Worst workplace incident/accident?
Discussion
JamesRR said:
P5BNij said:
Part of Brummie railway folk lore - 'Stacker Steadman' of Saltley Depot's finest hour in Washwood Heath Yard!
In November 1983 I witnessed the last few seconds of the Penzance - Paddington sleeper derailment at Padd, I was on my way to work at Old Oak Common and had just got off the Met-line tube from Hammersmith, there was a strange, earie silence as the dust settled.
Back in 2003 I was down at Old Oak shunting empty coaching stock with a mate, the following day he was doing the same job and the poor shunter he was working with was crushed between the buckeye couplings of the coaches, he didn't survive.
About five years ago one of our drivers was working a late night freight down the Coalville - Leicester line and found the remains of a pissed up Polish guy who'd wandered onto the line earlier and been hit by and dragged under the previous train.
The same year I was working a train in the opposite direction one afternoon and as I passed over the level crossing at Desborough saw a small red hatchback drive into the barrier on my left. Some years earlier a mate was passing over the same crossing when a transit van overtook the three cars in front of him and drove straight through the barrier into the side of the wagons.
Don't muck about on the railway, it'll hurt...
I volunteer with heritage trains, and generally have an interest, so when I was at school I did my work experience with the railways. Two incidents I recall being told about by old hands there:In November 1983 I witnessed the last few seconds of the Penzance - Paddington sleeper derailment at Padd, I was on my way to work at Old Oak Common and had just got off the Met-line tube from Hammersmith, there was a strange, earie silence as the dust settled.
Back in 2003 I was down at Old Oak shunting empty coaching stock with a mate, the following day he was doing the same job and the poor shunter he was working with was crushed between the buckeye couplings of the coaches, he didn't survive.
About five years ago one of our drivers was working a late night freight down the Coalville - Leicester line and found the remains of a pissed up Polish guy who'd wandered onto the line earlier and been hit by and dragged under the previous train.
The same year I was working a train in the opposite direction one afternoon and as I passed over the level crossing at Desborough saw a small red hatchback drive into the barrier on my left. Some years earlier a mate was passing over the same crossing when a transit van overtook the three cars in front of him and drove straight through the barrier into the side of the wagons.
Don't muck about on the railway, it'll hurt...
Edited by P5BNij on Tuesday 18th September 19:52
Edited by P5BNij on Tuesday 18th September 19:53
A shunter was in charge of a propelling movement of a loco hauled set out of a shed. Crossed behind the moving set, tripped and fell on points. Lost the arm and leg from one side of his body.
Another shunter, around the time MK2 carriages were replacing much older stock (P5BNij will know what I’m describing in this one, maybe others won’t). Was in the practice of standing ‘in between’ when buffing carriages up to each other and throwing the hook on. This was doable with the narrow, retractable gangways on the old stock, but definitely not advisable. On a MK2, there’s a much wider, non retractable gangway that has rubbing plates around it’s outside that form part of the union between carriages. The shunter forgot he was shunting the new MK2s, stood in between, and his neck was crushed between them. Took him two weeks to die in hospital. Can’t imagine much worse.
I also used to work as a school caretaker, and saw the aftermath of a kid degloving his finger trying to climb a fence. I heard it had to be amputated. Wasn’t nice.
As a very green seventeen year old secondman (driver's assistant) in the early '80s I nearly got clobbered by a Euston bound express doing 100mph on the adjacent line in Tring cutting when I got down to use the signal post telephone, it was a very windy day and I didn't hear it coming, didn't hear the blasts on the horn or my own driver shouting down at me from the cab to look out, the pressure of the train passing threw me off balance sideways onto the ballast, luckily in the right direction. I've never forgotten that day and I never will!
One of our drivers at another depot recently lost a finger when his wedding ring got caught on a loco handrail inside his glove, there's a photo of his injury in the safety notice case in our mess room.
A truly tragic accident has just sprung to mind which happened many years ago down in Cornwall - a St.Blazey driver was moving a Class 37 in or out of the shed and leant out of the cab side window as he did so, decapitating himself in the process when he caught his head on the brickwork of the doorway.
Edited by P5BNij on Wednesday 19th September 13:06
Edited by P5BNij on Wednesday 19th September 13:08
Back in the 80/90s I worked in a warehouse full of military surplus that was stacked to up to the ceilings. Health and safety was seemingly non existent with people climbing up or being forklifted 20ft to the top of said stacks to retrieve a few greatcoats or whatever. Loads of mucking about on vehicles with people being duped and forklifted into the air and tilted back and forth or driven around at top speed for a laugh. Others were left there while the driver went for a tea break. We had electric trucks that were used to set speed records between two buildings without any thoughts for people who may have suddenly appeared in front of them. That all ended when my mate took a corner on two wheels and it shed the batteries all over the place. Thinking back on it now I don't know how they got away with it for so long without any fatalities.
Amazingly there were only a couple of accidents I recall. One guy had his foot hanging outside the cab of a reach forklift, swung around and hit a iron post which guillotined the top of his boot off. He only lost his big toe but if it wasn't for the steel toecap it would have been all of them.
Another guy guiding someone with over a ton of fabric folls in a cage pallet. Pallet toppled over and pinned the guy against other pallets which broke it's fall and saved his life. He was pretty badly injured and off work for a few months. HSE became involved in that and from then on they were forced to get their act together.
Amazingly there were only a couple of accidents I recall. One guy had his foot hanging outside the cab of a reach forklift, swung around and hit a iron post which guillotined the top of his boot off. He only lost his big toe but if it wasn't for the steel toecap it would have been all of them.
Another guy guiding someone with over a ton of fabric folls in a cage pallet. Pallet toppled over and pinned the guy against other pallets which broke it's fall and saved his life. He was pretty badly injured and off work for a few months. HSE became involved in that and from then on they were forced to get their act together.
Back in the late eighties I was working for a survey company doing manhole surveys in the north east of Scotland. There were a number of us mainly blokes in their late teens or early twenties with an older guy in charge and a number of local lads taken on as assistants. Standard practice was to work in twos, one in the manhole taking measurements the other on the surface recording the information. The guy in charge was working one day kneeling next to the manhole, the lid of which was hinged and weighed 50-60 kg, his assistant was down the manhole when the cover started to swing shut. Without thinking the guy put his hand out to catch it, sadly the chances of stopping it were pretty much zero, it sliced most of all four of the fingers on his left hand straight off.
His assistant was then trapped in the manhole until the guy was able to lift the cover one handed and release him. His fingers were too badly smashed to reattach. I was working in a village some distance away (this was pre mobile phones being common) a Policeman turned up and said "can you ring your office, your boss has lost his fingers" I was assuming it was an elaborate wind up until I found out what had happened.
A couple of weeks later while rushing to get finished another guy pulled open a hinged manhole with a pickaxe, as he swung it up it came loose and dropped on his foot, it didn't help that he was wearing trainers, luckily he got away with severe bruising. The health and safety standards were shocking, how nobody died I will never know.
His assistant was then trapped in the manhole until the guy was able to lift the cover one handed and release him. His fingers were too badly smashed to reattach. I was working in a village some distance away (this was pre mobile phones being common) a Policeman turned up and said "can you ring your office, your boss has lost his fingers" I was assuming it was an elaborate wind up until I found out what had happened.
A couple of weeks later while rushing to get finished another guy pulled open a hinged manhole with a pickaxe, as he swung it up it came loose and dropped on his foot, it didn't help that he was wearing trainers, luckily he got away with severe bruising. The health and safety standards were shocking, how nobody died I will never know.
Not an accident but very close. I worked in a large automotive press shop years ago. The used to recruit a few apprentices from youth detention place, part of community building thing.
One of the lads was tasked with cleaning the up the ends of a few very large alignment pins on a very large milling machine. Pins must have been Ø80 x 200mm hardened steel. He came back a few minutes later minus one pin.
He couldn't get the magnetic base to work, so just decided to stand the pin on the bed, and lower the milling head onto it. He said it just vanished. No noise or anything, just disappeared.
He was let go immediately.
One of the lads was tasked with cleaning the up the ends of a few very large alignment pins on a very large milling machine. Pins must have been Ø80 x 200mm hardened steel. He came back a few minutes later minus one pin.
He couldn't get the magnetic base to work, so just decided to stand the pin on the bed, and lower the milling head onto it. He said it just vanished. No noise or anything, just disappeared.
He was let go immediately.
Nanook said:
Did you find it?
Not that I ever heard of. There was a lot of people/shifts etc & I was based in production office a fair way away, so someone might have found it eventually.Hard to imagine a 5/10kg lump of steel not making itself very obvious wherever it went.
Big noisy place full of machines and metal, but even so...
They replaced an inverter on a milk atomiser motor, on running it up it showed a persistent fault code which stopped it. Contacting a danfoss engineer the fault was identified as a missing encoder (bit which feeds back how fast the motor is going) signal. As there is no encoder on this motor decision was made to switch the fault from stop to warn.
Motor kept accelerating looking for its speed signal.
Top speed should be 13500 rpm, 25 kg stainless reached 45000 or so before separating into 3 pieces and leaving the building removing concrete, steel joists and piping without any apparent course deviation.
How no one died I have no idea.
Motor kept accelerating looking for its speed signal.
Top speed should be 13500 rpm, 25 kg stainless reached 45000 or so before separating into 3 pieces and leaving the building removing concrete, steel joists and piping without any apparent course deviation.
How no one died I have no idea.
Incidents regarding rings posted previously reminded me that nearly 50 years ago at tech college, we saw a health and safety film and ( obviously staged ) a guy wearing a ring got it caught in a lathe and we saw the finger disappear and the ligament stretched out across the work area.
It always stuck with me, and i resisted ever wearing a ring - my wife accepted this eventually as not having any other reason other tha that I was jewellery adverse, but i can see this image as if it was yesterday.
A real one that I heard about was on a hot sunny day on site, it was shorts with shirt off and this guy had a silk scarf ( wiping down boss ) and it got caught in the cement mixer he was loading. No mortar mixed that day.
HSE apart, the best of modern day building sites include handwash with barrier cream and moisturiser in the bogs.
On the big sites, no distracting radios, phones etc, no shorts, shirts must be worn due to sun exposure and the big C.
It always stuck with me, and i resisted ever wearing a ring - my wife accepted this eventually as not having any other reason other tha that I was jewellery adverse, but i can see this image as if it was yesterday.
A real one that I heard about was on a hot sunny day on site, it was shorts with shirt off and this guy had a silk scarf ( wiping down boss ) and it got caught in the cement mixer he was loading. No mortar mixed that day.
HSE apart, the best of modern day building sites include handwash with barrier cream and moisturiser in the bogs.
On the big sites, no distracting radios, phones etc, no shorts, shirts must be worn due to sun exposure and the big C.
Edited by BryanC on Wednesday 19th September 16:52
Does anyone remember this one. I remember it well and it left a dark cloud over the area for a long time. Awful.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tebay_rail_acciden...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tebay_rail_acciden...
triggerhappy21 said:
Not an accident but very close. I worked in a large automotive press shop years ago. The used to recruit a few apprentices from youth detention place, part of community building thing.
One of the lads was tasked with cleaning the up the ends of a few very large alignment pins on a very large milling machine. Pins must have been Ø80 x 200mm hardened steel. He came back a few minutes later minus one pin.
He couldn't get the magnetic base to work, so just decided to stand the pin on the bed, and lower the milling head onto it. He said it just vanished. No noise or anything, just disappeared.
He was let go immediately.
Can we tell these stories as though I haven’t worked with you for the last 20 years?One of the lads was tasked with cleaning the up the ends of a few very large alignment pins on a very large milling machine. Pins must have been Ø80 x 200mm hardened steel. He came back a few minutes later minus one pin.
He couldn't get the magnetic base to work, so just decided to stand the pin on the bed, and lower the milling head onto it. He said it just vanished. No noise or anything, just disappeared.
He was let go immediately.
More from the farm:
I grew up on farms and still go beating on the shoot at the farm my brother lives on.
Sitting in the beaters trailer, full of old farm workers etc when one fella says to another - "did you hear about old John? He was trying to find out what was wrong with the motor on his corn dryer and was standing on the wire protection cage when it collapsed. This then helped free off the motor problem and he was chopped to bits!!"
Cue lots of muttering and Chroist! etc
The chap he was talking to then says "well he never did have much luck John...do you remember when he accidentally killed one of his black lab's when it ran in front of the combine harvester and got into the gatherer - terrible"
"Yes, yes, I remember - and then blow me he did the exact same thing the year after to his remaining dog"
Lots more shaking of heads, muttering and Chroist's from the men.
I then decided, to lighten the conversational mood, to quip in with - "does that make him a cereal killer then?"
Apparently it is still mentioned in the local...!!
FiF said:
As mentioned on page 1 steelworks can be dodgy. Suicide by jumping into, or more correctly onto, 140 tonnes of molten steel in a ladle. Horrific.
A story to lighten the mood. Electric arc melting shop. Melter standing near the furnace heard the noise of it about to blow, turned and ran, but tripped and fell in line with the furnace charging door. As he hit the deck, he heard it go, and his last thought as he passed out was "Well that's me done"
Next thing he gradually regains consciousness, his feet feel a bit hot, and he thought "The b
ds, they've sent me down to hell."
In reality the furnace had blown, but not badly, some steel and slag had run out across the floor, stopped short of him, and his feet felt hot as his boots were on fire.
Lucky lucky lucky.
Was that in the old ASW plant in Cardiff?A story to lighten the mood. Electric arc melting shop. Melter standing near the furnace heard the noise of it about to blow, turned and ran, but tripped and fell in line with the furnace charging door. As he hit the deck, he heard it go, and his last thought as he passed out was "Well that's me done"
Next thing he gradually regains consciousness, his feet feel a bit hot, and he thought "The b
ds, they've sent me down to hell."In reality the furnace had blown, but not badly, some steel and slag had run out across the floor, stopped short of him, and his feet felt hot as his boots were on fire.
Lucky lucky lucky.
M3333 said:
Does anyone remember this one. I remember it well and it left a dark cloud over the area for a long time. Awful.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tebay_rail_acciden...
Yes I remember it very well as it was around the same time that one of our drivers hit the same type of P/Way trolley (not a wagon as is wrongly described in the link) at 75mph near Warrington whilst working the northbound night mail. The engineer's possession of the line had been given up before all of the gear had been removed and packed safely away.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tebay_rail_acciden...
Edited by P5BNij on Wednesday 19th September 20:12
Edited by P5BNij on Wednesday 19th September 20:12
Whatsmyname said:
Anyone old enough to remember fly / hump shunting on the railway will know some bad ones, a lot of signallers used to be shunters then when they lost a limb, brake stick riding etc they got put in the signal boxes.
When I first started on the railway in Saltley Power Signalbox, my regular supervisor was a chap called Gordon Bennett (really), who used to be a fireman until he slipped under a loco moving slower on the coaling stage, and lost his leg. The loco was being driven by his dad at the time. He used to tell people that although he’d lost his leg, they managed to save the foot!
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.
However, every time we reversed the forklift to withdraw the pallet, it would just tip forward and slid off the forks.
So I climbed up the back of the extended forks, and grabbed hold of the load on the pallet to pull it towards the forklift, enabling us to pull it out.
The driver then lowered the forks (with me still stood on the back side) and on reaching the bottom my foot was trapped between the back of the (moving) fork and the mudguard.
My foot was forced in an almost perfectly straight line to my leg - the driver heard me scream and realised something was wrong so immediately raised the forks at which point I jumped off, and was rushed to A&E.
I was lucky to just have some severe bruising and a hugely swollen ankle.
Roll on a few years and I'm back working on television sets. (old CRT types)
I was adjusting the set with a steel jewellers screwdriver, when I managed to touch the focus control (5kV or so) with said screwdriver.
I had a stainless pen in shirt pocket, which was ejected across the workshop, and I was thrown backwards falling off the metal trolley on which I was standing.
A colleague witnessing this event just stood there laughing...!
I suffered some minor burns from the high voltage (fortunately very low current)
And another TV tale...
Sat behind an open TV set with my girlfriend one lunchtime, eating lunch.
"Where is the high voltage part" she says.
I pointed to the EHT (26kV) connector that plugs into the tube, and suddenly in slow motion I realise this was going to hurt, as I saw the spark jump the inch or so from the (insulated!) connector to my finger tip.
It left a triangular burn mark on the end of my finger.
On the bright side, the girlfriend thought I was a hero
We were unloading a container full of baths on pallets with a forklift truck.
However, every time we reversed the forklift to withdraw the pallet, it would just tip forward and slid off the forks.
So I climbed up the back of the extended forks, and grabbed hold of the load on the pallet to pull it towards the forklift, enabling us to pull it out.
The driver then lowered the forks (with me still stood on the back side) and on reaching the bottom my foot was trapped between the back of the (moving) fork and the mudguard.
My foot was forced in an almost perfectly straight line to my leg - the driver heard me scream and realised something was wrong so immediately raised the forks at which point I jumped off, and was rushed to A&E.
I was lucky to just have some severe bruising and a hugely swollen ankle.
Roll on a few years and I'm back working on television sets. (old CRT types)
I was adjusting the set with a steel jewellers screwdriver, when I managed to touch the focus control (5kV or so) with said screwdriver.
I had a stainless pen in shirt pocket, which was ejected across the workshop, and I was thrown backwards falling off the metal trolley on which I was standing.
A colleague witnessing this event just stood there laughing...!
I suffered some minor burns from the high voltage (fortunately very low current)
And another TV tale...
Sat behind an open TV set with my girlfriend one lunchtime, eating lunch.
"Where is the high voltage part" she says.
I pointed to the EHT (26kV) connector that plugs into the tube, and suddenly in slow motion I realise this was going to hurt, as I saw the spark jump the inch or so from the (insulated!) connector to my finger tip.
It left a triangular burn mark on the end of my finger.
On the bright side, the girlfriend thought I was a hero
captain_cynic said:
An old story passed around the mining circles of Western Australia was that there was a gas leak at an LNG storage facility, the only reason two people sitting in an idling car noticed it was because the engine started racing. This is a story passed around the pub, so no idea if it's true or not.
Perfectly credible, particularly if the car was a diesel. Since the engine would be throttled by fuel supply alone, adding more fuel with the intake air would increase power and thus idle speed. A petrol engine could behave similarly if it were adjusted to idle lean.No smell because LNG (methane) is odourless until the stenching agent is added.
BryanC said:
Incidents regarding rings posted previously...
My MiL nearly lost her ring finger after fighting with a Kenwood Chef using the dough hook - luckily the machine was switched off before it added her digit to the mix.
I think the design has been altered to reduce such unpleasantness, so perhaps she was not the only victim...
I do some safety work on sites in the UK and the everyday occurences are still a worry - so close to nasty but somehow they just miss...until they don't. Rather like car driving - you see so many 'incidents' and near misses every day you wonder how we all keep moving, but we do (and a report in yesterday's paper cites a growth in UK traffic of 51% between now and 2050!!).
Two guys I did a Naval Engineering Apprenticeship with ended up working together on a Submarine main electrical switchboard; 440v 3 phase stuff.
Neither of them was might you label 'switched on' so after conducting routine maintenance they simply started winding the breaker back into place and onto live busbars which were completely out of phase...
The pyrotechnics and ensuing fire didn't kill them... but they weren't very popular for a very long time.
Neither of them was might you label 'switched on' so after conducting routine maintenance they simply started winding the breaker back into place and onto live busbars which were completely out of phase...
The pyrotechnics and ensuing fire didn't kill them... but they weren't very popular for a very long time.
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