A safety report - they did what?

[Glenn]

No matter how careful you are, there is always someone that doesn't know how to be safe or doesn't care, and can get someone hurt or killed. The person that is even more dangerous is the fellow that "thinks" he knows how to be safe but does things in an unsafe way.

I have started watching for unsafe situations or practices and found the following.
* the person that gets a splashed when they dump/throw frozen fries into hot grease.
* the fellow on the scaffold with out a fall harness and safety rope.
* the construction worker having a beer and sandwwich at the deli for lunch.
* the fellow cutting a tree without a falling rope to pull the tree in the right direction.


Have you seen any dumb things or accidents waiting to happen? Let us know so we can avoid them.

[HWooldridge]

Here is a "war story" that I saw first hand. We had a fellow in the machine shop who was nearing retirement with his eyesight starting to fail from cataracts. The supervisor felt sorry for him and let him keep working. His first bad injury was trying to manhandle a steel plate that was too big for one man - even a young strong one - so it fell and mashed a finger, which left him off work for a couple of weeks. Very shortly thereafter, he was draw filing in a lathe and got severely injured when the file caught in the chuck and flipped. Even though he had a handle on the file, the tip came around and layed his arm open like a filet knife. This was a two month recuperation and resulted in partial loss of hand movement. After he returned, he jumped on a fork lift and promptly knocked off a sprinkler head, which flooded part of the facility. Needless to say, he was encouraged to leave after this. Unfortunately, much of this could have been prevented by dealing with the eyesight problem in the beginning so it goes back to "root cause analysis" - something we should all practice.

Many (most) things in life can be summarized in statistics or numbers. I worked at a large company some years ago and their safety officer had some interesting information related to accidents. In short, there are good statistics that an average number of minor accidents will lead to a major one and so many majors will lead to a death. Therefore, it is good practice to eliminate all the minor things because it builds a culture of safety. Accidents still happen but a culture of bad housekeeping and obvious safety issues makes the likelihood much greater.

What this means to us as blacksmiths is to look at your setup with a jaundiced eye then get your friends to come over and do the same. Cords lying on the floor, flammable materials too close to ignition sources, uncovered grinders, etc., are all things that OSHA finds regularly in their inspections - so we should do the same in a home shop.

[Glenn]

Hoillis,
I was a safety co-ordinator for a fitting warehouse and pipe yard. I gave the standard talk to the prople on placement of hands in non-pinch areas when handling a lift of pipe. Use the whole hand as a mitten not the fingers to hold or direct the pipe. And DO NOT stand under or to the side of the lift, but at the end when directing the load.

Saturday crew had a sling fail and a full bundle of pipe hit the ground on one end breaking the steel band holding it together and letting the pipe flare out in both diredtions.

When the dust settled, the pipe handler was a basket case of raw nerves. He was standing at the end of the pipe that hit the ground and was unharmed by the failure. He usually walked beside the pipe and had no problems walking under the lift to get to the other side of the pipe to push it into position. Both actions could have resulted in his death that day.

When anything is in the air, always position yourself so that if it falls, you will not get hurt. If there is a question, attach a rope to the object and use the rope to direct it from a safe distance.

[Rantalin]

I spent the summer working for my dad, who owns an electrical contracting company. We were doing some work out in Boston over a standard grid ceiling, over some cubicles on the 7th floor. One of our guys went up into the ceiling to splice in a set of wires, and when he did, he made a very shocking discovery.(Pun intended) Some *idiot* left a set of wires coiled up without any wirenuts or tape to stop the electricity. Our guy checked to see if it was a live wire, which it was. And it was lying only inches away from the metal ceiling grid. If the wire had made contact with the grid, the entire floor's ceiling grid, along with probably most of the 23 floor building, could have become electrified, causing major damage to a lot of equipment, and possibly people also. No one has any idea how long this wire was up there for, and it was pure luck that it didn't cause a problem.

[Strine]

Here's an incident that really put the wind up me. Myself, my regular offsider and a ring-in were doing a 'level run' along a country road one time. This involves the use of a telescopic aluminium stick that extends to 5m in height.

The ring-in was operating the stick and to my horror had managed to poke it up through power lines overhead. I was operating the instrument through which you observe said stick and could pretend I was having trouble getting the measurement. I demanded he hold it still for a little longer while I sent my offsider over to take control. Calmly he told him not no move an inch except to look up and see the danger. In the end he held it so the fall line would be parallel to the wires and just let it go. We then went and had a cup of tea.

"LOOK UP AND LIVE"

[HWooldridge]

Glenn,

I have several stories about pinch points and finger grabbers.

We had one job that required the operator to mill a short sprue on a part. There were signs posted all over the place stating NOT TO WEAR GLOVES when operating this machine. Of course, we had an operator go to the machine and start working without gloves, then an hour into the shift, he decided to put them on - although he never could explain why later. In less than ten parts, he caught the tip of a glove in the revolving mill cutter and removed the first digit of his right middle finger when that old Bridgeport just chewed it right off.

I did not work at this company but a local firm had a fatality in a pinch accident a few years ago. They were in the die-casting business and over time, the maintenance crew disabled most of the safety interlocks on machines (with encouragement from management). One night on second shift, an experienced operator was trying to pull a part while the press cycled. He was too slow and with no interlocks, the platens closed on his head and shoulders with 300 tons of clamp force. The worse part was that no one found him for about 20 minutes so his corpse was cooked onto and riding the moving platen, with the machine continuing to shoot metal into the mold. A bad scene all the way around...

We all need to stay safe and pinch points are a real hazard in a lot of circumstances, including the blacksmith shop. For example, the space between dies on a power hammer is an obvious pinch point but some folks still insist wiping the dies by hand when the machine is running. I think this is unsafe practice and won't allow it in my shop but I still see it in other places.

I could go on but I'll let someone else talk... :lol:

[Strine]

And in relation to power hammers. Between hammer and anvil is a no go zone for hands and fingers. An aquaintance of mine now has a skin graft over his thumb as a result of putting his hand where he shouldn't. There is a funny side however. The graft came from a, shall we say, hairy part of his body, consequently he has bum hair growing on the underside of his thumb.

Power hammers....very dangerous

[Quenchcrack]

I manage a 100 person quality control department for a LARGE mid-south pipe producer. We just completed over 300,000 manhours without a lost time accident. That was just my department; the facility is just about ready to celebrate 3 MILLION manhours without a lost time accident. We have a safety meeting every week, safety training every month, every supervisor gets mandatory training every month. It can be done if you really want to. :lol: