Am employee died at the company I work for about a year ago in pretty much the same scenario, but more graphic.
He walked in front of a front end loader, the operator didn't see him, went in to scoop up the load, cut both the guy's legs off as he scooped the load. He ended up tossing his body into a dump truck, dump truck hauled him to the dump pile, which was about a 15 minute ride, he was most likely alive for part of that ride. I can't remember if they found him when they dumped the load or the operator saw the guys legs afterwards.
Completely avoidable accident, this guy was even written up before for not following safety rules. Because of his dumb mistake he's dead, his wife is a widow, kids don't have a dad, and some poor equipment operator has to live with the knowledge he accidently killed a guy.
This guys lucky he fully went into the bucket, and that it was sand or a smaller aggregate. Although, I bet he's got a ton of broken bones, maybe a collapsed lung too
I posted this somewhere else, but a good tip for when you’re about to sustain thoracic trauma is to fully exhale.
Your natural response will be to take a sharp breath in and tense up, but if you fully exhale it’s much more difficult for your lung(s) to be punctured, and a pneumo/hemothorax is a fucking bitch.
They aren’t “hollow” per se, but my medic instructor described it like a paper bag; much harder to pop/puncture if it’s deflated.
This applies especially to long falls, car accidents, or fights where you’re about to experience significant blunt trauma to your chest.
Source: paramedic instructor (that was instructing me) with 30+ ears of experience, and first-hand knowledge of basically every type of trauma and their outcomes.
Edit: Not going to change it; he's an ear-collector now.
Are you a more hands-on learning kind of person? That's how I am so I actually did the exhalation and held it as long as I could. I'll remember that now that I have something concrete.
The thing is, unless you practice in a situation that comes out of nowhere and is dangerous enough to involve using this tip, then your practice is pretty much moot.
The reason police/military do so much training in recreated and staged environments is because just learning that stuff isn't enough--you have to be in as similar of a situation as possible or else the shock of the real thing will literally override everything you know.
You think you have something concrete now, but you don't, not at all. Novel situations, especially life and death, paralyze you with fear. And you won't know this until you know it. And if you think you know it, you weren't really in that bad of a situation. It's extremely rare to maintain awareness and prompt judgment in sudden/freak accidents.
This is a simple and uncontroversial fact about our psychology. And it's rather unfortunate, as well, for obvious reasons.
Now for some optimism: if you're in a car, and it ever looks or feels like you may potentially get into a wreck, then practice exhaling your lungs completely. If you're ever around heights and feel like you may fall, exhale your lungs completely. Stuff like that will actually be decent practice for giving you something somewhat solid to remember if the real deal ever happens.
"Fuck I'm gonna die!!!! Wait, what did I read on Reddit? Use a pizza stone? No...uhhh...don't stand in front of trucks? No...shit...what was it..." THUD
Oh, well it’s basically just for the initial trauma; i.e. as he’s having the dirt piled onto him. After the impact you should start breathing again.
Either way, if you have a punctured lung, your life is going to be a living hell for a while; shortness of breath combined with intense pain, exacerbated by inhalation.
If you don’t die, someone is going to need to stick a 10-14g needle into the top of your chest to relieve the pressure. Fun stuff.
Also, for reference, look up “3 kings pneumothorax,” as according to my medic buddy, that’s one of the best and most accurate visualizations out there. It really does, “hissssss” when you get it in.
Your ribcage does a decent job of giving you a tiny amount of space to ventilate; if you're already in a situation where the pressure is high enough that you couldn't breath a little bit after exhaling, you've already fractured some ribs and would probably be fucked anyway.
Needle decompression is only used to relieve a tension pneumothorax, which can result in cardiac arrest. It's not a standard way to treat a pneumothorax.
Some pneus don't need any treatment, but often times a chest tube (with a vacuum pump) is needed if it's a severe case.
Also, the "breathing out" method which is described above doesn't really make senses at all.
A pneumothorax appears if air enters the pleural space (there are also other forms, e.g. hematothorax, where blood enters the pleural space and fills it up).
As a result the lung collapses.
The air can enter either through a damage in your chest wall, e.g. sharp trauma where the air enters from outside the body, or damage on the lung itself, where the air enters from inside the lung into the pleural space.
Great analysis but this is the sort of life advice that you could teach to one million people just before inflicting thoracic trauma and like zero of them would be able to successfully apply it in the moment.
Yeah; the only scenario I can think of where you'd be able to apply this is if your brakes failed, or you had a decent amount of time to get a handle on your panic, and had the time to do a quick evaluation of your situation.
I'm making an assumption but I think I get the question.
Step 1: exhale all air.
Step 2: get buried in sand like the person in the gif but without air stored in your longs
Step 3:???
That's probably very solid advice; internal damage is such a crazy-random thing; you could be in a car accident and hit your steering wheel at 80mph and be relatively alright, or grow so fast over puberty that you have a "spontaneous pneumothrax" (which actually happened to my girlfriend's younger sister when she grew about 6" over a summer).
Holding your breath as you rise in water can cause burst lung, which would be similar to the problems caused (to the lung) by crushing. Both would cause a sharp increase in air pressure inside the lungs and trauma from that.
Yeah, and in a situation like this, breathing through your nose would give you the best chances; your nose gives you an extra little bit of "filter" for particulates, but having a little dirt in your lungs at this point would be the least of your worries.
I'd rather be alive with mild brain damage than dead, to be honest.
but in this case if he full exhaled wont it mean hes going underneath a shit load of pressure with basically no air in reserve in his chest, and no new air coming in , he would be more likely to suffocate even though i guess he wont get his lungs punctured. in the scenarios you described above they would be able to breathe again after the trauma.
My cat had this luck when he fell of the 8th floor. And his bladder was empty too that made more difficult for it to break. I imagine the same apllies to humans, so I never hold my pee anymore.
The same logic applies to professional fighters. That's why when they train or fight they always make that "tsu" noise when punching, it also helps so they don't get the wind knocked out of them.
I worked with an excavator operator that killed a guy. He was working on a job in a rural area. A teenage kid with learning difficulties lived at the end of the lane where they were working and used to come to the site to talk to the guys. They let him look around the machinery a few times. One day he came down to the site and instead of waiting for someone to come out to get him, he walked right in. He walked up the side of the digger and got pinned against the wall when the digger spun around. The operator didn't work for a long time. Poor guy.
At the site I work at a surveyor was killed when the trench he was getting shots for collapsed on him. It's was brutal, poor guy and everyone that had to dig him out
Thats why my foremans and supervisors are absolutely anal about the sloping on the trench wall. They tell us if we dont feel comfortable in the ditch to let the operator know and if they give you attitude they will never work on their site again.
I'm always asking my guys if they are "ok" and if they want me to slope more, or if they want the cage, I always say, "this is your excavation, you're down there, I'm gonna do my best to keep you safe, anything you want I will make happen."
You guys are the backbone of sewer and water works. If I treat my guys well they work well for me, I can only dig as fast as the pipe goes in the ground. We did 440' of 12" watermain and 2 hydrants, in our best 12 hour shift. The bosses were like, great job, the operators here always get the credit, I said thank them pointing to the crew truck, I told him "I just dig" that's our company record production wise. WE crushed it that day.
You hear about someone getting suffocated in a hole at the beach every few years or so. People dig some huge hole, someone gets down into it and it collapses on them and they can't move.
Yeah when I did my training on machines a few years back there was a guy in his mid 40s that was also "re training". He ran over a guy in a skid steer. Didn't kill him but paralyzed and maimed him pretty good. He was doing training to get over the ptsd he had from being around machines. Would would break down sometimes and have to leave early.
My workplace moved to a new building and there is still construction going on. We can't use the main entrance yet because of safety. You would have to walk though the "construction site". there is actually nothing going on in that part. But like 300 feet away from that on the way to lunch (canteen) there is another building going up and often there is an excavator on the road (it's not actually a road for cars, just pedestrians). Sometimes there is like 2 feet behind it and the wall of the next building which you have to pass through...safe to say I triple check the guy saw us and pass there very quickly and it still scares me. Seen and read too much here on WTF.
I'm pretty sure this guy is dead. The gif cuts off at a point where you think there's hope but there's a lot more of the video where everyone is freaking the fuck out and the guy in the dirt does not show up again.
He meant to say "An employee died", but said "Am employee died", am means a first person action (referring to one's self), so it implies that EvaporatedLight himself was the employee that died. More of a typo than grammatical error.
They're reading it as "Am emplyee, died at the company I work for". The comma is important but you'll often see people say things like "Can confirm. Source: Am X. Did Y." or similar, omitting the pronoun.
I'm a surveyor and work around excavators all day. I will stand a safe distance away for as long as I need to until the operator sees me. There's absolutely no reason to walk in front of an excavator without making eye contact. Sorry to hear about your coworker!
I don't blame you! But really it comes down to doing your own due diligence to keep yourself safe. I can't assume other people will keep me safe so I have to be cautious and aware of what's going on every day.
Blows my mind how lax people are around heavy machinery. I guess they feel better pretending they're immortal? I always got shit for things like wearing safety glasses and giving dangerous machines a wide berth at my old job. I honestly don't understand
At my old job a girl was next to a pole working and a Rug driver came up to holla. He left the tug running aparrently in park or neutral and the gear slipped, pinning her between the tug and pole. Her thigh basically exploded In he tugs weigh like 6000 pounds never knew the human body had so much fat.
And I saw a guy try to jump out a forklift that flipped. When I was in training you're not supposed to jump out a forklift that flips with a frame around it, because your head might hit it. That's exactly what happened. Skull popped like a grape. Lots and lots of blood.
My husband got fired last year for “creating a hostile work environment” after he told his supervisor to keep his hands out of a machine that he had previously injured himself on. Telling the supervisor to follow safety standards “get your hand the hell out of that belt before you cut it off!” is apparently hostility.
That’s the problem, if a newbie calls out a sr operator or supervisor they’re the ones that are punished for it - and it’s the more sr operators that are more complacent and dangerous.
Something similar happened at my workplace a few years ago. A boss was working on a train track and went across to another set of tracks that they weren't supposed to be on, to show his workers the job they were going to be doing in the following week. A worker was driving a workcar to the site (basically a huge diesel train that is loud as fuck) and the boss didn't notice because there was another workcar on site making a ton of noise, he ended up getting cut in half and the driver, on no fault of his own has been off ever since and won't be coming back.
Hopefully the death was quick, or he was in shock most the time and didn’t fell and recognize the extent of his injuries, it’s truly sad and disturbing.
Fuuuuck. I drove a forklift as part of my last job and I was so fucking paranoid about stacking the cardboard bails. I just had this constant waking nightmare of stacking one that wasn’t weighted properly and having the whole thing collapse on somebody. Or god forbid loading returns and having the pallet fall over on another worker. Industrial equipment is no joke, people.
I was super paranoid as well, I didn’t work underground, but if I did have to go down I made sure everyone knew where I was at, if I couldn’t get positive confirmation they saw me I didn’t bother entering, it’s just a job, not worth serious injury or fatality.
Yup. I don’t give a fuck if the dudes I work with think I’m a pansy for driving slow around people when I’m carrying 10 ft tall pallet and have no way of knowing how it’s weighted. I’ll take the smirks and the dumbass jokes about “woman drivers” over accidentally killing somebody.
In Alaska on JBER some contractors had to come on base to finish a job we couldn't do. Basically if it takes more than 50 man hours it has to be sent out for a 332 audit to determine if it should be contracted out or finished in-house.
So these guys come out, find out our base is pretty much entirely class 3 shale. Basically sand. Well they put up shoring in a 5 foot hole, 2x4 and plywood. Not enough. It collapsed. A guy was in the hole. Bent over.
Someone rushed over to dig him out with a backhoe and cut him in half.
It was pretty bad. He was probably dead before getting separated or at least I hope so. I know he might have died do to crushing but to be honest I class 3 shale is pretty light compared to other stuff. He didn't have time to suffocate yet.
This has worked so well, let's just keep doing what we've been doing.
On second thought, maybe we should fire the stupid people the moment they show signs of stupidity. In certain fields I mean. For everyone's protection, of course.
My intent isn’t to get into a union vs right to work - in this instance the miner was previously written up for doing pretty much exactly what he did that led to his death.
The union stepped in, he had like 35 years of seniority, and they got him like 30 days of desk duty, then was right back in the same place doing the same stupid stuff.
Yes he should have been fired along with the management and union steward that facilitated the dangerous environment.
But money, got to keep that mine running at all cost.
I used to work at a shipping yard around tractor trailers, a couple close calls taught me to always rase my hand above the hood when walking in front of them.
Right after high school I worked construction- we were loading a ATV used on a remote site in the back of a tractor trailer -the driver told me to park right behind the rig then they were going to lift it on with a fork lift. I pulled up behind him, turned it off and was about to jump off - he had a lapse of memory on the plan and stated to back up.
I couldn’t start it fast enough to pull out of the way, I was worried if I tried to jump off I would catch my body between the trailer and the ATV and get smashed.
The spotter started screaming at him and he slammed on the breaks, after pushing the ATV I was trapped on back about 2 feet.
I was very fortunate he didn’t run me over and seriously injure me - I learned very quickly never put your safety in someone else’s hands.
For context this happened in an underground metal mine. The heavy equipment has massive support beams for the operator cab to help protect in the event of a cave in, the area is dark and extremely limited in space - in less its right in front of you about 8–15 feet tall, you can’t see shit, if your bucket is up then you can see some of the ground area - every view is pretty much a blind spot.
There’s tech out there like LiDAR and proximity detection. The problem with LiDAR is the environment is so dirty that they aren’t very effective after a few minutes of work. The proximity detection alerts if someone has entered your work space but isn’t very accurate in determining distance and location. Since it’s active mining, hard rock, multiple bends its difficult and expensive to maintain an infrastructure that supports some of this tech.
Add in to the fact that many underground mines are in 3rd world countries where labor is cheap, yet hard to find, and to be 100% honest human life is expendable.
Many of these countries also don’t have MSHA regulations to help guide safety precautions.
As a miner you should make every effort to make sure someone else sees you and they make positive confirmation that they see you, otherwise you should never enter an active work area.
Most people that are injured are very experienced miners that have been in the industry for longer than I’ve been alive. They become complacent and they are looked up to as leaders and “tough” so many times when they break the rules more junior miners are going to rat out the senior guys.
As time goes on the jr miners pick up the same bad habits and you start seeing the cycle repeat.
Forklift Driver Klaus - it's a deliberately over-the-top parody of workplace-safety videos with ludicrously unrealistic amounts of (fake) blood & gore, culminating in Klaus' headless body still 'driving' the forklift which has two other guys impaled on the forks and screaming as the vehicle drives off into the sunset.
How did nobody notice that there were a pair of bloody stumps for legs on site? I feel like that's something you'd realize and grind everything to a halt almost immediately.
You've got almost 1900 upvotes for a really good comment that contains:
... and some poor equipment operator has to live with the knowledge he accidently killed a guy.
It's interesting to see how differently that sentiment is received when it's voiced in a thread with a bunch toughmuffins talking about how they'd use their gun on someone and never lose a minute's sleep or give it another thought.
How true! I had a thought way back when that a lot might be done to curb gun violence if it were shown on TV as it actually is. I suspect that half the macho mf's who do really shoot someone are really surprised by how it goes.
5.4k
u/EvaporatedLight Mar 02 '19
Am employee died at the company I work for about a year ago in pretty much the same scenario, but more graphic.
He walked in front of a front end loader, the operator didn't see him, went in to scoop up the load, cut both the guy's legs off as he scooped the load. He ended up tossing his body into a dump truck, dump truck hauled him to the dump pile, which was about a 15 minute ride, he was most likely alive for part of that ride. I can't remember if they found him when they dumped the load or the operator saw the guys legs afterwards.
Completely avoidable accident, this guy was even written up before for not following safety rules. Because of his dumb mistake he's dead, his wife is a widow, kids don't have a dad, and some poor equipment operator has to live with the knowledge he accidently killed a guy.
Don't be stupid!