check it. As soon as the fitter touched the front wheel it fell off...

Not sure of the current stats but every year 7 people used to die from wheels coming off large goods vehicles. Here's a sobering quote from the Inst Road Transport Engineers on wheel security "When a wheel becomes detached from a heavy vehicle it may simply come to rest without causing any further damage or harm. However, in the wrong circumstances, when wheels become detached from a moving vehicle, they can accelerate up to around 150 km per hour, going out of control like a bouncing bomb, reaching a height of 50 metres before colliding with other vehicles or road users at an equivalent force of 10 tonnes."

After investigating some incidents and seeing CCTV footage of these things whanging into oncoming traffic I got utterly paranoid about motorway night driving for a time. Thanks to better procedures and improved design it's less of a risk, but even so, one chimpanzee with an air impact nut driver can undo all the good work.

Oh, yes... I nearly shat my pants when, aged about 18, I was driving eastbound on the old Winchester Bypass and a truck's wheel bounced over the central reservation towards me, motoring along - I hit the brakes - the wheel landed JUST in front of my car, and bounced over and into the trees at the side of the road. That scared the bloody life out of me!

Edited by RC1807 on Friday 21st September 15:22

[wst]

I'm a bit curious how an unpowered wheel can spontaneously accelerate when it falls off.

[echazfraz]

FiF said:

...quote from the Inst Road Transport Engineers on wheel security "When a wheel becomes detached from a heavy vehicle...they can accelerate up to around 150 km per hour, going out of control like a bouncing bomb, reaching a height of 50 metres before colliding with other vehicles or road users at an equivalent force of 10 tonnes."

They need to remove the word "Engineers" from their title if these lines indicate their grasp of physics!