While building Levi Stadium, a trucker was unloading rebar when the entire pile fell on him, impaling him multiple times and also crushing him.
I never met the man, but his cat and elderly dog ended up a a local shelter. We planned to adopt the dog and ended up taking home the cat too because we didn't want to split them.
Nena (the dog) passed away in her sleep in 2017 about 2 years after we brought her home. Seal (the cat) is around 7 years old now and doing just fine.
I've always wondered if they ever thought of him.
Engineer decided to open a parcel with a Stanley knife, not sure if he slipped or what angle he was cutting at but BAM! Stanley knife in the eye. Never saw him again but h&s quickly introduced a policy that safety goggles needed to be worn when opening boxes
Accidents with razor knives are some of the most common accidents. For a number of reasons; they're small & fit in the hand like lots of other safer objects, everybody has seen & used them, so they are rather complacent, things like that. And partly because of their size, they're not going to do something like a thousand pound swinging piece of metal or a ruptured steam line. (Cue Raiders Of The Lost Ark scene of opening the ark).
Used to be a wedding caterer. While the bride and groom were going to cut the cake it started to fall off the table as they were both trying to catch this ridiculously huge thing the bride slipped, fell into a pyramid of wine glasses on a foldout table behind her... The table collapsed and a wine glass stem pierced her neck.
She survived, but she was not gonna be able to take that gown back to the rental place... I've never seen so much blood in my life.
Suffered an almost fatal injury AND ruined her wedding reception and dress. Good God I feel sorry for that bride. Not to mention the cost of however much she had to pay the rental place for the dress.
My brother told me about a patient he had that tripped while walking with a wine glass and the stem went into her eyesocket and reached the brain. I now have a healthy fear of wine glasses.
Trench collapse. Guy was pinned mid chest. Not good but not immediately fatal. Guy’s coworkers freak out and use the backhoe to dig him out. Ended up catching him with the teeth on the bucket. Essentially cut him in half.
The guy on the backhoe was his brother.
Dude would have probably been alright had they rescued him the right way.
Work in a dealership and once a tech was using a tool that broke free bashing him in the face, knocking out multiple teeth, splitting his lip and breaking his nose…it was a bloody mess. Young kid, with balls of steel appearantly. While waiting for an ambulance he was sitting there talking and smiled to show the damage. That smile was horrifying. He recovered and got a ton of dental work and still works there.
Similar thing happened at the dealership I work at. I think he only broke one tooth though. Poor kid also split his stitches open and had to go back to the ER a couple days later.
I was a cashier in a grocery store. One of my fellow cashiers was a senior, just killing time in retirement. One day, she had a dizzy spell, collapsed, and cracked her head open on the floor. Paramedics were called, and as they were loading her into the ambulance, she was crying out that she could still finish her shift.
Friend from Australia visited the US a while back, and said that the most shocking thing was how many people her grandparents' age were still working, especially at places like Walmart.
Yeah, my mom still works because it is her "fun money" she is a nurse, and it's really hard to live on a fully fixed income when your old job is offering 4 hour work from home shifts and you make close to $100/hr from your years of experience at waiving benefits... $400 per shift? Work a couple of days per week from home just calling patients? Basically make your own schedule? It's hard to turn that down.
I dunno if you can call this an accident but I was working with this guy and outta nowhere he says "I'm sick of working here, check this out" and jammed his foot into the gears on the machine. Completely mangled his foot. Saw him 20 years later and his foot was still fucked.
He was looking for a couple weeks of workers comp, got a lifetime disability instead. It was pretty horrific.
I used to fly small airplanes in north west Alaska. In the two years I worked there I knew three pilots that died in crashes.
Don’t miss how those days felt.
It's crazy that Alaska has so many plane accidents that it's in an entirely different zone in terms of how airplane insurance is calculated. So much CFIT (Controlled Flight Into Terrain)
Stay safe!
Lol your username definitely checks out.
I worked in the Alaska fishing industry for a few years. Had a few friends choppered out to anchage with injuries. One was ok, one survived with an amputation and, I assume, a huge company pay out. We also had one guy have a heart attack in the pribs. I wasn't there at the time. They did their best to get him out but he didn't make it. Alaska is a tough place to work.
Worked for Edy's Ice Cream. My truck was loaded wrong so at a stop had to shimmy between pallets to get to the back pallet.
Was unloading the top pallet and the pallet below collapsed. The top pallet slid on to me. But since I was between 2 waist high pallets about 1200lbs of ice cream bent me at the waist the wrong way.
Sort of like bending over normally, backwards.
Ended up with 2 broken vertebrae, nerve damage and was not fun.
Eventually got a six disc fusion and was able to walk again.
But now I have arthritis in my back and it really hurts most of the time. I also have numb areas in my right thigh and my whole lower back.
Would not recommend.
The time we almost killed a customer at the restaurant I worked at. He had a milk allergy that we didn't know about, so we made his food on the same grill as everything else. Apparently his allergy was severe enough that he spent the weekend in the hospital because of anaphylaxis from cross-contamination.
He was super nice about it and acknowledged that he really should have told us. He remained a regular for the 2+ years that I continued working there and our systems changed drastically to accommodate allergies.
Just about all restaurants have either a sign or a warning on the menu: **"Before placing your order, please inform your server if a person in your party has a food allergy."**
**That's 100% on him.** I'm just glad that he was gracious enough to acknowledge it.
Our former team leader had allergies so severe that both senior engineers were instructed by him on where these special pen-like syringes are, who to call, and that they need to just jab it into him as fast as possible ANYWHERE because otherwise he'd be dead before ambulance arrives. And if in doubt whether the second engineer already used one of the pens... Jab in the second one. Because the results are way less severe than not using both.
And he almost never ate with us. And we all well understood why!
Except on cases when engineer from another team was with us. Guy had the same allergies, but way milder, and they were fast friends over it and he served like a royal taster - always trying snacks and pizza before Alex and greenlighting him, because he'd feel if there were traces of allergens in the same time frame, but the result would be like, rash and irritation and maybe some bowel songs, not a trip on a flashy minivan with two-tone disco.
I hugely appreciate this.
I have a mushroom allergy and can’t eat grapefruit due to chemo. The rare time I’m NOT asked about an allergy or intolerance and I have to ask myself, i nearly always have to change my order - e.g. the sauce has grapefruit.
My old company where I was a made a regular milk milkshake for a kid that had a serious dairy allergy. I don't remember if his allergy was mentioned and a soy milk shake was asked for.
Well, the kid died. My company, being retroactive moreso than proactive then decided to take a serious stance on allergy. We had to ask every customer explicitly whether they had allergies from then one. It took a kid's death to trigger that.
I feel like an asshole saying this, but I have severe food allergies and this is just negligent if the parents were the ones that took him. I’m allergic to tree nuts - I don’t eat at obvious places where easy cross-contamination occurs. Much less order a dish whose main ingredient is one that could kill me and trust that the substitute would be made correctly.
Right? When I worked at Starbucks, if someone asking for a beverage made with non-dairy milk specifically stated that they were allergic, we would sterilize one of our non-dairy milk pitchers and then place the cup with their order on it inside the sterile pitcher to make sure that it got used to make that drink, but at the end of the day, the drink was still going to get made at a bar where milk products are present 100% of the time, so we could never guarantee that cross-contamination *wouldn't* happen.
I mean, I get that milkshakes are awesome, and that having to deny your kid things that every other kid can have without issue sucks, but like, maybe if your kid's milk allergy is legitimately deadly, just don't order him what is typically a completely milk-based beverage and trust that it'll be fine??
Not me, but at the cookie factory where my brother worked a worker died when someone accidentally dumped out a massive mixer full of molasses on top of him. He suffocated before they could dig him out.
Conceptually, a flood of molasses sounds cartoony. But in reality...it's so terrifying.
My great grandfather lived in Boston at the time and my grandfather always had a big fear of getting separated/caught in commotion from hearing his dad talk about it.
That reminds me of an accident at the Bakery Chef in my town. It’s a bakery factory where they make a lot of baked goods for restaurants. Maintenance man didn’t lock out tag out a big mixer he was working on during shift change and 3rd shift came in and no one communicated that maintenance was working on the machine so night shift operator started the mixer with maintenance man inside. I worked 3 or 4 buildings down for a completely different company and we heard the screams over our loud machines.
Seriously. I worked at a gun store that also had an indoor shooting range, which requires massive ventilation and filters. One day I showed up to work, and the guys who serviced our range were there. Cool. They’re probably just collecting spent brass or monitoring air quality, like usual. Nobody said a word to me and there was nothing on the switchboard that operates the air handlers, so I turned on the vents like I do every day.
Within about 90 seconds the supervisor of their company ran up and switched off the system, and started yelling at me. “Who the fuck turned on the vents?! Was it you? You almost sucked my guy into the fan! He could have died! Don’t turn on the vents until we’re done changing the filters!”
I just slow-blinked at the dude and said, “Wait. So you had a human being in line with our vents, changing the filters, and he could have died from being sucked into the fan blades. But you didn’t tell anyone on the ground about this, you didn’t turn off the breaker to the fans, and you didn’t even put a piece of tape over the switch to turn on the fans. But you’re mad at me for flipping the switch that I get paid to flip at this time every morning? Bring your guy down off the roof. If you want to continue this conversation, every word I have to say is going to be in front of him.”
Dude just stormed off. The next time they changed the filters, there was a piece of tape over the power switches on the board. I don’t work there anymore.
I think it was the day before thanksgiving 2012. There was a news story about a guy trying to reach something off of a platform at a local paper mill. He fell into a nearly boiling hot tank of caustic solution with spinning blades in it. There was absolutely nothing left.
I have worked over those exact tanks numerous times. It’s an old facility, but if you don’t follow their safety policies right down to the T they will throw you out in a heart beat.
That’s just a terrible way to go on one of the worst days that it could happen if the year. I think about it often.
Yeah it was wisconisn or Michigan where a bunch of guys threw someone into the pulper because he snitched on them. All but 1 are free men now. The other will do life.
TLDR:
Asshole guy in Union job steals 10-15 feet of electrical cable from his workplace at a paper mill. Coworker (also union) reports this to security, the asshole is then suspended for 5 days without pay.
Through a bit of mismanagement, the cops give the asshole the tape (he told them he was unjustly suspended). He finds out it was this coworker.
Him and his lackies beat and strangled the coworker to death and threw his body in vat filled with paper pulp and water with a churner at the bottom. All this done because he "snitched" on a unionised coworker.
Ridiculous world we live in sometimes.
Edit: I mentioned the unionisation because the article seemed to imply it was important. The union president had a part to play in this case and I believe the asshole and his mates felt like by snitching he betrayed the union at large (which is of course not true). People seem to have understood that I don't like unions from this, I literally just gave a summary of the article. I'm not advocating for or against unions with this comment.
All over 10-15ft of electrical cable...and he was suspended for 5 days and not even fired.
This checks out more that the guy was a psychopath. Less because of misplaced union loyalty.
I worked as a maintenance tech for a fiberglass facility and one of the operators crawled out on a crane over 1500 degree Celsius molten glass to clear a jam. He fell in and there was nothing to recover.
Dude gave his life instead of shutting the line down for an hour. The worst part is our management was cool about unplanned shutdowns since we were always hitting above our target production anyway.
When I worked in commercial claims reporting for a major carrier, we used to get tons of workers comp ones with occasional fatalities. Most injuries were really dumb, minor things, and *usually* the fatality ones involved multiple people fucking up, but we did have some freak ones that nobody could've prevented. Had one where a guy was operating a giant industrial lathe from a operator booth. The counterbalance broke off and managed to arc in *just* the perfect way that it crashed through the roof of the booth, and killed the man instantly. Investigation showed there was no neglect or anything, the lathe had been properly inspected, it was just a total freak accident.
Yeah, at school we started working with lathes, before even explaining how they worked my teacher showed us a video of a guy being pulled into one with his sleeve (he warned us that it was graphic and we could chose if we watched it). Proceeded to a lot more careful after that vid.
My highschool principal only had 1.5 arms and liked to come into the woodshop class during the safety instructions and wave with his half arm.
Later someone found out that he was actually born like that, but it was still funny, and got otherwise dumbass teenagers to listen to safety rules.
I saw a guy get taken out by a sheet of plywood that flew off a roof, spun around a few times, came back and went right through him. It's was brutal and i didn't even know the guy. Condolences to your friend.
Yes, it was off a second story townhouse.
I was building a garage in the neighborhood and we stopped for lunch early because of the wind and happened to drive by at the exact wrong time. They were trying to sheet the roof. Wind ripped it out of a guys hands and it flew like a giant Chinese star.
Coworker, who was fresh out of trade school was using a table saw to cut 1” thick sheets of plastic into strips. It was cold so he put on some leather work gloves.
A glove got caught and pulled his hand into the saw, nearly severing his right index and middle fingers.
He came to me and said, “uh, I think I cut my hand”. It literally looked like a package of pork ribs - all mangled bone and tissue.
They were able to save the fingers, but they’re non functional and don’t bend.
Had an officer roll through my shop on the ship and tried to call me out on not wearing gloves while operating rotary machinery. I just looked at him like he was insane and asked him if he understood what "degloving" was and said why we don't do that.
I had a superior tell me that it made him uncomfortable when I wore a gas mask. I needed a damn gas mask to work on these reactors filled with toxic fucking chemicals. I was flabbergasted, I just could not believe that fucking guy.
I was welding on composite steel, which requires a positive pressure hood to keep the fumes out.
I was just a new temp. The super gets mad that I keep trying to wear the hood because it slowed us down and we had a quota to meet.
The other guys laughed it off and told me just to drink milk to settle the stomach issues you'd get from the fumes.
I collected one paycheck at that place
>He came to me and said, “uh, I think I cut my hand”
Hahaha! I once dropped some metal on my hand. It hurt but I didn't think too much of it and was wearing gloves. After like 10 minutes I was like dang this still hurts and told my supervisor I was gonna go take a look at it and I'd be right back. I climb out of cold storage and peel off my glove. I'd blown out my index finger. The nail was sideways and barely hanging on. There was blood. It was my first day back from vacation and I hadn't even been working for an hour. Anyway, I go find the production manager and I'm like uhhhh I think I need to go to the hospital. He turned sheet white and got the captain who drove me to the hospital. The nurse was kinda rude but whatever. She had been on shift for like 10 hrs already and I feel that. I had a broken finger tip, for which they can't do anything. She stitched my nail back in and sewed up along the side. She gave me a finger brace and a scrip for some painkiller that my SO at the time tried to steal from me, but that's another story. I was back to work by lunch on "light duty" which meant clambering around doing paint touch up in the most awkward spots with a finger brace. When I finally got back, my Forman was like "if you didn't want to work today, you could have just said so!" 😂
Worked at Sonic when I was 15. I was on break and sat on the patio. I was looking at the road as this super nice car pulled into the drive through. As the car turned, a motorcyclist flew right into the side of him. He flew about 10 feet in the air before landing right on his leg. He slid about 8 feet before hitting the curb. His leg snapped into two pieces and his leg was basically degloved. I sat in shock before people started screaming to call the police. I ran inside and told my bosses. Three of them ran out while the other workers started shutting down the store for the ambulances and police. I was the only one who saw what happened. His face was skinned, leg was degloved. His fingers went in all directions. But It wasn't the sight that scared me. It was the weezing noise that he made as he slowly started gaining consciousness. He was mouthing the words "Help me". But his lips were gone. He could only make noise. I didn't work that day, and cried the whole time he was being put in the ambulance. The worst part was, the car who hit him, drove off without staying a second. The owner of the car was eventually found, but nobody was charged.
A few months later, the victim of the hit and run, came to sonic. He lost his leg and was still in the process of recovery. The guy came to thank us and let us know how he was doing. Glad to see he survived, but still traumatizing nonetheless..
Edit: I'm sorry I sound weird, I was in a rush typing this. Nobody was charged was because they had no idea what happened. They were also both in the wrong. The bike was going way too fast, and the car tried turning in the middle of the road, instead of the left lane, that's why the biker was thrown. Sorry
Not really haunted, but we had a guy in the Army violate one of the cardinal rules of working in the motor pool; remove watches, rings and dog tags.
He had kept his wedding ring on and was working in the turret of an Avenger (surface to air missile launching system mounted on a HMMWV). When he climbed down the tiny ladder at the back he decided to jump down the last few feet to the ground. His ring caught on the ladder and degloved his finger.
He held up his hand and just looked at it and said, "Oh fuck." We grabbed him, wrapped his hand (not much blood honestly) and took him to the hospital. All the while another soldier was carrying the fleshy remnants in his hands and dry heaving. Once he was taken in at the hospital they just removed the finger. He became a cautionary tale for all my future soldiers.
The fact that what you're looking at isn't really human any more is probably a huge deal. Not to be grim or insensitive but it's the difference between a cow and a steak. It's a matter of intent and understanding, a total compartmentalization.
This is basically it. Fatalities (almost always suicides) are extremely common in the rail industry, and while I’m not out there examining corpses every day, we see some shit that would make most people puke or pass out. When you’ve dealt with enough mangled (but mostly whole) corpses and literal gore piñatas you develop a way of coping or you filter out.
Most of us use humour, but you invariably have to learn to separate the body from the human being. They’re gone, all that’s left is the body. It can be traumatic, especially if the family is on scene, but I don’t ever want to become so desensitized that that doesn’t move me.
Also therapy is definitely utilized if an incident is particularly heinous.
You get used to it. Shockingly quickly. Then every once in a while one will hit you for a bit. Then you push it down and get back to work.
Having a "job to do" helps a lot. Your brain shifts to analysts and planning out tasks. Just standing and staring would be more difficult since you shift to empathetically focusing on the suffering and tragedy.
Initially I was repulsed that they just amputated his finger. Had a comment typed up and everything. Speculating about the location they were and if the potential for infection was too high. After doing some research though, apparently it's several surgeries to salvage a degloved finger, depending on just how degloved it is. On top of that, it's never the same. Stiffness and pain in the finger is common.
So I suppose it's fair enough.
Worked at an industrial setting, had a contractor come in and use a hydraulic ram to pull a bearing about the size of your head. They didn't hook up the lines correctly and 40,000 psi of fluid hit him in the neck and almost decapitated him. It took out part of his brain stem, I got there for the death rattle. Blood everywhere, we couldn't help him. He was in his early 20s and his wife just gave birth a few months prior.
Yeah I heard they got a settlement, it was a huge osha investigation and they implemented new rules nationwide for that equipment. Osha rules truly are written in blood.
I worked with a machine called a microtome. It slices biological samples to a cell depth so they can be stained, it does this by raising and lowering the sample against a mounted razor blade.
You keep your fingers so far out of the way. After the multiple people who lost fingertips, sashimi'd their knuckles, sliced through nails. It's a horrible way to injured yourself because the cut is so clean it takes a second to realise you've just skinned yourself.
Here’s a funny story invoking a microtome. At my university, we have a yearly festival where the programs compete in challenge.
One challenge is to create a short funny film. One year, someone create a film where a guy would find sandwiches everywhere. One scene shows him in a service tunnel, pulling out a sandwich from some random looking piece of machinery and taking a bite out of it.
My friend who was doing her masters in biochemistry bursted out laughing. That machine was her old microtome that had just broken down. The dude was eating a sandwich taken from something that less than a week ago was used to slice mice brains up
I use a dermatome for skin grafts for burns and other grafts and my fear has always been accidentally getting myself with it, not sure what it would do since I have surgical gloves on. The slices are a bit thicker than the microtome though, I think if I am remembering correctly I usually select 0.15mm thickness but you can vary it.
Holy shit!!!
I'm fucking terrified of electricity. There's a reason all the electricians I know get paid so well. Fuck that kind of job hazard. I'll stick to my crane tyvm
First job as an auto electrician at a car garage for Vauxhall in 2000.
Walking through the workshop and one of the mechanics drops to the floor screaming as I'm maybe 20ft or so away. His right had smoke around it and he was trying to get his overalls off whilst yelling for help.
Turns out as he was using the gas bottles (oxy acetylene) to cut off an exhaust that was giving him trouble, some of the molten metal that dropped off, fell inside the overall through the right arm and burnt straight into the under side of his forearm.
I remember the smell was like meat burning with a sweet side to it. As he's trying to get the overalls off, the material has fused to this bubbling like gooey hole on his arm and when he tried to get them off it must have caused him even more pain. He was writhing around which made it very hard for us to try and help.
It unfortunately got much worse though. I don't know the names of what was damaged but he couldn't work as a mechanic anymore because this molten stuff had burned deep into his forearm and it stopped him being able to move some of his fingers. I don't know how things went for him after this as he never came back to work us after being in hospital for a while.
Edit. Updated gas bottles to say its oxy acetylene.
>Turns out as he was using the gas bottles to cut off an exhaust that was giving him trouble, some of the molten metal that dropped
What exactly was he doing?
Had to deal with some rusty bolts underneath a car. Fired up a high powered torch that runs on a mixture of oxygen and acetylene gas (gas bottles). Hot enough to melt the bolts that are too rusty to turn with a wrench.
Molten metal from the car rolled down his sleeve and ruined his arm/hand
Locally a forklift driver ran over a worker and the workers skull was crushed blood and brains everywhere.
Made me more cautioned to forklifts in my factory.
Was an OSHA investigator who had just completed training in a state with a small budget. Was called to a site where a man was crushed to death by a crane jib, mind you, Fed OSHA Officers aren't even allowed to do a fatality inspection until they've been with the agency for two years or longer.
Anyway, get out onsite do the investigation. Come to find out, the guy was stowing his jib (the portion of a crane that extends the boom length and is usually stowed on the side) when it popped of the side of the crane with him inside the lattice work. The jib fell roughly seven feet and rolled over the guy, the jib weighed around 5700 lbs.
Now this is all pretty common stuff, the interview his oiler/rigger was a little tough because they'd been together for so long (15 years) and were close. But the thing that really solidified it for me, was when I went to the autopsy and saw where the jib had landed. It landed right on the poor man's crotch, and let me tell you... it did not look pretty down there. I was told he had survived for several hours after the incident... I just hope they drugged the shit out of him in his final hours.
When the concrete laborer was cleaning the concrete paving machine and the operator was in his car staying warm and the laborers rain gear strap got caught in the auger and dragged him in. Most blood curdling screams I’ve heard as he was taking his last breath and it made mince meat of him. So sad everyone was looking for the emergency off button but if only the operator was where he should’ve been…….
The operator is the captain of the ship so to say. There is a red emergency stop button on the side and top where the operator stands and could have been shut off quickly. He asked if he could warm up in his car while they cleaned it because he wasn’t feeling good the supervisor said ok and assumed command of the machine. Supervisor was an owner. It sucks all around but the machine had to be running to clean it. OSHA deemed it a terrible accident and the deceased “should of had the rain gear suspenders attached properly “
Was a banquet server. Getting my pocket hooked to the knob on the door and ripping my pants almost clean off as I walked out into the banquet hall full of people.
Ah banquets. Chaos.
This isn't me but a coworker was asked by a guest to decant his 900 dollar bottle of wine for him. He was an extra because we had such a huge event and apparently didn't know how to open wine. He broke the bottle.
“Uh, they say 50% of wine tasting is nosing the glass to appreciate all the beautiful aromas. Tonight we’ll be exploring the nose on this magnificent wine, unencumbered by our often-misleading sense of taste. Now, if everyone could kneel down and put your noses close to the ground over here…”
We were doing some maintenance on some big commercial equipment. A high pressure hydraulic line ruptured and cut someone's arm off.
Blew it off would be more precise.
I learned that day not to fuck around with hydraulics willy nilly. I also learned that hydraulic oil is toxic, and the hospital needs the MSDS sheet in the event of hydraulic injuries.
The line had been previously damaged, and not correctly maintained.
Hydraulics are DANGEROUS. I wish more people understood that at my job. Fork drivers think it’s funny when a line bursts because i have to fix it. Uhhhh hello it’s dangerous, i don’t care about the work! Lol
Worked at a factory that dealt with sprinkler systems. Watched a man using a plasma cutter on a 12" pipe while his tinted glasses were on top of his head. A flash from the plasma cutter melted his contact to his eyeball. In an impulsive panic, I watched him try to pull out the contact lens that brought his cornea along with it. Loudest I'd ever heard a grown man scream. Happened 14 years ago and it still gets me.
I used to work at a sandwich place that made hot and cold food. There was a coworker who always came in stoned. One time, they came in too stoned, dropped the tongs into the deep fryer, and tried to pick them back up.
I worked at McDonald’s as a teen. One time I was at the fries section and I was holding the plastic scoop we used to scoop fries into bags. Anyway, the scoop was all full of deep fryer grease and it just kind of slipped out of my hand into the deep fryer. I didn’t reach in though, lol. I stood there panicking like a Sim when their stove catches fire. A manager ran over and grabbed some metal tongs and got it out. Whoops.
Dropping stuff is completely normal. Training yourself not to try to catch a knife or whatever is on its way into a fryer is hard. I don't even judge this person that much, but definitely use the story as a cautionary tale.
One of my best friends fell in a hydropulper at the papermill I work at. He drown in 140 degree F water paper soup. He fucked up and bypassed safety barriers. I dont look in there anymore ever. It's been about 12 years now.
When I was 13 I worked at Long John Silver's and we had the dumbest cook ever. We called him pedo-Paul because despite being, "Happily married" pedo Paul could not stop trying to flirt with the 15 year olds we were hiring. Anyway, pedo Paul one day drops his wedding ring in the deep fryer. To paint a picture, there's three deep fryers next to each other and above those deep fryers is no less than 6 pairs of tongs. Pedo Paul looks at his hand, looks at the deep fryer, looks back and forth like 6 times and then plunges his hand in the deep fryer to grab his ring. He manages to grab it and fling it across the room and starts freaking out about the burn. At this point, his hand was effectively nothing but one large blister but to make things worse, he runs over to the pressure washer to spray his hand off.
At this point, strips of his hand just start filleting themselves off and onto the walls of the sink and we can see a little bone. He passes out from the pain and cracks his head on the sink and we call the ambulance.
We don't actually know where his wedding ring ended up.
I want to feel bad making light of this, but Pedo-Paul seems like a real douche, so I don't.
All I can picture is a couple, sitting down for dinner, when the woman's for hits something on her plate, and as she reaches in and inspects it, her eyes widen in surprise. "Oh my god, Brad, this is so unexpected. But yes! Yes! Of course I'll marry you." Poor Brad, knowing he didn't have the staff plant the ring in the food, sits there for a moment, confused. He finally shrugs a "Surprise,", deciding that now he at least doesn't have to pay for a ring.
I was a dishwasher/delivery guy/food prep for a Chinese restaurant in my teens. The guy beside me was chopping vegetables and knicked the tip of his finger off. He wrapped it up and went to grab a glass of water. He then passed out and dropped the glass, shattering on the floor, slipped on the glass, fell and hit his head on the chopping table, and landed just beside the broken glass on the floor. Being the delivery guy, I delivered him to the hospital in my car. It was rough to see, but he was OK in the end.
Not as bad as some people probably, but working at Amazon.
When I started the job, a manager laughingly told me that during the summer, they have ambulances parked in the parking lot “just in case”. I thought he was joking.
I was there for around 9 months and it started getting hotter. The warehouse didn’t have AC, just giant exhaust fans blowing hot air around. A girl in presort directing traffic (basically sending boxes down the appropriate line) just suddenly collapsed. Full on passed out on the line. Line stopped. Girl taken to nurse. She was back on the line again an hour later.
The reason it haunted me is just the fact that she came back. She *passed out*, and still had to finish her shift. Diabolical.
Long time ago I used to work for Dart Container. Guy I worked with accidentally put a scalpel through his hand. They let him go to the doctor but told him if he wasn’t back by the end of the day he was fired. He was back by the end of the day.
Fuck that place.
A university student here. Was going through a corridor when suddenly a "thing" whizzed on my right side towards ground. Saw over to realise 2 students committed suicide by jumping together from top floor of building. The thing is, one of them was teaching our class as a "Teaching Assistant" the previous day.
I still do not pass though that corridor.
My university had to put up glass walls in our library because so many students were jumping off the top floors to kill themselves. It’s a serious problem around midterms and finals on college campuses.
I remember that when i studied abroad, i cannot open the window of my room (you can only open a little bit, it is obviously being locked in some way), when i asked around, other students told me that it is to avoid students to jump out from the window
(Which is a little bit worring at that time, i thought, did students need to kill themselves a lot in this university?)
I watched a snap boomer on a chain holding down a load on a truck almost shear a coworkers leg right off. It flung him in the air like a ragdoll. I've assisted medics carrying out a dead body of a coworker.. I've seen a few terrible things really. I could do on. I couldn't imagine being a paramedic. I feel for those guys
Old job, a channel head blew off a small filter(imagine a 100 lb huge metal disc that is on a hidge) Blew out and swung and hit a man in the head. His buddy had to hold his scale back on his head to slow down the bleeding till the ambulance to arrive.
Like his scalp peeled back from the front of his head to the rear. Like a old timey can with a pull top.
Worked at a trampoline place. The job was basically telling people not to double bounce each other. No one listened. Saw a lot of snapped legs. If only someone warned them.
When I worked for Walmart supply chain, the receiving crew wouldn’t put the pallets all the way in the rack. One had a huge piece of wood sticking out and our forklift guy swiveled into it. Impaled him in the shoulder and permanently disabled his arm. When I worked at Ecolab a chemical loader didn’t wear his PPE and spilled acid on his pants. The acid ate through his skin into his muscles and now he’s wheelchair bound even after the skin grafts. I didn’t see it personally but one of the acid delivery guys at my company didn’t wear his face shield or properly inspect his hookup lines and he needed facial reconstruction surgery and he went blind.
I’m only three years into my career so I’m off to a good start lol
I worked at a chain pet store for a while. They did not treats the animals they sold well. Multiple snakes starved themselves to death. I found an emaciated sand boa and took him home, got him vet care, only for him to die a week later. The heating systems would break, leaving the reptiles without heat or overheating (it got so hot the desert species were sitting in their water to cool off). I got reprimanded for moving the tanks away from the heat and misting them down. The mammals all had eye infections. Every day we removed dead fish from tanks and scan them in as inventory loss. The feeder fish were not considered inventory, as they were worth Pennie's we'd remove at least 10 dead ones a day and just throw them out. It was heartbreaking. I quit after 3 months because I couldn't let myself be complacent in what was happening. Never buy animals from places like petsmart, pet supplies plus, petland, and petco. They come from the equivalent of puppy mills and are horribly mistreated. It's been years and I still get sick to my stomach when I think about it.
How is this legal?
I've read this stuff several times now on Reddit, so it can't be just that one store.
Do you have no animal protection laws over there?
I think the general public is more likely to care about/report the mistreatment of mammals, then birds, then stuff like reptiles and fish.
It’s not legal at all, but animal welfare agencies are spread thin and if it doesn’t get reported and vigorously followed up on, it will slip through the cracks. Most of the general public sees no issue with a fish living in an unheated or filtered vase, or plunking a goldfish straight into tap water in a bowl, so the casual disregard of fish and reptile welfare in pet stores continues.
Thankfully it can be extremely management dependent, I’ve been in some big chain stores and seen all the animals in great shape, fish in the right type of tanks, rodents and reptiles in clean, well stocked habitats. But I’ve also seen the opposite unfortunately.
I work with special needs individuals and the facility I was first working at had this sweet woman whom was non-verbal but made still kind made nose to communicate in a way. She was put on a diet of thicken liquids and purée food which meant she was not able to eat any sorta solid foods. We had this semi new girl that started to work over in that house who was an absolute nightmare to work with. She spent a lot of time on her phone and did not really care for the resident as she should have. One day she made a peanut butter sandwich and left it on the counter where the resident was able to snatch it up and shoved in her mouth. She was later taken to the bathroom to use the facility and fell over on the floor from the toilet. She ended up choking on the peanut butter, she spent about 4 days in the hospital where the nurses were still digging out peanut butter out of her throat until she ended up passing away. I couldn’t eat peanut butter for years after her passing. The two people who made the sandwich and the person who did not start CPR right away were fired and have records of adult abuse on their records.
Getting kicked in the back by a horse, breaking 5 ribs and a punctured lung (it wasn't horrible it was a small one). My boss made me work for 4 hours after and only let me go to the hospital after our stable hand ran over to me because I was on the ground wheezing and crying. Then, she told me to drive myself. I got kicked on the right side. I drove a manual. I didn't leave 1st gear. An 8 min drive turned into a 35 min ride.
I was 20, working for my aunt and uncle in an automotive shop. I was doing heavy wheels (19.5 inch railway rims with 16 ply tires) and while lifting one, I felt something for *pop* in my back, followed by excruciating pain. Couldn’t stand up straight, hurt to lift anything. Told my uncle who responded “get over it, and if you try to get workman’s comp we will fire you so god damned fast!”
I didn’t know what to do, and young me was afraid of losing a job that was barely letting me get by. For 6 months I lived off of pain killers and coffee
I’m 37 now, and if I’m up and moving, the pain is easy to ignore. Once I sit down, or particularly when I lay down for bed, it becomes extremely noticeable.
It sucks, but the thing I miss most, as dumb as it sounds, is just being able to run. It’s extremely painful now, but god I loved being up and moving when I was young. Football, soccer, ultimate frisbee, or just going for runs around the small town I lived in. Those days are long gone, as is a good portion of my health
I cut off ties with them years ago, and I don’t honestly think of them as family anymore.
I learned a while back that it’s okay to burn bridges when it’s for your well being
When I first started out in restaurants, a guy i worked with dropped his watch into the fryer. Without thinking he reached in elbow deep into the hot oil. It was fast, but 350 degree grease works faster. It was gnarly. Suffice it to say his culinary career ended that day
My mom's ex worked in a fast food restaurant as a cook. It was KFC so a LOT of fryers. I kid you not, this man stuck his fucking arms inside a fryer to get something out on the God damn regular and would refuse to go to a hospital or anything. He'd let it get wrapped up, but would also not leave work. He was crazy (not like...actually. just....ridiculous.) He also had seizures regularly and he was working a construction job once and fell of a scaffold and BIT HIS TONGUE ALMOST IN HALF and broke some bones and dude was furious that they called an ambulance and he had to go to the hospital.
Meanwhile, I'm afraid to cook hamburger on the stove because it pops a bit.
Sort of unfair since I was a lifeguard and accidents WERE work, but… I was on the beach the day this guy paralyzed himself trying to do a backflip. The whole situation was fucked: guard on duty didn’t see it happen, two random nurses who were swimming tried to bring the guy to shore (not realizing it was a spinal injury)… we had an EMT on the guard staff take over, and I remember she rubbed his back and said “can you feel that?” and his response was “feel what?” Truly haunting day.
Loud, obnoxious, and troublemaker of a forklift driver who repeatedly causes accidents dropped a pallet of heavy electronics from the highest height the forks could go nearly on top of the closing manager. How she still remains employed is beyond me since her actions would have gotten anyone fired a long time ago.
* She's ran into and broken several fire sprinkler systems.
* She's dropped pallets from varying heights before.
* She ran into another associate (the side opposite of the forks thankfully)
* She drives fast and screams at anyone in her way and attempts to run over people sometimes if they're walking too slow
* She's damaged product before by attempting to put the forks into the pallets but misjudges the height and then skewers the boxes of products sitting on the pallets.
* She's damaged the loading bay doors more than once.
Yet when I go to the store to do my shopping she's still there doing the same shit. Thank god I left that place because I can guarantee she's going to send someone to the hospital or get someone killed.
used to unload trucks, coworker was complaining about heart burn. He was gone for 30 minutes and i made the joke someone go find him i don't want to be the one to find his dead body.
He was dead, massive heart attack.
I worked at a Sears Warehouse in the early 2000's. A guy who worked for UPS did a delivery for us and went to a neighboring warehouse do do another drop off. We saw the paramedics arrive there. The next day went to work and they had another person doing deliveries. We learned He died of a heart attack while he was unloading the truck only 5 minutes after leaving us. At his funeral there were people from several of the businesses he delivered to paying respects.
My first job.
The new head of the installation called each one of us separately to his office for introduction.
While I was in there, he gets a call from a family member that there's an automobile accident. He looks really stressed.
Later that morning one of my coworkers found him, dead, in the wash room, from a heart attack.
Personal one here: I worked in a chemical plant and we were 'recycling' rosin. Stuff was stored in barrels and we were opening the barrels and busting up the solid rosin into smaller pieces and then shoveling those pieces into a kettle to be melted and used for other processes.
Well, we had just finished filling the kettle and things were all melted when the main operator starting the pump out process (so the kettle would be empty for another batch). Well, the process was to blow the pump line with steam to make sure it was open and then start the pump.
It was a very cold day and a steam trace line was broken near the large vessel where the rosin was to be pumped. Instead of checking the target vessel, the operator saw the steam rising and assumed the line to the target was open.
So, instead of following the second procedure of relieving pressure on the line, he opened the pump valve... What he did not know was that the line was closed off to the target vessel and he just pressurized the line with 150 pounds of steam. Then when he opened the pump line the 150 pounds of steam blew back through the pump and into the kettle we had just filled.
350+ degree hot rosin blew out of the kettle. Some of it landed on my right side and burned my right arm, shoulder and side of my face; 2nd and 3rd degree burns. Lazy operator scarred me for life.
When I was in my early 20's working for an electrical contractor specializing in server rooms, another apprentice and I were tasked with running conduit for power and data into the new server room from a set of panels like 150 feet away. He was bending the pipe and I was standing in the suspended ceiling (on a ladder of course) hanging it on threaded rod hangers that I had already shot into the deck above.
Unfortunately for me, the lighting in this area was fucking ANCIENT 2x4's that had those Bakelite plug in connectors. The problem with Bakelite is that it becomes very brittle with age, and after a long time it will basically disintegrate into tiny crumbs and dust if it gets whacked. As my buddy was handing me a stick of 2" EMT, I lost my grip and the end of the pipe whacked into the top of one of the lights, causing the Bakelite connector to crumble, and the end of the EMT nicked the 277 volt line feeding the light.
These were 20 amp 277 volt commercial lighting circuits...and a huge fireball that came out of the top of the light, rolling over everything in the ceiling for like 8 feet in every direction (including me of course). I immediately covered my face, knocking myself off the ladder, and fell through the ceiling almost cartoon style. It was awful. I took down a 30' section of ceiling. The lights thankfully were held up with separate wire ties to the deck not just clipped onto the grid so thankfully they didn't fall down on top of me. Thanks the OSHA inspectors who were on staff at the client...I was wearing gloves, safety glasses, and a hard hat, otherwise I may have gotten really fucked up.
In the end I burned off a chunk of my beard and singed my eyebrows, and I got banged up from the fall, but that could very well have been a fatal incident.
Fuck companies who still have Bakelite lighting connectors.
Five or six years ago I watched my coworker fall 40 feet off a roof. He survived the fall and the noises he was making will never leave my mind. He kept grabbing my arms and looking at me with his eyes wide open like he had something he needed to tell me. I don’t know what he was trying to say but I told his family he wanted me to tell them he loved them.
I worked at a pet food store. We were having a store meeting on a Sunday morning when we suddenly heard banging at the front door (all glass). We went up there to check what was happening and a coworker from a different store location was at the door bleeding with his dog and he ran to the front corner of the store and collapsed. Another dog (the aggressor) ran in and almost went for him again, but luckily we were able to chase the dog out.
My coworker and his dog just lay bleeding in a corner for a bit. They were both freaked out and bleeding. We tried getting the owner's information for the other dog but she kept talking in circles and trying to lie or avoid answering questions. She was using a broken retractable leash for her dog and never trained her dog... and considering he had leash aggression, it was only a matter of time before he attacked another dog and person. That morning just happened to be it.
One of best workers at my plant was forced to drive from Greenville to Charlotte, after he was already on the clock for 12 hours. We told the previous shift supervisors and managers to get one of their people to take the two letters to Charlotte, since they forgot to send it on the truck.
Our plant manager, made him go and the transportation manager kept texting him asking if he's made it yet. The last time he texted, my coworker looked down as soon as an 18 wheeler came to a complete stop. He crashed into the back becoming trapped as the postal van caught on fire. He burned alived to deliver two letters, which also burned.
[A news page from the crash](https://www.wcnc.com/article/traffic/deadly-crash-closes-i-85-nb-lanes-saturday-morning/275-425505092)
His wife and kids got paid a lot of money from it, and no they weren't charged. Though they no longer work here, they got the postal shuffle, including the plant manager.
A mail carrier near where I used to live died of heatstroke. He had complained to his manager that he wasn't feeling well, and was threatened with discipline if he didn't make it back in time. The manager kept her job.
Damn. This is why unions are necessary when management fails us. I also work in a mail carrier and our warehouse has NO air conditioning. So whenever someone says they're not feeling well they immediately get sent to our 24/7 on duty fully licensed nurse to get checked out, rest for at least 15 minutes, hydrated, etc. And if they're not OK, they get put on modified duty for that day or sent home.
We’ve unfortunately had a lot of train vs people incidents where I live. I promise that like 10 years after the accident someone found a skeletal foot or hand or something when getting their roof redone. Trains send people, or parts of them, flying.
I was working on a HVAC contract in West Virginia. A guy with a Pettibone was carrying something and it was blocking his view. He struck a 34.5KV Potomac Edison Transmission line and, I was facing away when he did. It look like the sky suddenly went black from the arc from the line because he got to close. The line was still live so and intermittingly arcing off the machine so they could not rescue the guy until Potomac Edison got there to deenergize the circuit. He died on site inside the cab of the Pettibone.
When I worked for a certain home improvement store, we had a timbre saw on site for cutting sheet materials to order. One employee, let’s call him “Kevin”, worked on the department that operated this piece of equipment.
Now, rule one of the timbre saw is that you don’t put *anything* near the blade that you can’t afford to lose. To aid in this, the sheets of wood are clamped down and secured to the cutting bed before you start the saw. Kevin however, did not do this. He had a habit of leaning the sheets against the cutting bed and holding them in place with his hand. After seeing this a number of times, and warning Kevin that he would be reported to management if it continued, I was not surprised to hear an emergency tannoy go out one day. Sure enough, Kevin had badly misjudged his distances and managed to cut through not only a sheet of MDF, but also most of his hand.
Surgeons managed to save some of his fingers and it took a week to strip the saw down and clean out the chunks of Kevin.
Bonus story: if a forklift driver tells you to stay in your car during loading, STAY IN YOUR FUCKING CAR. Seven tonnes of forklift leaves one hell of a mess when it accidentally crushes an idiot.
I work at a zip line at a day camp. A few years ago, one of my coworkers was finishing up at her station where she was sending kids on the zip line, and she was about to use the zip line herself. She forgot to make sure that her zip line tether was connected to her harness, and jumped off the platform. She fell thirty feet to the ground.
I heard her hit the ground. I saw the broken bones sticking out of her leg. I heard her screams of agony even as I ran halfway across the 50 acre camp to notify the main office.
Thankfully, she survived. She managed to land in the exact perfect way to minimize her injuries: on her feet so her legs were able to somewhat cushion her fall. If she had hit the ground in any other way, she would have been paralyzed or killed. She’s extremely lucky to be alive and walking today, but it’s still so haunting to know what could have happened.
Now I’m the one who works at that station where she worked. I still feel a twinge of panic whenever someone jumps off that platform, even after I’ve double and triple checked everything. I still do my best to make sure an incident like that never happens again.
I have a scar on the top of my right foot which was made by a coworker stomp dancing in heels at a work party. She broke the skin and I bled all over the dance floor and every time I see that scar I think of her.
She bought me a giant toblerone to say sorry so I did get something out of it other than the scar!
I worked at large manufacturing company that produced excavators and was hired at the same time as a guy my age. We hit it off and became good friends. His father was the second shift supervisor and we both worked second shift as material handlers and equipment operators. One guy on our team was a cranky old fuck that would always make mistakes and violate safety policies.
One day in the middle of our shift my buddy was helping the old fuck use an industrial crane to move a part that weighed 800lbs. Somehow the bastard messed up the controls and sent this 800lb chunk of cast steel right into my buddy. It completely crushed his femur and fractured his tibia and fibula. The sound of his bones breaking was loud enough to be heard across the entire manufacturing plant. His screams were horrific. Everyone ran to help get the part off of him and call EMS. Everyone expect the old fuck. He just got into his forklift and casually drove outside of the facility looking for the next post on his list.
My buddy was in the hospital for months and was in physical therapy for over a year. Since we were contractors the only thing he was given was a half paid medical bill and a “sorry that sucks but we no longer require your services.” He took his life and left behind his 3 year old daughter. I hope you’re at peace C.
I have since focused my career towards safety and try my best to use foresight and intuition to prevent accidents like this from ever occurring. Oh and fuck you Daniel.
I’m a pharmacist and this one time I had a guy come in with his foreman, the man was clutching is head and blood was spurting from it as he had just been hit in the head with a steal girder! I told them that they needed the hospital and that a plaster wasn’t gonna be enough when the man pulled his hand away from the cut and the foreman saw bone and fainted lol
Needless to say we called an ambulance for the steel girder man…
Car comes in for its first oil change. Tech straddles the bay to get a good grip/leverage on the oil filter. He slipped and caught his elbow on the hood latch. Lots of blood. He refused to go to the hospital and stitched it himself with carpet thread. Found out later he was high as a kite and didn’t want the required workers comp drug test.
Only heard the story but…
I worked as a hazmat guy in a University. One of my task was to collect used embalming fluids from the anatomy department. They fill the body full of a preservative solution, let it steep in all the cells, then “bleed” it out into a container for us to collect and dispose. I don’t know the full process, but end result is a slightly pinkish clear liquid with the occasional chunk of flesh in it. Fun stuff.
First time I went my boss told me to be sure to check if the cap was screwed on tight, and to drive the point home, he explained that the path between the anatomy department and the hazmat storage was full of bumps, which causes the liquid to slosh back and forth. One time he forgot to check, and he hit a bump. The used embalming fluid that was dancing back and forth turned into a big wave in the container, powerful enough to blow the unscrew lid off and splash all over my boss.
I made triple sure those caps where screwed on TIGHT!
I was offered a job as a site lead, managing a couple of hundred people. I turned it down, for personal reasons, after having hired just about all the workers. I knew the guy they got to be the site lead when I turned it down, and I knew he was a lazy, stupid, slapdash, careless, thoughtless son of a bitch. Well it turns out that he ran a lax safety culture and a guy i had hired was killed. I went back and looked at the emails he’d sent me during the hiring process “thank you sir for this opportunity, this will change my family’s lives forever”. Yep. It sure did.
I’ll never forgive the guy who took the lead job, and I’ll never forget the guy who died in an entirely avoidable industrial accident.
Used to manage a shredding company (the ones with the mobile shredding trucks. The driver who was operating the shredder decided that the best way to clear a jam would be to jump in the shredder and jump up and down on the paper. It was very fortunate that the drivers helper was just outside the truck bringing more paper from up in the office building as he heard the scream from inside the truck and managed to hit the emergency stop button. The guy survived thanks to the helper but his foot did not. It was chewed up to about halfway up his foot. It did not look pretty.
Edit spelling.
One of the first courses I ever taught (scuba instructor) was to a family of 3 in a lake. On the final dive of the course the father had an SCA (sudden cardiac arrest) at about 16m underwater.
I surfaced with him and began preforming rescue breaths while towing him back to shore while his wife and son began to panic. He was obese and despite being strong for my size I really struggled to get him out of the water and tore my lat in the process. His wife and son were too distraught to help. I got him out and began administering CPR while screaming for someone to call 911 and trying to console his family.
He was dead well before EMS arrived and I've never forgotten those memories. I had to take a few months off work to recover from the physical and mental injuries. I feel like crying just typing it out. I feel so guilty for not being able to save him.
I was an apprentice carpenter in a granite and concrete product quarry .
We had to replace the floor on a shed 60ft up on the side of a crusher tower ( where the big rocks go up a conveyor belt and get dropped down into the crushers at the bottom )
Long story short I fell through a loft sized hatch that was just covered with a plastic sheet .
Only my broad shoulders and my arms locking out stopped me falling to my death . I was literally just dangling there by my elbows , legs just hanging in mid air .
This was in the 1980s before safety is what it is now .
In 1995 I worked at a furniture factory. We bought lumber as logs and cut and machined it to the sizes we needed to make the various piece of solid wood furniture that we sold.
Anyway, it was a small company, not very well funded. Summer came, and the owner saw a chance for cheap labor, so he hired in a bunch of high school kids. Technically, OSHA rules would not allow anyone under 18 to operate equipment. The owner wasn't so big on OSHA or having machinery with the right guards etc.
One of the high school students was the quarterback of the football team. He was heavily recruited and it was rumored that he was going to sign a letter of intent to play for a Big 12 school. Anyway, that day he was helping one of the old timers cut parts on a big rip saw. He goes to grab a piece of wood that is coming off the blade and it kicked in a way that he didn't anticipate. He somehow managed to cut off his hand at the wrist. In shock, he tries to grab his hand with his good hand, and cuts 3 fingers off his other hand. I remember we were waiting for an ambulance to arrive while the boss had me under the saw looking for the fingers.
I was a volunteer firefighter throughout high school in my hometown. 17YO at the time of this event
Responded to a call just after starting school for the day- left class with a friend of mine who was also volunteering. Ended up responding to a fatal vehicle collision whose victim was a girl we knew of who was only a few years older than we were.
Every firefighter was heartbroken. That was a hard day. I think the hardest part for me was the conversations I had with her boyfriend and grandparents when they passed though the scene later in the day.
The life lessons learned when you see such tragedy first hand really is incredible.
Cherish every day you have because you never know if you’ll have tomorrow
I was working at Thorpe Park and a colleague asked if I “dared him” to run under the magic carpet ride as it swung up in the air. I said absolutely fucking not and that I didn’t want him to do it.
He decided to do it anyway while it was in motion he pushed through the safety gate, waited until it was at its highest and rushed underneath. He made it to the other side as it swung down, then as it came back up the air current was strong enough to pull him slightly backwards towards the ride again. As the ride went up to the top he lost his balance and fell on him bum under the ride.
He scrambled like a rat out of a sinking ship and pushed so hard into the safety barrier to get away that he cracked the acrylic panel on it. The operator in the booth saw the whole thing and was laughing hysterically while I couldn’t believe what had just happened.
The dingus who nearly got crushed by 2 tons of metal and plastic had turned grey and just sat still, gasping on the other side of the ride until it finished and I unloaded the guests.
Apparently a few of the guests in the queue complained about him (there were a lot of people waiting to go on the ride as well as some waiting at the exit for their friends so LOTS of witnesses) and he actually got fired for it.
Not an accident as such but Odin damn, it was closer than he thought it was going to be.
I broke my back at 20yo while roofing and my site boss came to see me in the hospital. He gushed on about how lucky I was to get workman’s comp like I’d hit the jackpot. Years later I heard that he had sawed into a live wire on a site and the current blew off one elbow and a kneecap. I checked in on him to see how he was managing and he was happy af to get what he saw as early retirement. Really made me realize both how fucked worker mentality can become and how ridiculously unsafe that restoration company was.
It’s not really that bad but it does haunt me all the time so…
I’m a teacher and use those big cutting boards with the big blade arm all the time. One time I was trying to cut some task cards up really quickly before I picked them up from lunch and accidentally went down HARD on my thumb. I was prepared for pain and it to be deep. But as quick as I winced, I realized I didn’t feel pain and the blade almost bounced up. It had hit my fake acrylic nail and didn’t go through. It barely left a scratch indent. Oh my god. Relief, shock, embarrassment washed over me at once. I was lucky. Not bad at all. However, it now haunts me every time I use the paper cutter and I am very nervous. Lucky to have learned my lesson the not so hard way.
Worked at a car dealership during the height of pollen season. Multiple times a day we would have to drive around a pressure washer and spray off the cars to keep them looking clean. A dude was spraying one down and noticed a spot on a car wasn't coming off with the pressure washer so he decided to spray it while rubbing the spot with his hand. It blew the skin right off of about 3 knuckles like it was butter. I grabbed some clean shop towels and wrapped it up as fast as I could but there was blood EVERYWHERE by the time I got to it and could get to a phone to call 911(this was pre cell phone days).
I worked in a grocery store (still do, honestly). My boss had to move a triple stacked pallet of sugar, and her bright idea was to lift the top 2 pallets with the forklift, move them to the side, and then have me move the pallet on the floor over to where she needed it, and then stack the 2 other pallets on top. She moved them, I And started moving the other pallet. I hear 2 screams, look up, and see 2 pallets of sugar coming down at me. I take off running, hit the wall, and hear the 2 pallets hit the ground. The power Jack I was using was buried under 2 pallets of sugar, and something started burning the sugar, because all we smelled was caramelizing sugar
Summer teenaged job and I was working in an amusement park that had more flags than you could count on one hand. In the sandwich place. About the only place that didn’t fry everything. The line ran out of roast beef, and I had to clean the slicer. Could not find the chain mail gloves. Supervisor yelled at me to just skip them. I said no. He called me a wuss. Proceeded to start cleaning the slicer.
And removed the tip of his finger.
Wrapped his hand in a towel, told me I was right, and to please walk him to the nurses office.
My dad worked at a kind of factory .
He was driving behind a truck full of steel pipes
One of the pipes fell of went trou the windshield and between his legs .
A milimeter to the right and I was not answering this post.
I was a substitute kindergarten teacher for 1,5-3y olds as a part of my mandatory alternative (didn't go to military) service.
A kid ran out from the queue when going out for a walk and hopped on a grass area on the sidewalk, ran some more and then stumbled and fell. When I went to help him get up I noticed 20cm away from his head was a concrete reinforcement rod sticking out from the ground. Had he fell a little closer you can imagine what could've happened. So a very effin lucky accident that I'll never forget.
While building Levi Stadium, a trucker was unloading rebar when the entire pile fell on him, impaling him multiple times and also crushing him. I never met the man, but his cat and elderly dog ended up a a local shelter. We planned to adopt the dog and ended up taking home the cat too because we didn't want to split them. Nena (the dog) passed away in her sleep in 2017 about 2 years after we brought her home. Seal (the cat) is around 7 years old now and doing just fine. I've always wondered if they ever thought of him.
That guy would have been happy to know that his pets got good homes. That was a great thing to do :)
How sweet of you to adopt both so they wouldn’t be separated! 🥹
You're an angel! Thank you for taking care of those animals.
Engineer decided to open a parcel with a Stanley knife, not sure if he slipped or what angle he was cutting at but BAM! Stanley knife in the eye. Never saw him again but h&s quickly introduced a policy that safety goggles needed to be worn when opening boxes
Accidents with razor knives are some of the most common accidents. For a number of reasons; they're small & fit in the hand like lots of other safer objects, everybody has seen & used them, so they are rather complacent, things like that. And partly because of their size, they're not going to do something like a thousand pound swinging piece of metal or a ruptured steam line. (Cue Raiders Of The Lost Ark scene of opening the ark).
Used to be a wedding caterer. While the bride and groom were going to cut the cake it started to fall off the table as they were both trying to catch this ridiculously huge thing the bride slipped, fell into a pyramid of wine glasses on a foldout table behind her... The table collapsed and a wine glass stem pierced her neck. She survived, but she was not gonna be able to take that gown back to the rental place... I've never seen so much blood in my life.
Suffered an almost fatal injury AND ruined her wedding reception and dress. Good God I feel sorry for that bride. Not to mention the cost of however much she had to pay the rental place for the dress.
Goddamn thought you were gonna say that bride/groom accidentally stabbed the other while trying to save the cake
My brother told me about a patient he had that tripped while walking with a wine glass and the stem went into her eyesocket and reached the brain. I now have a healthy fear of wine glasses.
Trench collapse. Guy was pinned mid chest. Not good but not immediately fatal. Guy’s coworkers freak out and use the backhoe to dig him out. Ended up catching him with the teeth on the bucket. Essentially cut him in half. The guy on the backhoe was his brother. Dude would have probably been alright had they rescued him the right way.
That’s crazy, so tragic man
Work in a dealership and once a tech was using a tool that broke free bashing him in the face, knocking out multiple teeth, splitting his lip and breaking his nose…it was a bloody mess. Young kid, with balls of steel appearantly. While waiting for an ambulance he was sitting there talking and smiled to show the damage. That smile was horrifying. He recovered and got a ton of dental work and still works there.
Similar thing happened at the dealership I work at. I think he only broke one tooth though. Poor kid also split his stitches open and had to go back to the ER a couple days later.
I was a cashier in a grocery store. One of my fellow cashiers was a senior, just killing time in retirement. One day, she had a dizzy spell, collapsed, and cracked her head open on the floor. Paramedics were called, and as they were loading her into the ambulance, she was crying out that she could still finish her shift.
Friend from Australia visited the US a while back, and said that the most shocking thing was how many people her grandparents' age were still working, especially at places like Walmart.
Yeah, my mom still works because it is her "fun money" she is a nurse, and it's really hard to live on a fully fixed income when your old job is offering 4 hour work from home shifts and you make close to $100/hr from your years of experience at waiving benefits... $400 per shift? Work a couple of days per week from home just calling patients? Basically make your own schedule? It's hard to turn that down.
I dunno if you can call this an accident but I was working with this guy and outta nowhere he says "I'm sick of working here, check this out" and jammed his foot into the gears on the machine. Completely mangled his foot. Saw him 20 years later and his foot was still fucked. He was looking for a couple weeks of workers comp, got a lifetime disability instead. It was pretty horrific.
He let the intrusive thoughts win on that one. Holy shit.
Yeah, rational thought definitely didn't win that day.
Bruh….
I used to fly small airplanes in north west Alaska. In the two years I worked there I knew three pilots that died in crashes. Don’t miss how those days felt.
It's crazy that Alaska has so many plane accidents that it's in an entirely different zone in terms of how airplane insurance is calculated. So much CFIT (Controlled Flight Into Terrain) Stay safe!
Land wherever you c fit
Lol your username definitely checks out. I worked in the Alaska fishing industry for a few years. Had a few friends choppered out to anchage with injuries. One was ok, one survived with an amputation and, I assume, a huge company pay out. We also had one guy have a heart attack in the pribs. I wasn't there at the time. They did their best to get him out but he didn't make it. Alaska is a tough place to work.
Worked for Edy's Ice Cream. My truck was loaded wrong so at a stop had to shimmy between pallets to get to the back pallet. Was unloading the top pallet and the pallet below collapsed. The top pallet slid on to me. But since I was between 2 waist high pallets about 1200lbs of ice cream bent me at the waist the wrong way. Sort of like bending over normally, backwards. Ended up with 2 broken vertebrae, nerve damage and was not fun. Eventually got a six disc fusion and was able to walk again. But now I have arthritis in my back and it really hurts most of the time. I also have numb areas in my right thigh and my whole lower back. Would not recommend.
The time we almost killed a customer at the restaurant I worked at. He had a milk allergy that we didn't know about, so we made his food on the same grill as everything else. Apparently his allergy was severe enough that he spent the weekend in the hospital because of anaphylaxis from cross-contamination. He was super nice about it and acknowledged that he really should have told us. He remained a regular for the 2+ years that I continued working there and our systems changed drastically to accommodate allergies.
Just about all restaurants have either a sign or a warning on the menu: **"Before placing your order, please inform your server if a person in your party has a food allergy."** **That's 100% on him.** I'm just glad that he was gracious enough to acknowledge it.
ANd beyond that, pretty much any adult that has a deadly food allergy knows to check twelve times, and even then be careful eating out.
Our former team leader had allergies so severe that both senior engineers were instructed by him on where these special pen-like syringes are, who to call, and that they need to just jab it into him as fast as possible ANYWHERE because otherwise he'd be dead before ambulance arrives. And if in doubt whether the second engineer already used one of the pens... Jab in the second one. Because the results are way less severe than not using both. And he almost never ate with us. And we all well understood why! Except on cases when engineer from another team was with us. Guy had the same allergies, but way milder, and they were fast friends over it and he served like a royal taster - always trying snacks and pizza before Alex and greenlighting him, because he'd feel if there were traces of allergens in the same time frame, but the result would be like, rash and irritation and maybe some bowel songs, not a trip on a flashy minivan with two-tone disco.
ESPECIALLY if it’s a food product that frequently gets cooked into other things.
I hugely appreciate this. I have a mushroom allergy and can’t eat grapefruit due to chemo. The rare time I’m NOT asked about an allergy or intolerance and I have to ask myself, i nearly always have to change my order - e.g. the sauce has grapefruit.
of course he should have told you! It sounds like he nearly killed himself (through silence) and you were merely someone cooking a meal
My old company where I was a made a regular milk milkshake for a kid that had a serious dairy allergy. I don't remember if his allergy was mentioned and a soy milk shake was asked for. Well, the kid died. My company, being retroactive moreso than proactive then decided to take a serious stance on allergy. We had to ask every customer explicitly whether they had allergies from then one. It took a kid's death to trigger that.
I feel like an asshole saying this, but I have severe food allergies and this is just negligent if the parents were the ones that took him. I’m allergic to tree nuts - I don’t eat at obvious places where easy cross-contamination occurs. Much less order a dish whose main ingredient is one that could kill me and trust that the substitute would be made correctly.
Exactly. I have a shellfish allergy. I'm not going to pick red lobster or the local seafood market restaurants as a place to eat.
Right? When I worked at Starbucks, if someone asking for a beverage made with non-dairy milk specifically stated that they were allergic, we would sterilize one of our non-dairy milk pitchers and then place the cup with their order on it inside the sterile pitcher to make sure that it got used to make that drink, but at the end of the day, the drink was still going to get made at a bar where milk products are present 100% of the time, so we could never guarantee that cross-contamination *wouldn't* happen. I mean, I get that milkshakes are awesome, and that having to deny your kid things that every other kid can have without issue sucks, but like, maybe if your kid's milk allergy is legitimately deadly, just don't order him what is typically a completely milk-based beverage and trust that it'll be fine??
Not me, but at the cookie factory where my brother worked a worker died when someone accidentally dumped out a massive mixer full of molasses on top of him. He suffocated before they could dig him out.
That's horrifying
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Conceptually, a flood of molasses sounds cartoony. But in reality...it's so terrifying. My great grandfather lived in Boston at the time and my grandfather always had a big fear of getting separated/caught in commotion from hearing his dad talk about it.
That reminds me of an accident at the Bakery Chef in my town. It’s a bakery factory where they make a lot of baked goods for restaurants. Maintenance man didn’t lock out tag out a big mixer he was working on during shift change and 3rd shift came in and no one communicated that maintenance was working on the machine so night shift operator started the mixer with maintenance man inside. I worked 3 or 4 buildings down for a completely different company and we heard the screams over our loud machines.
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21 people died in a molasses flood in 1919. Hearing a description of that was terrifying.
Damn push one button and a lifetime of grief and guilt weighing heavy on your conscious all day every day
If death is only a button push away, then there are already several safety failures in progress.
Seriously. I worked at a gun store that also had an indoor shooting range, which requires massive ventilation and filters. One day I showed up to work, and the guys who serviced our range were there. Cool. They’re probably just collecting spent brass or monitoring air quality, like usual. Nobody said a word to me and there was nothing on the switchboard that operates the air handlers, so I turned on the vents like I do every day. Within about 90 seconds the supervisor of their company ran up and switched off the system, and started yelling at me. “Who the fuck turned on the vents?! Was it you? You almost sucked my guy into the fan! He could have died! Don’t turn on the vents until we’re done changing the filters!” I just slow-blinked at the dude and said, “Wait. So you had a human being in line with our vents, changing the filters, and he could have died from being sucked into the fan blades. But you didn’t tell anyone on the ground about this, you didn’t turn off the breaker to the fans, and you didn’t even put a piece of tape over the switch to turn on the fans. But you’re mad at me for flipping the switch that I get paid to flip at this time every morning? Bring your guy down off the roof. If you want to continue this conversation, every word I have to say is going to be in front of him.” Dude just stormed off. The next time they changed the filters, there was a piece of tape over the power switches on the board. I don’t work there anymore.
I think it was the day before thanksgiving 2012. There was a news story about a guy trying to reach something off of a platform at a local paper mill. He fell into a nearly boiling hot tank of caustic solution with spinning blades in it. There was absolutely nothing left. I have worked over those exact tanks numerous times. It’s an old facility, but if you don’t follow their safety policies right down to the T they will throw you out in a heart beat. That’s just a terrible way to go on one of the worst days that it could happen if the year. I think about it often.
Yeah it was wisconisn or Michigan where a bunch of guys threw someone into the pulper because he snitched on them. All but 1 are free men now. The other will do life.
https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1995-05-17-1995137160-story.html
TLDR: Asshole guy in Union job steals 10-15 feet of electrical cable from his workplace at a paper mill. Coworker (also union) reports this to security, the asshole is then suspended for 5 days without pay. Through a bit of mismanagement, the cops give the asshole the tape (he told them he was unjustly suspended). He finds out it was this coworker. Him and his lackies beat and strangled the coworker to death and threw his body in vat filled with paper pulp and water with a churner at the bottom. All this done because he "snitched" on a unionised coworker. Ridiculous world we live in sometimes. Edit: I mentioned the unionisation because the article seemed to imply it was important. The union president had a part to play in this case and I believe the asshole and his mates felt like by snitching he betrayed the union at large (which is of course not true). People seem to have understood that I don't like unions from this, I literally just gave a summary of the article. I'm not advocating for or against unions with this comment.
All over 10-15ft of electrical cable...and he was suspended for 5 days and not even fired. This checks out more that the guy was a psychopath. Less because of misplaced union loyalty.
I worked as a maintenance tech for a fiberglass facility and one of the operators crawled out on a crane over 1500 degree Celsius molten glass to clear a jam. He fell in and there was nothing to recover. Dude gave his life instead of shutting the line down for an hour. The worst part is our management was cool about unplanned shutdowns since we were always hitting above our target production anyway.
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When I worked in commercial claims reporting for a major carrier, we used to get tons of workers comp ones with occasional fatalities. Most injuries were really dumb, minor things, and *usually* the fatality ones involved multiple people fucking up, but we did have some freak ones that nobody could've prevented. Had one where a guy was operating a giant industrial lathe from a operator booth. The counterbalance broke off and managed to arc in *just* the perfect way that it crashed through the roof of the booth, and killed the man instantly. Investigation showed there was no neglect or anything, the lathe had been properly inspected, it was just a total freak accident.
This site has made me terrified of lathes.
Good, you should be.
If there’s any machines that deserve the utmost respect it’s lathes and planers…they will mangle you without skipping a beat
Yeah, at school we started working with lathes, before even explaining how they worked my teacher showed us a video of a guy being pulled into one with his sleeve (he warned us that it was graphic and we could chose if we watched it). Proceeded to a lot more careful after that vid.
My highschool principal only had 1.5 arms and liked to come into the woodshop class during the safety instructions and wave with his half arm. Later someone found out that he was actually born like that, but it was still funny, and got otherwise dumbass teenagers to listen to safety rules.
That guy sounds like a laugh, and a good person too 😄
I saw a guy get taken out by a sheet of plywood that flew off a roof, spun around a few times, came back and went right through him. It's was brutal and i didn't even know the guy. Condolences to your friend.
Did the wind cause it?
Yes, it was off a second story townhouse. I was building a garage in the neighborhood and we stopped for lunch early because of the wind and happened to drive by at the exact wrong time. They were trying to sheet the roof. Wind ripped it out of a guys hands and it flew like a giant Chinese star.
That’s insane. Sorry you had to witness it
Coworker, who was fresh out of trade school was using a table saw to cut 1” thick sheets of plastic into strips. It was cold so he put on some leather work gloves. A glove got caught and pulled his hand into the saw, nearly severing his right index and middle fingers. He came to me and said, “uh, I think I cut my hand”. It literally looked like a package of pork ribs - all mangled bone and tissue. They were able to save the fingers, but they’re non functional and don’t bend.
Isn't this why you don't wear gloves with rotary tools and saws
Had an officer roll through my shop on the ship and tried to call me out on not wearing gloves while operating rotary machinery. I just looked at him like he was insane and asked him if he understood what "degloving" was and said why we don't do that.
I had a superior tell me that it made him uncomfortable when I wore a gas mask. I needed a damn gas mask to work on these reactors filled with toxic fucking chemicals. I was flabbergasted, I just could not believe that fucking guy.
I was welding on composite steel, which requires a positive pressure hood to keep the fumes out. I was just a new temp. The super gets mad that I keep trying to wear the hood because it slowed us down and we had a quota to meet. The other guys laughed it off and told me just to drink milk to settle the stomach issues you'd get from the fumes. I collected one paycheck at that place
OSHA has entered the chat.
>He came to me and said, “uh, I think I cut my hand” Hahaha! I once dropped some metal on my hand. It hurt but I didn't think too much of it and was wearing gloves. After like 10 minutes I was like dang this still hurts and told my supervisor I was gonna go take a look at it and I'd be right back. I climb out of cold storage and peel off my glove. I'd blown out my index finger. The nail was sideways and barely hanging on. There was blood. It was my first day back from vacation and I hadn't even been working for an hour. Anyway, I go find the production manager and I'm like uhhhh I think I need to go to the hospital. He turned sheet white and got the captain who drove me to the hospital. The nurse was kinda rude but whatever. She had been on shift for like 10 hrs already and I feel that. I had a broken finger tip, for which they can't do anything. She stitched my nail back in and sewed up along the side. She gave me a finger brace and a scrip for some painkiller that my SO at the time tried to steal from me, but that's another story. I was back to work by lunch on "light duty" which meant clambering around doing paint touch up in the most awkward spots with a finger brace. When I finally got back, my Forman was like "if you didn't want to work today, you could have just said so!" 😂
Worked at Sonic when I was 15. I was on break and sat on the patio. I was looking at the road as this super nice car pulled into the drive through. As the car turned, a motorcyclist flew right into the side of him. He flew about 10 feet in the air before landing right on his leg. He slid about 8 feet before hitting the curb. His leg snapped into two pieces and his leg was basically degloved. I sat in shock before people started screaming to call the police. I ran inside and told my bosses. Three of them ran out while the other workers started shutting down the store for the ambulances and police. I was the only one who saw what happened. His face was skinned, leg was degloved. His fingers went in all directions. But It wasn't the sight that scared me. It was the weezing noise that he made as he slowly started gaining consciousness. He was mouthing the words "Help me". But his lips were gone. He could only make noise. I didn't work that day, and cried the whole time he was being put in the ambulance. The worst part was, the car who hit him, drove off without staying a second. The owner of the car was eventually found, but nobody was charged. A few months later, the victim of the hit and run, came to sonic. He lost his leg and was still in the process of recovery. The guy came to thank us and let us know how he was doing. Glad to see he survived, but still traumatizing nonetheless.. Edit: I'm sorry I sound weird, I was in a rush typing this. Nobody was charged was because they had no idea what happened. They were also both in the wrong. The bike was going way too fast, and the car tried turning in the middle of the road, instead of the left lane, that's why the biker was thrown. Sorry
Holy fuck
Wear the correct protection seriously.. people forget the road at any speed is basically like sliding on a cheese grater
Not really haunted, but we had a guy in the Army violate one of the cardinal rules of working in the motor pool; remove watches, rings and dog tags. He had kept his wedding ring on and was working in the turret of an Avenger (surface to air missile launching system mounted on a HMMWV). When he climbed down the tiny ladder at the back he decided to jump down the last few feet to the ground. His ring caught on the ladder and degloved his finger. He held up his hand and just looked at it and said, "Oh fuck." We grabbed him, wrapped his hand (not much blood honestly) and took him to the hospital. All the while another soldier was carrying the fleshy remnants in his hands and dry heaving. Once he was taken in at the hospital they just removed the finger. He became a cautionary tale for all my future soldiers.
The word deglove is the worst word in the world. I just want to puke everytime I hear it!
If you read Kobe’s autopsy report you’ll get new nightmares.
How does anyone actually conduct these reports for a living and not be dry heaving and quaking every minute? And worse the poor kids with him
The fact that what you're looking at isn't really human any more is probably a huge deal. Not to be grim or insensitive but it's the difference between a cow and a steak. It's a matter of intent and understanding, a total compartmentalization.
This is basically it. Fatalities (almost always suicides) are extremely common in the rail industry, and while I’m not out there examining corpses every day, we see some shit that would make most people puke or pass out. When you’ve dealt with enough mangled (but mostly whole) corpses and literal gore piñatas you develop a way of coping or you filter out. Most of us use humour, but you invariably have to learn to separate the body from the human being. They’re gone, all that’s left is the body. It can be traumatic, especially if the family is on scene, but I don’t ever want to become so desensitized that that doesn’t move me. Also therapy is definitely utilized if an incident is particularly heinous.
You get used to it. Shockingly quickly. Then every once in a while one will hit you for a bit. Then you push it down and get back to work. Having a "job to do" helps a lot. Your brain shifts to analysts and planning out tasks. Just standing and staring would be more difficult since you shift to empathetically focusing on the suffering and tragedy.
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"One of the nerves... slurped out like spaghetti" AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH breathes in AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH
Initially I was repulsed that they just amputated his finger. Had a comment typed up and everything. Speculating about the location they were and if the potential for infection was too high. After doing some research though, apparently it's several surgeries to salvage a degloved finger, depending on just how degloved it is. On top of that, it's never the same. Stiffness and pain in the finger is common. So I suppose it's fair enough.
Worked at an industrial setting, had a contractor come in and use a hydraulic ram to pull a bearing about the size of your head. They didn't hook up the lines correctly and 40,000 psi of fluid hit him in the neck and almost decapitated him. It took out part of his brain stem, I got there for the death rattle. Blood everywhere, we couldn't help him. He was in his early 20s and his wife just gave birth a few months prior.
That is truly horrible. Do you know if the family is ok or at least taken care of?
Yeah I heard they got a settlement, it was a huge osha investigation and they implemented new rules nationwide for that equipment. Osha rules truly are written in blood.
I worked with a machine called a microtome. It slices biological samples to a cell depth so they can be stained, it does this by raising and lowering the sample against a mounted razor blade. You keep your fingers so far out of the way. After the multiple people who lost fingertips, sashimi'd their knuckles, sliced through nails. It's a horrible way to injured yourself because the cut is so clean it takes a second to realise you've just skinned yourself.
Here’s a funny story invoking a microtome. At my university, we have a yearly festival where the programs compete in challenge. One challenge is to create a short funny film. One year, someone create a film where a guy would find sandwiches everywhere. One scene shows him in a service tunnel, pulling out a sandwich from some random looking piece of machinery and taking a bite out of it. My friend who was doing her masters in biochemistry bursted out laughing. That machine was her old microtome that had just broken down. The dude was eating a sandwich taken from something that less than a week ago was used to slice mice brains up
Oh gross! 😂 We never really got brains, we got a lot of cysts and tumours though!
Haha, I was expecting them to be microtome-prepared deli slices
We have a cryostat one and cut at -24C usually, most people never even realise because the blade is so cold then they notice frozen red stuff.
I use a dermatome for skin grafts for burns and other grafts and my fear has always been accidentally getting myself with it, not sure what it would do since I have surgical gloves on. The slices are a bit thicker than the microtome though, I think if I am remembering correctly I usually select 0.15mm thickness but you can vary it.
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Holy shit!!! I'm fucking terrified of electricity. There's a reason all the electricians I know get paid so well. Fuck that kind of job hazard. I'll stick to my crane tyvm
First job as an auto electrician at a car garage for Vauxhall in 2000. Walking through the workshop and one of the mechanics drops to the floor screaming as I'm maybe 20ft or so away. His right had smoke around it and he was trying to get his overalls off whilst yelling for help. Turns out as he was using the gas bottles (oxy acetylene) to cut off an exhaust that was giving him trouble, some of the molten metal that dropped off, fell inside the overall through the right arm and burnt straight into the under side of his forearm. I remember the smell was like meat burning with a sweet side to it. As he's trying to get the overalls off, the material has fused to this bubbling like gooey hole on his arm and when he tried to get them off it must have caused him even more pain. He was writhing around which made it very hard for us to try and help. It unfortunately got much worse though. I don't know the names of what was damaged but he couldn't work as a mechanic anymore because this molten stuff had burned deep into his forearm and it stopped him being able to move some of his fingers. I don't know how things went for him after this as he never came back to work us after being in hospital for a while. Edit. Updated gas bottles to say its oxy acetylene.
>Turns out as he was using the gas bottles to cut off an exhaust that was giving him trouble, some of the molten metal that dropped What exactly was he doing?
Had to deal with some rusty bolts underneath a car. Fired up a high powered torch that runs on a mixture of oxygen and acetylene gas (gas bottles). Hot enough to melt the bolts that are too rusty to turn with a wrench. Molten metal from the car rolled down his sleeve and ruined his arm/hand
Locally a forklift driver ran over a worker and the workers skull was crushed blood and brains everywhere. Made me more cautioned to forklifts in my factory.
Forklifts are dangerous. I was always worried about them when I was in warehouse pick. Almost all of our serious accidents were forklift accidents.
Was an OSHA investigator who had just completed training in a state with a small budget. Was called to a site where a man was crushed to death by a crane jib, mind you, Fed OSHA Officers aren't even allowed to do a fatality inspection until they've been with the agency for two years or longer. Anyway, get out onsite do the investigation. Come to find out, the guy was stowing his jib (the portion of a crane that extends the boom length and is usually stowed on the side) when it popped of the side of the crane with him inside the lattice work. The jib fell roughly seven feet and rolled over the guy, the jib weighed around 5700 lbs. Now this is all pretty common stuff, the interview his oiler/rigger was a little tough because they'd been together for so long (15 years) and were close. But the thing that really solidified it for me, was when I went to the autopsy and saw where the jib had landed. It landed right on the poor man's crotch, and let me tell you... it did not look pretty down there. I was told he had survived for several hours after the incident... I just hope they drugged the shit out of him in his final hours.
When the concrete laborer was cleaning the concrete paving machine and the operator was in his car staying warm and the laborers rain gear strap got caught in the auger and dragged him in. Most blood curdling screams I’ve heard as he was taking his last breath and it made mince meat of him. So sad everyone was looking for the emergency off button but if only the operator was where he should’ve been…….
Jesus christ, that's horrible. What happened to the operator?
He got fired, OSHA shut the job down and the Union got him hired again
>and the Union got him hired again worst union ever. The Union should have brought in training so that everyone knows where the shut off is.
The operator is the captain of the ship so to say. There is a red emergency stop button on the side and top where the operator stands and could have been shut off quickly. He asked if he could warm up in his car while they cleaned it because he wasn’t feeling good the supervisor said ok and assumed command of the machine. Supervisor was an owner. It sucks all around but the machine had to be running to clean it. OSHA deemed it a terrible accident and the deceased “should of had the rain gear suspenders attached properly “
Was a banquet server. Getting my pocket hooked to the knob on the door and ripping my pants almost clean off as I walked out into the banquet hall full of people.
Ah banquets. Chaos. This isn't me but a coworker was asked by a guest to decant his 900 dollar bottle of wine for him. He was an extra because we had such a huge event and apparently didn't know how to open wine. He broke the bottle.
“Uh, they say 50% of wine tasting is nosing the glass to appreciate all the beautiful aromas. Tonight we’ll be exploring the nose on this magnificent wine, unencumbered by our often-misleading sense of taste. Now, if everyone could kneel down and put your noses close to the ground over here…”
We were doing some maintenance on some big commercial equipment. A high pressure hydraulic line ruptured and cut someone's arm off. Blew it off would be more precise. I learned that day not to fuck around with hydraulics willy nilly. I also learned that hydraulic oil is toxic, and the hospital needs the MSDS sheet in the event of hydraulic injuries. The line had been previously damaged, and not correctly maintained.
Hydraulics are DANGEROUS. I wish more people understood that at my job. Fork drivers think it’s funny when a line bursts because i have to fix it. Uhhhh hello it’s dangerous, i don’t care about the work! Lol
Worked at a factory that dealt with sprinkler systems. Watched a man using a plasma cutter on a 12" pipe while his tinted glasses were on top of his head. A flash from the plasma cutter melted his contact to his eyeball. In an impulsive panic, I watched him try to pull out the contact lens that brought his cornea along with it. Loudest I'd ever heard a grown man scream. Happened 14 years ago and it still gets me.
Yeah, fuck that. Eye injuries always scare me the worst for some reason
I used to work at a sandwich place that made hot and cold food. There was a coworker who always came in stoned. One time, they came in too stoned, dropped the tongs into the deep fryer, and tried to pick them back up.
I worked at McDonald’s as a teen. One time I was at the fries section and I was holding the plastic scoop we used to scoop fries into bags. Anyway, the scoop was all full of deep fryer grease and it just kind of slipped out of my hand into the deep fryer. I didn’t reach in though, lol. I stood there panicking like a Sim when their stove catches fire. A manager ran over and grabbed some metal tongs and got it out. Whoops.
Dropping stuff is completely normal. Training yourself not to try to catch a knife or whatever is on its way into a fryer is hard. I don't even judge this person that much, but definitely use the story as a cautionary tale.
One of my best friends fell in a hydropulper at the papermill I work at. He drown in 140 degree F water paper soup. He fucked up and bypassed safety barriers. I dont look in there anymore ever. It's been about 12 years now.
This is the third paper pulper death I've read about in this thread. Remind me never to work at a paper mill.
When I was 13 I worked at Long John Silver's and we had the dumbest cook ever. We called him pedo-Paul because despite being, "Happily married" pedo Paul could not stop trying to flirt with the 15 year olds we were hiring. Anyway, pedo Paul one day drops his wedding ring in the deep fryer. To paint a picture, there's three deep fryers next to each other and above those deep fryers is no less than 6 pairs of tongs. Pedo Paul looks at his hand, looks at the deep fryer, looks back and forth like 6 times and then plunges his hand in the deep fryer to grab his ring. He manages to grab it and fling it across the room and starts freaking out about the burn. At this point, his hand was effectively nothing but one large blister but to make things worse, he runs over to the pressure washer to spray his hand off. At this point, strips of his hand just start filleting themselves off and onto the walls of the sink and we can see a little bone. He passes out from the pain and cracks his head on the sink and we call the ambulance. We don't actually know where his wedding ring ended up.
I want to feel bad making light of this, but Pedo-Paul seems like a real douche, so I don't. All I can picture is a couple, sitting down for dinner, when the woman's for hits something on her plate, and as she reaches in and inspects it, her eyes widen in surprise. "Oh my god, Brad, this is so unexpected. But yes! Yes! Of course I'll marry you." Poor Brad, knowing he didn't have the staff plant the ring in the food, sits there for a moment, confused. He finally shrugs a "Surprise,", deciding that now he at least doesn't have to pay for a ring.
At Long John Silvers lmao.. And they say romance is dead.
I was a dishwasher/delivery guy/food prep for a Chinese restaurant in my teens. The guy beside me was chopping vegetables and knicked the tip of his finger off. He wrapped it up and went to grab a glass of water. He then passed out and dropped the glass, shattering on the floor, slipped on the glass, fell and hit his head on the chopping table, and landed just beside the broken glass on the floor. Being the delivery guy, I delivered him to the hospital in my car. It was rough to see, but he was OK in the end.
Damn that's super unlucky.
Not as bad as some people probably, but working at Amazon. When I started the job, a manager laughingly told me that during the summer, they have ambulances parked in the parking lot “just in case”. I thought he was joking. I was there for around 9 months and it started getting hotter. The warehouse didn’t have AC, just giant exhaust fans blowing hot air around. A girl in presort directing traffic (basically sending boxes down the appropriate line) just suddenly collapsed. Full on passed out on the line. Line stopped. Girl taken to nurse. She was back on the line again an hour later. The reason it haunted me is just the fact that she came back. She *passed out*, and still had to finish her shift. Diabolical.
Long time ago I used to work for Dart Container. Guy I worked with accidentally put a scalpel through his hand. They let him go to the doctor but told him if he wasn’t back by the end of the day he was fired. He was back by the end of the day. Fuck that place.
A university student here. Was going through a corridor when suddenly a "thing" whizzed on my right side towards ground. Saw over to realise 2 students committed suicide by jumping together from top floor of building. The thing is, one of them was teaching our class as a "Teaching Assistant" the previous day. I still do not pass though that corridor.
My university had to put up glass walls in our library because so many students were jumping off the top floors to kill themselves. It’s a serious problem around midterms and finals on college campuses.
I remember that when i studied abroad, i cannot open the window of my room (you can only open a little bit, it is obviously being locked in some way), when i asked around, other students told me that it is to avoid students to jump out from the window (Which is a little bit worring at that time, i thought, did students need to kill themselves a lot in this university?)
I watched a snap boomer on a chain holding down a load on a truck almost shear a coworkers leg right off. It flung him in the air like a ragdoll. I've assisted medics carrying out a dead body of a coworker.. I've seen a few terrible things really. I could do on. I couldn't imagine being a paramedic. I feel for those guys
Old job, a channel head blew off a small filter(imagine a 100 lb huge metal disc that is on a hidge) Blew out and swung and hit a man in the head. His buddy had to hold his scale back on his head to slow down the bleeding till the ambulance to arrive. Like his scalp peeled back from the front of his head to the rear. Like a old timey can with a pull top.
Mann what kinda job was this? Sounds like you’ve worked before OSHA was even a thing
Teddy bear stuffer at Build-a-Bear.
We lost so many good men
Worked at a trampoline place. The job was basically telling people not to double bounce each other. No one listened. Saw a lot of snapped legs. If only someone warned them.
When I worked for Walmart supply chain, the receiving crew wouldn’t put the pallets all the way in the rack. One had a huge piece of wood sticking out and our forklift guy swiveled into it. Impaled him in the shoulder and permanently disabled his arm. When I worked at Ecolab a chemical loader didn’t wear his PPE and spilled acid on his pants. The acid ate through his skin into his muscles and now he’s wheelchair bound even after the skin grafts. I didn’t see it personally but one of the acid delivery guys at my company didn’t wear his face shield or properly inspect his hookup lines and he needed facial reconstruction surgery and he went blind. I’m only three years into my career so I’m off to a good start lol
I worked at a chain pet store for a while. They did not treats the animals they sold well. Multiple snakes starved themselves to death. I found an emaciated sand boa and took him home, got him vet care, only for him to die a week later. The heating systems would break, leaving the reptiles without heat or overheating (it got so hot the desert species were sitting in their water to cool off). I got reprimanded for moving the tanks away from the heat and misting them down. The mammals all had eye infections. Every day we removed dead fish from tanks and scan them in as inventory loss. The feeder fish were not considered inventory, as they were worth Pennie's we'd remove at least 10 dead ones a day and just throw them out. It was heartbreaking. I quit after 3 months because I couldn't let myself be complacent in what was happening. Never buy animals from places like petsmart, pet supplies plus, petland, and petco. They come from the equivalent of puppy mills and are horribly mistreated. It's been years and I still get sick to my stomach when I think about it.
How is this legal? I've read this stuff several times now on Reddit, so it can't be just that one store. Do you have no animal protection laws over there?
I think the general public is more likely to care about/report the mistreatment of mammals, then birds, then stuff like reptiles and fish. It’s not legal at all, but animal welfare agencies are spread thin and if it doesn’t get reported and vigorously followed up on, it will slip through the cracks. Most of the general public sees no issue with a fish living in an unheated or filtered vase, or plunking a goldfish straight into tap water in a bowl, so the casual disregard of fish and reptile welfare in pet stores continues. Thankfully it can be extremely management dependent, I’ve been in some big chain stores and seen all the animals in great shape, fish in the right type of tanks, rodents and reptiles in clean, well stocked habitats. But I’ve also seen the opposite unfortunately.
I work with special needs individuals and the facility I was first working at had this sweet woman whom was non-verbal but made still kind made nose to communicate in a way. She was put on a diet of thicken liquids and purée food which meant she was not able to eat any sorta solid foods. We had this semi new girl that started to work over in that house who was an absolute nightmare to work with. She spent a lot of time on her phone and did not really care for the resident as she should have. One day she made a peanut butter sandwich and left it on the counter where the resident was able to snatch it up and shoved in her mouth. She was later taken to the bathroom to use the facility and fell over on the floor from the toilet. She ended up choking on the peanut butter, she spent about 4 days in the hospital where the nurses were still digging out peanut butter out of her throat until she ended up passing away. I couldn’t eat peanut butter for years after her passing. The two people who made the sandwich and the person who did not start CPR right away were fired and have records of adult abuse on their records.
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Getting kicked in the back by a horse, breaking 5 ribs and a punctured lung (it wasn't horrible it was a small one). My boss made me work for 4 hours after and only let me go to the hospital after our stable hand ran over to me because I was on the ground wheezing and crying. Then, she told me to drive myself. I got kicked on the right side. I drove a manual. I didn't leave 1st gear. An 8 min drive turned into a 35 min ride.
Wtf.
I was 20, working for my aunt and uncle in an automotive shop. I was doing heavy wheels (19.5 inch railway rims with 16 ply tires) and while lifting one, I felt something for *pop* in my back, followed by excruciating pain. Couldn’t stand up straight, hurt to lift anything. Told my uncle who responded “get over it, and if you try to get workman’s comp we will fire you so god damned fast!” I didn’t know what to do, and young me was afraid of losing a job that was barely letting me get by. For 6 months I lived off of pain killers and coffee I’m 37 now, and if I’m up and moving, the pain is easy to ignore. Once I sit down, or particularly when I lay down for bed, it becomes extremely noticeable. It sucks, but the thing I miss most, as dumb as it sounds, is just being able to run. It’s extremely painful now, but god I loved being up and moving when I was young. Football, soccer, ultimate frisbee, or just going for runs around the small town I lived in. Those days are long gone, as is a good portion of my health
Gotta be honest your uncle fuckin sucks
I cut off ties with them years ago, and I don’t honestly think of them as family anymore. I learned a while back that it’s okay to burn bridges when it’s for your well being
You haven't gone to check with a doctor?
When I first started out in restaurants, a guy i worked with dropped his watch into the fryer. Without thinking he reached in elbow deep into the hot oil. It was fast, but 350 degree grease works faster. It was gnarly. Suffice it to say his culinary career ended that day
My mom's ex worked in a fast food restaurant as a cook. It was KFC so a LOT of fryers. I kid you not, this man stuck his fucking arms inside a fryer to get something out on the God damn regular and would refuse to go to a hospital or anything. He'd let it get wrapped up, but would also not leave work. He was crazy (not like...actually. just....ridiculous.) He also had seizures regularly and he was working a construction job once and fell of a scaffold and BIT HIS TONGUE ALMOST IN HALF and broke some bones and dude was furious that they called an ambulance and he had to go to the hospital. Meanwhile, I'm afraid to cook hamburger on the stove because it pops a bit.
Sort of unfair since I was a lifeguard and accidents WERE work, but… I was on the beach the day this guy paralyzed himself trying to do a backflip. The whole situation was fucked: guard on duty didn’t see it happen, two random nurses who were swimming tried to bring the guy to shore (not realizing it was a spinal injury)… we had an EMT on the guard staff take over, and I remember she rubbed his back and said “can you feel that?” and his response was “feel what?” Truly haunting day.
Ah dude.spinal injuries are dreadful. And you have to stabilise immediately. Haunting as you say.
Loud, obnoxious, and troublemaker of a forklift driver who repeatedly causes accidents dropped a pallet of heavy electronics from the highest height the forks could go nearly on top of the closing manager. How she still remains employed is beyond me since her actions would have gotten anyone fired a long time ago. * She's ran into and broken several fire sprinkler systems. * She's dropped pallets from varying heights before. * She ran into another associate (the side opposite of the forks thankfully) * She drives fast and screams at anyone in her way and attempts to run over people sometimes if they're walking too slow * She's damaged product before by attempting to put the forks into the pallets but misjudges the height and then skewers the boxes of products sitting on the pallets. * She's damaged the loading bay doors more than once. Yet when I go to the store to do my shopping she's still there doing the same shit. Thank god I left that place because I can guarantee she's going to send someone to the hospital or get someone killed.
You should tell corporate or something. They'd order her termination pretty fucking quick
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used to unload trucks, coworker was complaining about heart burn. He was gone for 30 minutes and i made the joke someone go find him i don't want to be the one to find his dead body. He was dead, massive heart attack.
I worked at a Sears Warehouse in the early 2000's. A guy who worked for UPS did a delivery for us and went to a neighboring warehouse do do another drop off. We saw the paramedics arrive there. The next day went to work and they had another person doing deliveries. We learned He died of a heart attack while he was unloading the truck only 5 minutes after leaving us. At his funeral there were people from several of the businesses he delivered to paying respects.
My first job. The new head of the installation called each one of us separately to his office for introduction. While I was in there, he gets a call from a family member that there's an automobile accident. He looks really stressed. Later that morning one of my coworkers found him, dead, in the wash room, from a heart attack.
Personal one here: I worked in a chemical plant and we were 'recycling' rosin. Stuff was stored in barrels and we were opening the barrels and busting up the solid rosin into smaller pieces and then shoveling those pieces into a kettle to be melted and used for other processes. Well, we had just finished filling the kettle and things were all melted when the main operator starting the pump out process (so the kettle would be empty for another batch). Well, the process was to blow the pump line with steam to make sure it was open and then start the pump. It was a very cold day and a steam trace line was broken near the large vessel where the rosin was to be pumped. Instead of checking the target vessel, the operator saw the steam rising and assumed the line to the target was open. So, instead of following the second procedure of relieving pressure on the line, he opened the pump valve... What he did not know was that the line was closed off to the target vessel and he just pressurized the line with 150 pounds of steam. Then when he opened the pump line the 150 pounds of steam blew back through the pump and into the kettle we had just filled. 350+ degree hot rosin blew out of the kettle. Some of it landed on my right side and burned my right arm, shoulder and side of my face; 2nd and 3rd degree burns. Lazy operator scarred me for life.
Sounds like a villain origin story
I am sorry to hear this.
When I was in my early 20's working for an electrical contractor specializing in server rooms, another apprentice and I were tasked with running conduit for power and data into the new server room from a set of panels like 150 feet away. He was bending the pipe and I was standing in the suspended ceiling (on a ladder of course) hanging it on threaded rod hangers that I had already shot into the deck above. Unfortunately for me, the lighting in this area was fucking ANCIENT 2x4's that had those Bakelite plug in connectors. The problem with Bakelite is that it becomes very brittle with age, and after a long time it will basically disintegrate into tiny crumbs and dust if it gets whacked. As my buddy was handing me a stick of 2" EMT, I lost my grip and the end of the pipe whacked into the top of one of the lights, causing the Bakelite connector to crumble, and the end of the EMT nicked the 277 volt line feeding the light. These were 20 amp 277 volt commercial lighting circuits...and a huge fireball that came out of the top of the light, rolling over everything in the ceiling for like 8 feet in every direction (including me of course). I immediately covered my face, knocking myself off the ladder, and fell through the ceiling almost cartoon style. It was awful. I took down a 30' section of ceiling. The lights thankfully were held up with separate wire ties to the deck not just clipped onto the grid so thankfully they didn't fall down on top of me. Thanks the OSHA inspectors who were on staff at the client...I was wearing gloves, safety glasses, and a hard hat, otherwise I may have gotten really fucked up. In the end I burned off a chunk of my beard and singed my eyebrows, and I got banged up from the fall, but that could very well have been a fatal incident. Fuck companies who still have Bakelite lighting connectors.
Five or six years ago I watched my coworker fall 40 feet off a roof. He survived the fall and the noises he was making will never leave my mind. He kept grabbing my arms and looking at me with his eyes wide open like he had something he needed to tell me. I don’t know what he was trying to say but I told his family he wanted me to tell them he loved them.
I worked at a pet food store. We were having a store meeting on a Sunday morning when we suddenly heard banging at the front door (all glass). We went up there to check what was happening and a coworker from a different store location was at the door bleeding with his dog and he ran to the front corner of the store and collapsed. Another dog (the aggressor) ran in and almost went for him again, but luckily we were able to chase the dog out. My coworker and his dog just lay bleeding in a corner for a bit. They were both freaked out and bleeding. We tried getting the owner's information for the other dog but she kept talking in circles and trying to lie or avoid answering questions. She was using a broken retractable leash for her dog and never trained her dog... and considering he had leash aggression, it was only a matter of time before he attacked another dog and person. That morning just happened to be it.
One of best workers at my plant was forced to drive from Greenville to Charlotte, after he was already on the clock for 12 hours. We told the previous shift supervisors and managers to get one of their people to take the two letters to Charlotte, since they forgot to send it on the truck. Our plant manager, made him go and the transportation manager kept texting him asking if he's made it yet. The last time he texted, my coworker looked down as soon as an 18 wheeler came to a complete stop. He crashed into the back becoming trapped as the postal van caught on fire. He burned alived to deliver two letters, which also burned. [A news page from the crash](https://www.wcnc.com/article/traffic/deadly-crash-closes-i-85-nb-lanes-saturday-morning/275-425505092)
Jesus Christ. Did his family sue? Were they charged? That is terrible.
His wife and kids got paid a lot of money from it, and no they weren't charged. Though they no longer work here, they got the postal shuffle, including the plant manager.
A mail carrier near where I used to live died of heatstroke. He had complained to his manager that he wasn't feeling well, and was threatened with discipline if he didn't make it back in time. The manager kept her job.
Damn. This is why unions are necessary when management fails us. I also work in a mail carrier and our warehouse has NO air conditioning. So whenever someone says they're not feeling well they immediately get sent to our 24/7 on duty fully licensed nurse to get checked out, rest for at least 15 minutes, hydrated, etc. And if they're not OK, they get put on modified duty for that day or sent home.
That's fucked. I could never work at a station for that reason alone.
This is horrifying. He shouldn't have been put in that position and made to go. Over some letters, what a waste of that poor guys life.
A coworker was killed by a freight train. Nothing left but the splatter on the locomotive.
We’ve unfortunately had a lot of train vs people incidents where I live. I promise that like 10 years after the accident someone found a skeletal foot or hand or something when getting their roof redone. Trains send people, or parts of them, flying.
I was working on a HVAC contract in West Virginia. A guy with a Pettibone was carrying something and it was blocking his view. He struck a 34.5KV Potomac Edison Transmission line and, I was facing away when he did. It look like the sky suddenly went black from the arc from the line because he got to close. The line was still live so and intermittingly arcing off the machine so they could not rescue the guy until Potomac Edison got there to deenergize the circuit. He died on site inside the cab of the Pettibone.
When I worked for a certain home improvement store, we had a timbre saw on site for cutting sheet materials to order. One employee, let’s call him “Kevin”, worked on the department that operated this piece of equipment. Now, rule one of the timbre saw is that you don’t put *anything* near the blade that you can’t afford to lose. To aid in this, the sheets of wood are clamped down and secured to the cutting bed before you start the saw. Kevin however, did not do this. He had a habit of leaning the sheets against the cutting bed and holding them in place with his hand. After seeing this a number of times, and warning Kevin that he would be reported to management if it continued, I was not surprised to hear an emergency tannoy go out one day. Sure enough, Kevin had badly misjudged his distances and managed to cut through not only a sheet of MDF, but also most of his hand. Surgeons managed to save some of his fingers and it took a week to strip the saw down and clean out the chunks of Kevin. Bonus story: if a forklift driver tells you to stay in your car during loading, STAY IN YOUR FUCKING CAR. Seven tonnes of forklift leaves one hell of a mess when it accidentally crushes an idiot.
I work at a zip line at a day camp. A few years ago, one of my coworkers was finishing up at her station where she was sending kids on the zip line, and she was about to use the zip line herself. She forgot to make sure that her zip line tether was connected to her harness, and jumped off the platform. She fell thirty feet to the ground. I heard her hit the ground. I saw the broken bones sticking out of her leg. I heard her screams of agony even as I ran halfway across the 50 acre camp to notify the main office. Thankfully, she survived. She managed to land in the exact perfect way to minimize her injuries: on her feet so her legs were able to somewhat cushion her fall. If she had hit the ground in any other way, she would have been paralyzed or killed. She’s extremely lucky to be alive and walking today, but it’s still so haunting to know what could have happened. Now I’m the one who works at that station where she worked. I still feel a twinge of panic whenever someone jumps off that platform, even after I’ve double and triple checked everything. I still do my best to make sure an incident like that never happens again.
I have a scar on the top of my right foot which was made by a coworker stomp dancing in heels at a work party. She broke the skin and I bled all over the dance floor and every time I see that scar I think of her. She bought me a giant toblerone to say sorry so I did get something out of it other than the scar!
Some people pay good money for that
I worked at large manufacturing company that produced excavators and was hired at the same time as a guy my age. We hit it off and became good friends. His father was the second shift supervisor and we both worked second shift as material handlers and equipment operators. One guy on our team was a cranky old fuck that would always make mistakes and violate safety policies. One day in the middle of our shift my buddy was helping the old fuck use an industrial crane to move a part that weighed 800lbs. Somehow the bastard messed up the controls and sent this 800lb chunk of cast steel right into my buddy. It completely crushed his femur and fractured his tibia and fibula. The sound of his bones breaking was loud enough to be heard across the entire manufacturing plant. His screams were horrific. Everyone ran to help get the part off of him and call EMS. Everyone expect the old fuck. He just got into his forklift and casually drove outside of the facility looking for the next post on his list. My buddy was in the hospital for months and was in physical therapy for over a year. Since we were contractors the only thing he was given was a half paid medical bill and a “sorry that sucks but we no longer require your services.” He took his life and left behind his 3 year old daughter. I hope you’re at peace C. I have since focused my career towards safety and try my best to use foresight and intuition to prevent accidents like this from ever occurring. Oh and fuck you Daniel.
I’m a pharmacist and this one time I had a guy come in with his foreman, the man was clutching is head and blood was spurting from it as he had just been hit in the head with a steal girder! I told them that they needed the hospital and that a plaster wasn’t gonna be enough when the man pulled his hand away from the cut and the foreman saw bone and fainted lol Needless to say we called an ambulance for the steel girder man…
Car comes in for its first oil change. Tech straddles the bay to get a good grip/leverage on the oil filter. He slipped and caught his elbow on the hood latch. Lots of blood. He refused to go to the hospital and stitched it himself with carpet thread. Found out later he was high as a kite and didn’t want the required workers comp drug test.
Only heard the story but… I worked as a hazmat guy in a University. One of my task was to collect used embalming fluids from the anatomy department. They fill the body full of a preservative solution, let it steep in all the cells, then “bleed” it out into a container for us to collect and dispose. I don’t know the full process, but end result is a slightly pinkish clear liquid with the occasional chunk of flesh in it. Fun stuff. First time I went my boss told me to be sure to check if the cap was screwed on tight, and to drive the point home, he explained that the path between the anatomy department and the hazmat storage was full of bumps, which causes the liquid to slosh back and forth. One time he forgot to check, and he hit a bump. The used embalming fluid that was dancing back and forth turned into a big wave in the container, powerful enough to blow the unscrew lid off and splash all over my boss. I made triple sure those caps where screwed on TIGHT!
That's a good boss. "Hey, I know that people learn from mistakes, but in this instance why don't you learn from MY mistake."
I was offered a job as a site lead, managing a couple of hundred people. I turned it down, for personal reasons, after having hired just about all the workers. I knew the guy they got to be the site lead when I turned it down, and I knew he was a lazy, stupid, slapdash, careless, thoughtless son of a bitch. Well it turns out that he ran a lax safety culture and a guy i had hired was killed. I went back and looked at the emails he’d sent me during the hiring process “thank you sir for this opportunity, this will change my family’s lives forever”. Yep. It sure did. I’ll never forgive the guy who took the lead job, and I’ll never forget the guy who died in an entirely avoidable industrial accident.
Used to manage a shredding company (the ones with the mobile shredding trucks. The driver who was operating the shredder decided that the best way to clear a jam would be to jump in the shredder and jump up and down on the paper. It was very fortunate that the drivers helper was just outside the truck bringing more paper from up in the office building as he heard the scream from inside the truck and managed to hit the emergency stop button. The guy survived thanks to the helper but his foot did not. It was chewed up to about halfway up his foot. It did not look pretty. Edit spelling.
One of the first courses I ever taught (scuba instructor) was to a family of 3 in a lake. On the final dive of the course the father had an SCA (sudden cardiac arrest) at about 16m underwater. I surfaced with him and began preforming rescue breaths while towing him back to shore while his wife and son began to panic. He was obese and despite being strong for my size I really struggled to get him out of the water and tore my lat in the process. His wife and son were too distraught to help. I got him out and began administering CPR while screaming for someone to call 911 and trying to console his family. He was dead well before EMS arrived and I've never forgotten those memories. I had to take a few months off work to recover from the physical and mental injuries. I feel like crying just typing it out. I feel so guilty for not being able to save him.
You did everything you could, but I’m sure the guilt is heavy. I’m sorry you have that terrible memory in your life!
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I was an apprentice carpenter in a granite and concrete product quarry . We had to replace the floor on a shed 60ft up on the side of a crusher tower ( where the big rocks go up a conveyor belt and get dropped down into the crushers at the bottom ) Long story short I fell through a loft sized hatch that was just covered with a plastic sheet . Only my broad shoulders and my arms locking out stopped me falling to my death . I was literally just dangling there by my elbows , legs just hanging in mid air . This was in the 1980s before safety is what it is now .
In 1995 I worked at a furniture factory. We bought lumber as logs and cut and machined it to the sizes we needed to make the various piece of solid wood furniture that we sold. Anyway, it was a small company, not very well funded. Summer came, and the owner saw a chance for cheap labor, so he hired in a bunch of high school kids. Technically, OSHA rules would not allow anyone under 18 to operate equipment. The owner wasn't so big on OSHA or having machinery with the right guards etc. One of the high school students was the quarterback of the football team. He was heavily recruited and it was rumored that he was going to sign a letter of intent to play for a Big 12 school. Anyway, that day he was helping one of the old timers cut parts on a big rip saw. He goes to grab a piece of wood that is coming off the blade and it kicked in a way that he didn't anticipate. He somehow managed to cut off his hand at the wrist. In shock, he tries to grab his hand with his good hand, and cuts 3 fingers off his other hand. I remember we were waiting for an ambulance to arrive while the boss had me under the saw looking for the fingers.
Closed a milk silo the wrong way, I caused a 3,000L river of milk to run through the factory.
I was a volunteer firefighter throughout high school in my hometown. 17YO at the time of this event Responded to a call just after starting school for the day- left class with a friend of mine who was also volunteering. Ended up responding to a fatal vehicle collision whose victim was a girl we knew of who was only a few years older than we were. Every firefighter was heartbroken. That was a hard day. I think the hardest part for me was the conversations I had with her boyfriend and grandparents when they passed though the scene later in the day. The life lessons learned when you see such tragedy first hand really is incredible. Cherish every day you have because you never know if you’ll have tomorrow
I was working at Thorpe Park and a colleague asked if I “dared him” to run under the magic carpet ride as it swung up in the air. I said absolutely fucking not and that I didn’t want him to do it. He decided to do it anyway while it was in motion he pushed through the safety gate, waited until it was at its highest and rushed underneath. He made it to the other side as it swung down, then as it came back up the air current was strong enough to pull him slightly backwards towards the ride again. As the ride went up to the top he lost his balance and fell on him bum under the ride. He scrambled like a rat out of a sinking ship and pushed so hard into the safety barrier to get away that he cracked the acrylic panel on it. The operator in the booth saw the whole thing and was laughing hysterically while I couldn’t believe what had just happened. The dingus who nearly got crushed by 2 tons of metal and plastic had turned grey and just sat still, gasping on the other side of the ride until it finished and I unloaded the guests. Apparently a few of the guests in the queue complained about him (there were a lot of people waiting to go on the ride as well as some waiting at the exit for their friends so LOTS of witnesses) and he actually got fired for it. Not an accident as such but Odin damn, it was closer than he thought it was going to be.
I broke my back at 20yo while roofing and my site boss came to see me in the hospital. He gushed on about how lucky I was to get workman’s comp like I’d hit the jackpot. Years later I heard that he had sawed into a live wire on a site and the current blew off one elbow and a kneecap. I checked in on him to see how he was managing and he was happy af to get what he saw as early retirement. Really made me realize both how fucked worker mentality can become and how ridiculously unsafe that restoration company was.
It’s not really that bad but it does haunt me all the time so… I’m a teacher and use those big cutting boards with the big blade arm all the time. One time I was trying to cut some task cards up really quickly before I picked them up from lunch and accidentally went down HARD on my thumb. I was prepared for pain and it to be deep. But as quick as I winced, I realized I didn’t feel pain and the blade almost bounced up. It had hit my fake acrylic nail and didn’t go through. It barely left a scratch indent. Oh my god. Relief, shock, embarrassment washed over me at once. I was lucky. Not bad at all. However, it now haunts me every time I use the paper cutter and I am very nervous. Lucky to have learned my lesson the not so hard way.
Worked at a car dealership during the height of pollen season. Multiple times a day we would have to drive around a pressure washer and spray off the cars to keep them looking clean. A dude was spraying one down and noticed a spot on a car wasn't coming off with the pressure washer so he decided to spray it while rubbing the spot with his hand. It blew the skin right off of about 3 knuckles like it was butter. I grabbed some clean shop towels and wrapped it up as fast as I could but there was blood EVERYWHERE by the time I got to it and could get to a phone to call 911(this was pre cell phone days).
I worked in a grocery store (still do, honestly). My boss had to move a triple stacked pallet of sugar, and her bright idea was to lift the top 2 pallets with the forklift, move them to the side, and then have me move the pallet on the floor over to where she needed it, and then stack the 2 other pallets on top. She moved them, I And started moving the other pallet. I hear 2 screams, look up, and see 2 pallets of sugar coming down at me. I take off running, hit the wall, and hear the 2 pallets hit the ground. The power Jack I was using was buried under 2 pallets of sugar, and something started burning the sugar, because all we smelled was caramelizing sugar
Summer teenaged job and I was working in an amusement park that had more flags than you could count on one hand. In the sandwich place. About the only place that didn’t fry everything. The line ran out of roast beef, and I had to clean the slicer. Could not find the chain mail gloves. Supervisor yelled at me to just skip them. I said no. He called me a wuss. Proceeded to start cleaning the slicer. And removed the tip of his finger. Wrapped his hand in a towel, told me I was right, and to please walk him to the nurses office.
My dad worked at a kind of factory . He was driving behind a truck full of steel pipes One of the pipes fell of went trou the windshield and between his legs . A milimeter to the right and I was not answering this post.
I was a substitute kindergarten teacher for 1,5-3y olds as a part of my mandatory alternative (didn't go to military) service. A kid ran out from the queue when going out for a walk and hopped on a grass area on the sidewalk, ran some more and then stumbled and fell. When I went to help him get up I noticed 20cm away from his head was a concrete reinforcement rod sticking out from the ground. Had he fell a little closer you can imagine what could've happened. So a very effin lucky accident that I'll never forget.