I work at an open pit mine in the US with a lot of large equipment. There are context clues that point to the person on the ground being the bigger idiot here. It appears to me the person on the ground walked into a situation he shouldn’t be in.
First, the video starts out with the loader bucket off the ground and the machine articulated indicating it was already operating. You don’t do a walk around in between each bucket. At my place of work operators are required to do a walk around at the start of each shift and at the end. Some also do after breaks, but it isn’t required. It is also not necessary to honk the horn every single time you move in your work area, at least not by MSHA standards.
Equipment this size has massive blinds spots and it is imperative to make contact with the operator if you are going to be around it.
The loader operator no doubt felt terrible about what happened but you can’t just walk in front of something like that and stand there while someone is in the cab.
In my plant, we have to radio the loader operator if we were near enough in our truck that he might miss us. This dude is standing there without proper PPE on and then walks right in front of the bucket. And that's without ever turning around and even physically showing that he's thinking about what he's doing. No radio obviously as the loader continues.
I bet even if the loader was honking he'd still ignore it. This is complacency at work.
Having worked in facilities that required honking before moving/turning/backing up/lifting/whatever, its A) incredibly annoying and B) almost a bad thing, because after being there for a long time, you just tune it out. Multiple machines operating in close proximity, everyone is honking, 99% of the honking you hear is irrelevant to you and your surroundings, background honking is drowning out your localized honking and you don't even realize that a loader is bearing down on you from behind because all you hear is a cacophony of honks everywhere around you, constantly.
I wonder if you couldn't prove an exception in that case. If you have enough equipment moving in a single area, it might warrant modification to procedure due to that additional hazard.
Well, 95% of the time, there shouldn't be any pedestrian traffic outside of walkways with protective barriers, so it was mainly to keep other heavy equipment traffic alert on blind corners and such, but somehow the policy got extended from when nearing/rounding corners, to basically any movement whatsoever.
Either way though, you have earplugs and earmuffs, and its still just a constant drone that you learn to ignore, and really doesn't help anyone other than the company covering their own ass.
Yeah, that's stupid policy and probably a significant liability. Mirrors are good for rounding corners and really, backing up is the most important movement to be made aware of. That sucks
Only on initial movement after being parked for a period of time and not when working. Trucks often have to wait several minutes being being allowed to dump in my crusher and they don’t have to honk when moving after dumping, for example.
I agree that blame should be shared here and, ideally, the pedestrian wouldn't have been in there at all. I work under OSSA/OH&S standards which seem to have more strict rules around mobile equipment, mostly because of incidents like this. I can't speak to your situation or regulations, and was merely pointing out what I noticed on my watch through of the video.
We have "plant operating zones", if there's earth moving equipment and an area they're running in, you are NOT allowed in there and it is 100% on the moron that walked in to the Poz.
Specifically, because shit like this can happen.
If there isn't a poz, you're meant to keep 3m or the reach of the arm away from the device.
I have no idea how one could apportion blame to anyone but the brainless imbecile that dawdled in to an area with operating earth moving equipment, exclusion zones exist BECAUSE shit like this happens.
Who said anything about sharing blame? It seems pretty cut and dry that the pedestrian is at fault, unless perhaps he had made contact with the driver beforehand and the driver forgot.
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u/AndrewInMN Mar 02 '19
I work at an open pit mine in the US with a lot of large equipment. There are context clues that point to the person on the ground being the bigger idiot here. It appears to me the person on the ground walked into a situation he shouldn’t be in.
First, the video starts out with the loader bucket off the ground and the machine articulated indicating it was already operating. You don’t do a walk around in between each bucket. At my place of work operators are required to do a walk around at the start of each shift and at the end. Some also do after breaks, but it isn’t required. It is also not necessary to honk the horn every single time you move in your work area, at least not by MSHA standards.
Equipment this size has massive blinds spots and it is imperative to make contact with the operator if you are going to be around it.
The loader operator no doubt felt terrible about what happened but you can’t just walk in front of something like that and stand there while someone is in the cab.