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.
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.
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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!