Chit Chat
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17 Sep 14
14:59
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02 Oct 03
It didn't exist many years ago, I'm a bit of a stickler for this, but within reason.
The most extreme case was the construction of The Road of Bones in Russia, so named because the bones of those who died are buried there, an estimated 2,000,000.
The Suez Canal - 120,000.
The Panama Canal, the accident figures were presumably high, and as nobody knew how dangerous mosquito bites were, the death toll by disease alone was 22,000.
The Hoover Dam - 112.
The Forth Road Rail Bridge - 78.
Building the World Cup stadiums for 2012 in Brazil - 8.
The Empire State Building has less fatalities than Brazil - Official records state that only five workers were killed: one worker was struck by a truck
a second fell down an elevator shaft
a third was hit by a hoist
a fourth was in a blast area
and a fifth fell off a scaffold.
(All avoidable)
Hard to comprehend that in some places it's blatantly ignored and the results are not good reading for the 21st century.
In the last week there have been reports of 2 deaths and a serious injury. They happened some time ago and details are only coming out now.
Pirelli Tyres in Cumbria, a man shut in an oven that heats up to 150 degrees celsius. Baked to death.
^^ (Unbelievable, considering my first job in 1967 was as an apprentice electrician in a chemical manufacturing company in Stratford. Plenty of ovens there, about 100 feet square, where apprentices used to hide when it was cold and there wasn't much going on. There were no locks, and handles on both sides of the sliding iron doors. Plain common sense imo)
Baldwins, a well known crane hire company that I've used before. Brakes not checked, driver killed when it came off the road and crashed.
A farm in Hereford, a woman had both her arms broken in several places when they became trapped in a potato machine.
A few weeks back a man died when he fell into a slurry tank in Suffolk.
A one day music festival somewhere down Gloucester way was cancelled a month ago due to a fork lift truck driver being killed while preparing the stage.
I've had two relatively small claims brought about by lack of Health and Safety over the years, both 4 figures sums, one in 1977 and one in 1989.
And I was involved in one about 1997/98. A young lad about 18/19, would NOT facking listen to instructions, and we ended up crashing into each other, smashing his ankle to pieces.
I wasn't his supervisor at the time or he'd have been on a final warning in about a week for the things he did.
Better to be sacked than have a permanent limp and never play Sunday football again. I don't know what the firm paid out, if anything. He was 100% at fault, so I'd have given him fack all.
The most extreme case was the construction of The Road of Bones in Russia, so named because the bones of those who died are buried there, an estimated 2,000,000.
The Suez Canal - 120,000.
The Panama Canal, the accident figures were presumably high, and as nobody knew how dangerous mosquito bites were, the death toll by disease alone was 22,000.
The Hoover Dam - 112.
The Forth Road Rail Bridge - 78.
Building the World Cup stadiums for 2012 in Brazil - 8.
The Empire State Building has less fatalities than Brazil - Official records state that only five workers were killed: one worker was struck by a truck
a second fell down an elevator shaft
a third was hit by a hoist
a fourth was in a blast area
and a fifth fell off a scaffold.
(All avoidable)
Hard to comprehend that in some places it's blatantly ignored and the results are not good reading for the 21st century.
In the last week there have been reports of 2 deaths and a serious injury. They happened some time ago and details are only coming out now.
Pirelli Tyres in Cumbria, a man shut in an oven that heats up to 150 degrees celsius. Baked to death.
^^ (Unbelievable, considering my first job in 1967 was as an apprentice electrician in a chemical manufacturing company in Stratford. Plenty of ovens there, about 100 feet square, where apprentices used to hide when it was cold and there wasn't much going on. There were no locks, and handles on both sides of the sliding iron doors. Plain common sense imo)
Baldwins, a well known crane hire company that I've used before. Brakes not checked, driver killed when it came off the road and crashed.
A farm in Hereford, a woman had both her arms broken in several places when they became trapped in a potato machine.
A few weeks back a man died when he fell into a slurry tank in Suffolk.
A one day music festival somewhere down Gloucester way was cancelled a month ago due to a fork lift truck driver being killed while preparing the stage.
I've had two relatively small claims brought about by lack of Health and Safety over the years, both 4 figures sums, one in 1977 and one in 1989.
And I was involved in one about 1997/98. A young lad about 18/19, would NOT facking listen to instructions, and we ended up crashing into each other, smashing his ankle to pieces.
I wasn't his supervisor at the time or he'd have been on a final warning in about a week for the things he did.
Better to be sacked than have a permanent limp and never play Sunday football again. I don't know what the firm paid out, if anything. He was 100% at fault, so I'd have given him fack all.
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Anybody else had an accident that wasn't their fault, or seen or heard of a recent one?
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Death toll in recent gaza conflict 2100
Death toll in quatar building football stadiums |
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1200
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Death toll in recent gaza conflict 2100
Health and Safety? |
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surely elf and safety?
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No of course the death toll in gaza is not health and safety related. I do wonder what on earth the FA are thinking about even considering playing there.
On a lighter note I one suffered a very nasty gash on my arm in a roofing accident that's left me with a scar that looks like I once tried to slit my wrist. My dad also worked with a bloke who fell into a pot of bitumen. He died a horrible death weeks later. He knows another who touched a live electric pylon. He survived but didn't get a penny as he was moonlighting. |
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Death toll in recent Ukraine conflict due to the Russian Invasion 3100++
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Which Health & Safety rule(s) did that break?
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Health and Safety is something that most gaffers preach about to slow you down or make your job harder, but when they want something doing quickly then H&S goes out the window.
On this building site alone I've been told I'm not allowed to stand on 2 breeze blocks with a scaffold board spanning them for H&S reasons (it's 10 inches off the ground) and that I had to set up a scaffold. Yet last week they were more than happy for me to shimmy up a parapet wall to clean some mortar off their new summer house roof. |
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Safety harnesses not needed unless you go over 2 metres high.
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South Lake Land Wild Animal Park, Cumbria.
How hard is it close and secure a facking door behind you? That must have been a lovely phone call to make: 'Mr. McClay, how are you today? Now, you don't see it happen often in England, but due to Health and Safety measures not being strictly followed, I regret to inform that your 24 year old daughter has been killed by a Tiger.' |
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I had an office within a warehouse, with stored insulation products (imagine a Portakabin).
Every surface was covered in fiber, and it was almost impossible to speak on the phone, without almost choking on the stuff. I pointed it out to the MD and he was dismissive, so I brought in the H & S people. All they were interested in was they had seen that there were products stored on the flat roof, and no guard rail. |
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Sounds about right.
Mrs CMATs mother used to work in a H&S administration office in Barking before she retired. She got invited out by her supervisor one day to be a guest at the inspection of a local premises. She had to be TOLD to extinguish her cigarette as she was about to walk in. It was a food warehouse. |
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In 1989 I moved to London and talked my way into a job with a hoist firm in Bromley-by-Bow.
I had a week to learn how to strip down and repair electric wire-rope hoists at the workbench. If I could do that I'd be a fitter, if not I'd have to settle for "erector", which wasn't so good money. One drawback - I had to work on the 110v machines while they were still plugged in. My forman said "If you get through the last two days without shorting the machine or getting a belt, we'll let you loose on the 3-phase models." I did. F'ck knows how they got away with it. Actually I do know: we were all young and the money was good - why complain? |
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In 1967, long hair was the order of the day for most teenage youths.
Where I worked, two apprentice fitters, coincidentally with famous names, David Jacobs and David Bailey, both had motorcycles, and before the days of compulsory crash helmets, used to let their halr fly in the wind. They always observed safety regs by tying it up when using a stationary grinding wheel. A few weeks after I left I saw Charlie Gunn, another apprentice fitter, in a garage. He told me that Bailey had torn half his scalp off by rushing to get something done just before he went to go home, and had already untied his hair. He was lucky that somebody else pulled the main switch or he could have ground a hole in his face. Another tale I heard from Fords at Dagneham later, but I'm busy at the moment. |
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A stationary grinding wheel? That sounds like a lot of hard work!
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Primary school S.E.London,circa 1965/66 milk monitor running carrying a crate of ½ milk bottles tripped and had his wrists ripped to shreds.
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This happened 43 years ago.
My girlfriend worked in a toy factory in Roman Road, Bow, east London. I can’t recall which part of a toy she was making, but it involved a small press. On the side of the press was a pressure switch, so when the safety gate was lifted to get the part out, the plunger came off the switch and the power was cut off. Take out the part, put in a new one, close the gate, the power comes on, hit the foot pedal, down comes the press, does its job and goes back up automatically, open the gate, take out the part, start again, repeat it all day. The more she made, the more she earned. After being there a few weeks, some of the girls realised they could keep the pressure on the switch by sticking chewing gum and tape over it, thus speeding up the process by leaving the safety gate open all day. This didn’t make a huge difference, but she said that after an hour of cutting the time off for every part by not lifting and lowering the gate, they could get in front of the bonus quota and either do some more or stop for a smoke, and not lose any money. This meant that the electricity was never cut off, but if she accidentally stood on the pedal while taking the part out, the press would come down. She did, it did, and she was lucky only to crush the tip of one of her fingers. |
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Now for bigger stuff, but the same principle.
It happened at Fords,Dagenham, about 38 years ago. I never fancied working there, despite the money you could earn, and the overtime you could fiddle. This was told to me by a bloke who came to work for me in 1981/82. As you can imagine, all the production work in Fords is linked to bonuses, which obviously means the faster you go, the more you earn. This bloke’s job was putting sheets of metal into a press. Once it was in the gates were closed, the operative hits the foot pedal, the press comes down, does its job, goes back up, and out comes a car door pressed into its correct shape. So the pedal doesn’t accidentally get trodden on it was raised above the floor, and the operative has to lift his leg for each operation on the machine. When the pedal is up, the power is cut off. The second it’s pressed,…Wham!! Down comes the press. This poor bastard got his metal twisted a few inches out of line, the press came down and pressed it regardless when he hit the pedal, but it was a fack up and had to be scrapped. This was apparently a common occurrence when working at any sort of speed. The metal sheet was too far over and got tangled in the safety mesh at the side of the press. He leant in to free it with a hammer, struggled like fack as it was jammed, he leant a bit further in, and in a split second of lack of concentration, he lifted his leg to put it on the side of the machine to help him lean in some more, but he missed the side of the machine and caught the edge of the pedal with his foot. Wham!!! Down it came. The bloke who told me this said that all they virtually pulled out was a pair of jeans with his legs in it. The rest was, as he succinctly put it - ‘reduced to jam.’ On a lesser note, and it’s obvious if you think about it. I was told that if the long production line stops, there are too many people waiting about doing nothing. They actually have people on standby to go on the line if somebody needed to go to the khazi or leave the line for any reason. This following piece you’re about to read, I didn’t believe at first,but having heard it a few times from different people, and knowing how production lines work, it may well be true. Once you get into ’Ford Mode’ and become an automaton, you could earn pretty good wages. So it’s no surprise that some men (like my maternal grandfather, the miserable bastard) were there all their lives. It’s quite believable, given how many worked in Dagenham, and how old some of them were, that sooner or later, one will drop dead on the production line. And in the old days of harsher management, there was no cessation of work, they got the stand-by man in immediately, pulled the corpse away from the working area, and everybody else carried on. As bad as these cases are, they are nowhere as common as the deaths caused in the building industry by lack of Health& Safety. It’s the most dangerous sector in Britain. To put it in context, 448 British soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan since 2001. Over the same period, more than 760 construction workers have been killed on British building sites. |
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-29560514 A man was crushed to death in a concrete mixer because of the "gross negligence" of his boss, a court heard. Lee Balkwell, 33, died at a farm where he worked near Upminster, east London, in 2002. Simon Bromley, 45, denies unlawfully killing Mr Balkwell as a result of gross negligence. Opening the prosecution's case at Chelmsford Crown Court, Karim Khalil QC claimed Mr Bromley had a "lax attitude to safety". Mr Bromley, of Baldwin's Farm, Upminster, also denies breaking health and safety laws by failing to protect Mr Balkwell at work. 'Basic safety' The court heard Mr Balkwell had not been offered any training for using the mixer, and Mr Bromley had not provided him with safety clothing or equipment. Mr Khalil alleged Mr Bromley should have put basic safety measures in place to reduce the risk of a serious accident. These included locking levers which controlled the rotation of the drum, completely isolating the engine that powers it, and making sure the cab door was locked, so there was no chance the drum could start up with someone inside. In court, Mr Bromley was quoted as saying, "there's no safe way" to operate a concrete mixer when interviewed by police in August 2002. ^^^ That was from the BBC NEWS webpage. The BBC television news page, obviously put on there by a rank diquehead, refers to Upminster as east London. From the border of East Ham, which is the last part of east London travelling east, to Upminster, is over 11 miles. Big place, east London. Which begs the question, if it's in east London, why did he put in on the Essex news page? |
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Tony Broadbent denies manslaughter in roof fall
A man has denied the manslaughter of a man who died when he fell through a roof while working for him in Milton Keynes on 18 August, 2012. Roofing business owner Tony Broadbent, 60, also pleaded not guilty to failing to discharge his duty as an employer, when he appeared at Luton Crown Court. Mr Broadbent, of High Street, Harrold, near Bedford, is due to stand trial on 31 March. I bet Mr Broadbent is more safety conscious now. The man who died was his son, Kyle. |
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Are you seriously going back to a 2002 news item to show that somebody made a slight error in nomenclature??
 Ah! But, of course, it's an error which besmirches your favourite target...THE BBC!  |
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By the way, what was the actual cause regarding the man's fall through the roof. I guess the case is now over as it is another not-too-recent event?
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?X. (transpose).
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You're more than welcome to read the news on the BBC television pages, go to channel 130 then press the red button.
You'll find both items there, in different counties. |
