New Forum: Safety Competition!

Well we designate all our road jobs hard hat areas because on risk assessment the risk of something falling off a dumber or structure is high, if as has happened to me a passing truck whipped my helmet off,I left it go and got a new one with a chin strap and subsequently fitted straps to the rest of the crew.

nice shirt

My friend and I a long time ago where running our first New Holland LS 125 (very small machine thankfully) and were attaching a chain to the bucket to pull something out. My friend told me to lower the arms which I did and his hand got caught in the hydraulics. Very bad. We got it out and everything was all good but we learned a big lesson. The home owner's daughter came out (who was stunning) and he had to hold back the pain, precede to smile as if nothing was wrong. Be careful around all machinery no matter what! That was a good 10 years ago and safety has become a major concern of mine since that point

We had an accident on the weekend just gone.
We were up on our farm using the backhoe to move a 1000L water container in our machine shed.
My JCB has roll over forks fitted which are very difficult to see from the operator seat as the front bucket obstructs view.
My father in law was acting as spotter and guiding me up to the water container. He was standing away to the left side of the machine and water container, using his right hand to signal me. Unbeknown to me (and to him), he had his left hand resting on the top of the water container. He signalled me to tilt the forks upward and as I did, his left little finger was crushed between the top of the water container and a horizontal timber purlin along the back wall of the shed.
This accident resulted in him having to have surgery to fix his finger which also required inserting a pin to support the broken bone. Luckily it was not too mangled and it was not his whole hand.
A valuable lesson was learnt to keep not only your body, but also your hands well away from machinery and equipment whilst in operation....

Abscraperguy said:

Just reading through all these posts and got some questions for you guys. What do you think about hard hats on road construction jobs? I've heard that in some provinces here in Canada its optional if no overhead work is being done. I know in one jursdiction what started this was a flag girl lost her life because of hers. A wind came up and knocked hers off and she unknowingly stepped out in front of a truck when she reached to get it. Lets hear your thoughts.

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Out here in Kalifornia, CalTrans (DOT) worksites require Hardhats. Period.

I have been doing a lot of work on the edge of Bay Area freeways this year, (sometimes even protected by K-rail!) and although most of it doesn't involve overhead, I have gotten to appreciate my hard hat. If I am grade-setting, shoveling, etc for the backhoe it has protected me from tossed/dropped/bounced/shaken or otherwise launched rocks/clods from jerky operators/hoes. Since it is often tight areas, I frequently find myself working next to the stick/bucket, and tend to keep my head down so if they slap me, it gets the hat first.

Most any of the quarries, A/C plants, dumps, recycling yards, recycling quarries (that is where they are "quarrying" a giant mountain of recycled a/c and concrete, sometimes in the middle of a commercial area, providing Class 2 Base Rock, sometimes even using it in the A/C plant next door), etc in this area require hard hats and vests if you are out of the truck.
(I drive 10-wheeler, haul equipment behind it and with our Cozad, operate, repair and just generally find as many ways to try to get into trouble with the largest and yellowest pieces of iron I can find!) (Oh, and get quite a bit of stick-time with our new "Green" Excavator. It's made out of Recycled Iron, and Oak, a Renewable Resource. It's powered by Bio-Fuels, and has a low Greenhouse Gas Emmission as long as I haven't eaten too many beans...)


On the original thread subject, I have no interesting stories, since I have ALWAYS been safe... :usa :angel:Cowboy:guns:badidea:bash:crazylmao
I really have had a boring life as far as accidents have gone, but I can't say the same thing for my Guardian Angel! I have had or been the intended victim of so many close calls in many different lines of hazardous work over the years... But they never got interesting. I learned many things from them, including which operators to stay away from!



Well, there was the time I needed to move one of the Mercedes 1017A 4x4 flat-bed trucks we had gotten from US Military Surplus so I could start working on it to get it ready for sale, and after starting it up and beginning to drive it, I discovered that it had air-over-hydraulic brakes, the spring-pod air-release parking brakes had been backed off so just because it would move didn't mean I had enough air pressure, and it took quite a while to build up useable air pressure, I didn't know how to shut the engine off and none of the various knobs, switches, buttons, pedals, keys, verbal command recognition devices, etc did anything to further the goal of not furthering the progress down the slight hill towards the front end of an old Intertrashinal. Oh ya, all the labels were in German, and I have a grasp of about 6 such words, most of them not helpful to this situation. Although knowing how to ask for the nearest restroom might have been helpful afterwards...

So, after doing an integrity test on the bumper mounts, I waited a while until the air built enough to apply the brakes and pop the clutch to kill the engine (not easy with that Mercedes Diesel either... I like them!), popped the cab and discovered that to kill the engine you have to step on the left-heel controlled exhaust brake floor button, which has a linkage going from the air cylinder on the exhaust butterfly over to the injection pump to shut fuel down. Very nifty system. It doesn't work however if you don't have air pressure, plus the linkage was rusted in place so it didn't work anyway!
The next one I moved down the hill to the shop had no brakes, so I put it in low gear, and had the big forklift drive a few feet in front of me in case I lost the gear. I liked those trucks!


Ben~

Always check the equipment for a fire extinguisher if you are clearing land by yourself. If you don't get burned trying to put the fire out on your dozer belly pan You will have a heart attack trying get enough dirt up to put the fire out. Regardless if you have insurance or not, human nature want let you just stand there and look at your equipment go up in flames

Saw an operator turn his backhoe while reversing using the right side brake. Thing is, he didn't look before and the speed he swung with, the cutting edge of the loader end tore through another guys shirt without touching his stomach (Yes he did try jumping backwards out of the way) Everyone froze for a bit. Needless to say, he slowed his pace for the remainder of the job.

I dont tell this story much but here goes...........

Back when Deere introduced the 450C I was a young buck just moving from the shop to a service truck and one day got sent to check a steering problem on a brand new 450C delivered to a job site. It had been raining for several days and the whole location was mud and water puddles. I arrived at the location and fired up this dozer moving it back and forth........ everything seemed to work ok including the steering.

So I then decide to drive it around a bit and see how it operates. I drop it in gear and take off tracking thru a water puddle only to find out that "puddle" was a hole 12ft deep......ointhead

No fence, no barrier of any kind around this hole and it turned into a real heated conversation as to who was to blame and too what degree.

I never assume that puddle of water is just a puddle of water

Does anyone know where i can purchase/find rock truck training materials??

scarfo said:

Does anyone know where i can purchase/find rock truck training materials??

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There are several places to get them.

MSHA has a variety of training aids, and has a lot of haul truck material.

www.msha.gov

Here is a list of training aids:

http://www.msha.gov/training/catalog/trainingproductscatalog2006.pdf

You can also search for the MSHA channel on youtube. They have hundreds of videos, and it is all free.


Cat has training material as well as classes you can take.

http://www.cat.com/operator-training

http://safety.cat.com/

There are others, but these will get you started.

Protect your eyes,wear your safety glasses!

If you see someone doing sompthing stupid on your site, make sure they understand what theyre doing wrong because in canada anyone that observes a "unsafe activity" can and will be held responcible.

I had a labouror that had no common sense once and he decided to slide down the frosted sewerpipe in the ditch while waiting to check grade. He got alot of speed up and slid over the first bell then caught the 2nd bell and ate S*** resulting in a broken ankle and Me being held responcible as an observer!

Hey, Well It's hard to resist a thread like this.

I'm a younger operator. I've been driving the kit since the age of 10, But when this story happend I had only ever driven empty tractors (or loaded on flat ground) And Excavators (trackhoes, backhoes, 360's)

A couple of summers ago (before I went to college to do "H&S 101") I Took on a pretty simple bit of work digging into a hillside for a garage. Had a Kubota KH 3 tonner and a Kubota B8200 Tractor and 3 ton trailer at my disposial.

A couple days into it we were making good progress and I was now running both machines (load trailer, drive tractor etc) And Getting abit lazy on my tipping, and rather overloading a tractor probably only ment for a 2 ton trailer topps.

I was Reversing up a slope (tipping up hill in a safe manner, with the front loader grounded aswell as the brakes) and dumping the load into a pile beside the bank, the area to do this was gradually getting smaller (About a 15' track with the bank one side and a pond the other)

Long story short though, the first time I took a shortcut, I did'nt quite get the trailer up strait, On level ground this would'nt matter. But once I tipped and the load started coming out I saw the trailer tire and I'm pretty sure that's the fastest I've ever tried to drop a tipper. Needless to say I was too late and the Trailer was sideways, the tractors drawbar was bent to about 45' and the tractor was on two wheels.

We wasted the rest of the day getting the tractor and trailer workable again. And I was lucky to of kept the job and been put back on the swinger (my main machine, but I did'nt end up back on the tractor until we were back to strait tipping).

That coulda all been avoided. Firstly If I had known what I now have learnt at college about the safety aspects, I would'nt of tipped the trailer like that. I was also trying to be as fast as possible, and the overloaded trailer caused the accident. Not to mention I did'nt really know what I was doing with the trailer, If in doubt, say.

Simple fact is though it was my mistake, I took the responsibility, and as A result I stayed on site. (I'm also proud to say that It's the only serious accident I've really had)

Sorry for the Incredibly long post.

boom stops are their for a reason be it skid loader or dump use them. was working on a case 70 xt never worked on one before just started at a bobcat dealership. Buddy asked me to look at something i think an interlock. well anyways lifted the arms put the stop in didn;t lower the boom to touch it had another buddy push the safety lock on his side and pushed on a lever under the cab that come to find out was part of the lift circuit. boom slams done on the stop look up and the owner says good thing you put that stop in. I stopped right then and their working on it and said take it to the case dealer.

Taking the house of an excavator to remove and replace broken bolts in the swing bearing almost had the house fall on me. It was on a two post lift but i didn't have it far enough back on the lift so as i took the last bolts out it rocked back and landed on the lift just on the back two pads. luckily had a safety chain on the front of the machine to the lift and it held it in place. everyone was at lunch and it would have been forty minutes before i would have been discovered had i not of had that safety chain on there.

A nother buddy had his 3 middle toes taken off by a tilt cylinder on a skid steer by his buddy. buddy 1 was on the front of the machine and told buddy two to roll the bucket back and had his foot in the wrong place and off came the toes. looks pretty funny when he wears flip flops which he does quite often

all the previous post was in the last 3 years have really started paying attention to safety since then. It really only does take a second of not paying attention to get your self in trouble.

Some years ago, I was running a d-65 in an open field, stripping topsoil. I was in this field all by myself for the entire morning, not a soul around. It was about 5 min before lunchtime and i was finishing a long push. When i got to the end, I shook my blade off and threw the dozer in reverse. Maybe a second later, I heard a load crash. Being startled, I turned around quickly to see that my boss was following me in my tracks to pick me up for lunch, but i didn't know he was there. All I seen was his truck getting pushed backwards and guys bailing out of the bed of the truck. The only thing that kept my tracks from climbing over the hood of the truck was the long tow hitch on this dozer was buried into the radiator, the radiator into the fan and so on. Naturally I thought for sure that I just lost my job but my boss admitted that he should have never followed me that close. He also admitted that the accident would not have happened if he wouldn't have gotten so damn scared when i backed up that he missed reverse and went right into park. Just an old funny story and nobody got hurt.

Operators train your laborers..they are your best friend in tight situations,They are the extra set of eyes you need, but they can be your worst nightmare,and never let them wear I-pods,or bring their cell phones on the site,I had an incident ,or what you might call a wayyy to close call,after sanding my ditch, I had swung around to set my line , moved back to start my next cut , as I swung back to start my cut,there on my blind side ,was my laborer ,ear buds in , texting away,I was all brakes and a**holes trying to avoid him,I just managed to boom over his head.I was running a 450 Hitachi,with a V-bucket..If I had hit him at full swing..hell I don't even want to think about it...His excuse for being there was he couldn't text while in the ditch, no reception..and laboures wonder why operators become ANAL about things

We were disassembling the main boom of a 2250 starting at the tip. The boom section has the FACT connection technology so all you have to do is take a sledge and knock out the two bottom pins to release the section of boom. We had the operator boom the crane down to where the tip was resting on cribbing and knocked the first pin out on one side, and started on the other side. The guy on the other side was standing inside the boom knocking the pin to the outside of the boom. Well unfortunately for him, he was standing with his boot directly under the chord for the boom tip. As soon as he knocked his pin out, the entire boom settled right down onto his foot and sunk about 6" inches into the sandy soil. Subsequently his boot wrapped around the chord to the point where his toes were almost touching his shins. He crushed his foot and had to wear a special boot for a few months but has made a full recovery. We have changed some techniques for our bullgangs, for example: while assembling the crane we now stand inside the boom and knock the pins in from the inside so when we disassemble the crane we can knock the pins out safely from outside the boom. We were also not completely sure why the boom settled so much (there was an inexperienced operator in the cab at the time) and maybe a mix of loose soils and inadequate cribbing kept the boom from sinking.

I always got told never to rely on a parking brake, as too many operators push / pull dumpers and abuse equipment. How easy is it to park into a pile of muck, park across aslope, turn steering, or just lower all equipment to the ground.
Also i learnt your life is NEVER worth your job.