The Heavy Equipment Forums Safety Competition

[digger242j]

THE HEAVY EQUIPMENT FORUMS SAFETY COMPETITION
Leading by (lousy) example.​

The Purpose:

The purpose of the competiton is to get you, our members, to share your experiences. While we all try to be safe on the job, we sometimes do things that are not quite so safe. Hopefully, we learn valuable lessons in the process, and hopefully those lessons don't cost us anything that can't be replaced. If we share those lessons with each other, we may save somebody else from repeating the same mistakes.

Understand this--The competition, and the prize, are NOT for the purpose of rewarding unsafe acts. Rather, they are for the purpose of rewarding your ability to recognize what was unsafe in your acts, learn from that, and help others to do the same.

Competition Rules:

Entries should be educational in nature. The point is to help each other by sharing experiences. While we may learn from our mistakes, none of us has time enough to make them all. Let's learn from each other's mistakes.

All entries must be based on personal experience--something that you did, or that happened on your job; not "I heard about this thing that happened one time..."

There's no time limit on when this particular thing took place. Something that happened fifty years ago can be as educational as something that happened yesterday.

The award will not be given posthumously. Do something dumb enough to get yourself killed and you're disqualified. It would probably be good if you didn't kill anybody else either.

Enter as many times as you like. (Be aware that we'll probably try to stay very far away from the person with the most entries.)

All entries become the property of Heavy Equipment Forums

The way the competition works:

The competition will be held quarterly. This quarter will consist of July, August, and September, of 2007.

At the end of each quarter, we'll post a poll, listing all the entries for that quarter. Members will vote, and after one week, the poll will close. Entry with the most votes wins.

Voting will be at the whim of the membership. Vote for the story you liked best, the one that you found most useful, the one that was dumbest, or the one your buddy submitted. There's really no way to regulate that anyway, is there? The purpose of the competiton isn't to see who can write the best essay, but to help make each other aware of safety hazards that we can avoid, if we're made aware of them. Winning is just a bonus, since you being around to tell us the story is the real prize.

Post your entries in the Safety Competition Forum, found under the "Support and Announcements" section. In that way, we can further discuss what went on, and what can be learned. Constructive criticism is welcome. Inflamatory, derogatory, or otherwise negative commetary is not welcome.

Given that there are no real guidelines for voting, it would be to the entrant's advantage to make the stories interesting and entertaining, as well as educational. Pictures, if available, would serve all of those purposes, but they're not required.

The prize:

Steve says he has some HEF T-shirts. (He didn't say whether they've been worn, or laundered.) The winner will get one of those. In addition, there will be some sort of official looking certificate awarded, suitable for framing. (Or hiding in your dresser drawer, underneath the socks and underwear.)

 

[RollOver Pete]

Thats an excellent idea!
:cool2

 

[digger242j]

Added to "The way the competition works:", is the following--Constructive criticism is welcome. Inflamatory, derogatory, or otherwise negative commetary is not welcome.


And Jeff's comment caused me to post a clarification:

:

I've made alot of mistakes that I've learned from, but they were mostly trucking type mistakes(don't know if they're allowed) and often someone could've been killed had things gone completely wrong. Digger definately said those kind weren't allowed.

To which I replied:

We do a lot of trucking here too, Jeff. Maybe not a lot of freight box trucking, but that's ok. As long as the lesson is something that can be related to what we do on the job, it's worth passing along.

No. I just said you're disqualified if you kill yourself, and it's probably best if you don't kill anybody else either. That was tongue-in-cheek, but my intention was to discourage things (like the pictures of the guy squashed beneath the dozer that we've seen from several different sources), that crossed that line into the morbid or gruesome. Excluding the deadly accidents, the potentially deadly accidents are the ones we'd most like to avoid, right?