The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is a regulatory agency of the United States Department of Labor that strives to ensure the well-being of workers across various industries, such as construction, agriculture, and so on.
It achieves this by setting standards, providing training, outreach, education, and assistance, as well as enforcing compliance with regulations through inspections and enforcement actions.
However, since OSHA has jurisdiction over approximately 7 million worksites, the agency's employees regularly encounter a very diverse array of situations. So when Reddit user Vesper4255 asked them to share the craziest and most memorable stories, there were plenty to go around.
This post may include affiliate links.
This one time there was a deadly pandemic that killed millions worldwide, we had refrigerated body trucks in the streets, hospital was chronically collapse-level overwhelmed. The personal protective equipment they gave us for infection control? Plastic garbage bags to wear over our scrubs. Face masks designed for 30 minutes of effective use were worn for days. 115,000 of us died.
Not an OSHA inspector, but related, and I regularly do inspections together with them.
One of the factories that a related, but not quite subsidiary company, runs received a formal complaint which triggered an OSHA inspection.
The complaint mentioned something along the lines of machines not being properly barricaded, resulting in someone losing two fingers and could result in a big lawsuit. My company wasn't happy as although they weren't in the direct line of fire, there was reputational damage involved.
We got there, foreman pointed us to the machine. We got them to break it open to see the damage. Out pops not two, but SIX little blobs.
Two of them were definitely fingers, bloody gristly and all that Jazz. In my mind, I was going, "Great, incident verified. The dimwit running the place was gonna get slapped with a stupid fine, time to wrap up and go home."
Then the inspector started poking at the other four shrivelled grey blobs, because those were rats right? Dead rats? But why don't they have any skulls?
He poked one of them until it crumbled open and voila, those weren't rats. Those were dessicated, f*****g fingers. There SIX f*****g fingers in one machine.
After the two of us spent some time hurling chunks in a pot nearby, we got to hear some even better news.
This machine with the s****y safety s**t and six fingers in it? There were seven more machines just like that one in the factory. And the foreman admitted that the factory owner has been firing all the foreign workers operating the machine if anyone ever spoke about past incidents and suppressing all the incidents until someone finally had enough and reported him.
It was at that point where this stopped being an inspection and turned into a full blown criminal investigation and my company dropped the factory like a hot potato, but not before we sued the pants off the sick S.O.B naturally.
Last I heard, they had found close to 40 fingers and an actual goddamn ARM in the other machines and the dude was facing life in prison. My country is pretty s**t about workers rights, especially foreign workers, so I was honestly quite surprised they even managed to drag him to court in the first place.
Not an inspector, but i work in the food industry and there are these big packaging robots in our factory. These things have gates that close of every part of the machine so that no one can access anything while it's active and it shuts down as soon as a gate is opened.
Well here's the thing. It takes a while to reboot the machine when it shuts down and the operators don't like that. So in some MacGyver way they managed to rig the sensor in not noticing that the door is opened if they need to fix something or get some cardboard unstuck.
Last year a guy climbed into that machine to fix something and while he thought he was safe asked the new guy to press the start button on the machine to test if the fix had worked. The machine however didn't shut down because the gate had opened and just immediately restarted. The guy inside only had his ribs crushed because the new guy luckily had the reaction speed to press the emergency shutdown button in time.
Safe to say we've been in safety meetings and giving safety training for over a year now...
I currently work in a company that does Alcohol Bottling and to a small part distilling. I work in IT. I'm not a huge fan of the job for some reasons. But at least this place takes Job Safety and Training SUPER SERIOUSLY!!! Doesn't matter if your not on the "Factory Floor". Your in IT, Marketing, even the Finance Dept. YOU MUST GO TO THE SAFETY TRAINING CLASSES BI-YEARLY!!! And there is a lotto based on how many days there hasn't been an Employee OSHA issue. For as much as my company has problems. THEY TAKE SAFETY SUPER SERIOUSLY!!! This should be the standard. I have watched: Day Davis of the Bacardi Bottling Plant in Jacksonville Florida being crushed 4 times in my works safety training. People die because of Employers lax safety standards. Your life in worth more than what your job is. Please for Day Davis 's sake watch the video on youtube.com. Its the mans last hours of his life as he worked to make a better life for him and his fiance. Marriage didn'
My old boss fell into an open pit while showing the inspectors around. Good times.
A man crushed under a piece of marble. He was already meeting his maker and his mortal remains are seared into my memory. The owner hadn’t checked on him in a few days and he probably had been conscious for a while, evidenced by the lack of nails, the scratch marks in the dirt, on the block and the lack of gas in the forklift. My first successful prosecution, go me!
I started work in a little factory. It’s been operating for almost 30 years. The day I started, I noticed there were zero fire extinguishers anywhere. None. Anywhere. In the entire building. Upon further inspection, there were no smoke detectors or fire alarms. I started asking around, and the employees told me they hadn’t ever had a fire drill. Ever. There wasn’t even a plan. The welders told me *there’s fires in the building all the time,* and they just scramble to put them out with whatever is on hand. For some reason, no one thought twice about it. They didn’t think about it ever. It was just cool.
I asked the safety guy. Like the manager dude that has “health and safety” on his badge. He lied to me and said that the plant was “grandfathered in to not having fire measures.”
Needless to say I quit. I had a conversation with a friend who works with an OSHA compliance agency, and he alerted whatever authority could take action. My friend’s employer actually ended up gaining a big contract from that factory to bring them up to code. The factory was ordered to do so under penalty.
Non American OSHA:
You people know that meme about the forklift carrying its younglings so they can reach the top of the shelf?
Exactly that but IRL with a 6ton and a 1.5 ton forklift in a building with 1t/m2 floor carrying capacity and about 1 ton of flammable s**t as cargo.
I'm no longer a safety inspector to keep my own health and sanity
Once saw a makeshift welding station shielded by beach umbrellas and duct tape. The worker was wearing sunglasses instead of a welding mask. Said it gave him a 'summer vibe'. I was speechless!
Maybe it's because I just woke up, but I misread "welding" as "wedding" and got pretty confused.
Not an OSHA inspector but as an electrician in the elevator industry one of our supervisors walked in to a 7 or 8 story lift shaft to find one worker in a makeshift harness made by combining and tying slings together being lifted up the shaft by a co worker using an electric winch hanging on the top of the shaft... They were both Chinese nationals the boss had bought over to work and were Actually very good Liftys but had absolute NO CONCEPT of safety and clearly no regard for their own lives
Judging from the images we've seen from India and other Asian countries, apparently this is absolutely normal for their workers. Terrifying.
We had a volunteer (non profit business) with 20 years experience in building trades and another 5 as a volunteer, fire a nail gun through his hand while demonstrating to our clients how a nail gun has a mechanism to stop it from firing unless it was pressed up against something....
Amazing! I have done something similar but not nearly so bad when I was pretending that I was going to staple my finger to scare my 4 year old brother. To make it realistic I pressed down on the stapler a bit and proceeded to actually staple my finger. It actually didn't hurt as much as you would think it did
Former hospital safety inspector here. We acquired a surgeon’s private practice and when I went in to inspect the first time, there were soiled instruments with blood on them in the sink of the employee break room next to the used coffee cups. Biohazard waste receptacle and autoclave in there too. No separation of clean and soiled. I’m a firm believer in doctor’s offices being owned and run by hospitals because the standards are higher.
I'm not an OSHA inspector, but if my workplace had an inspection, it would go down badly.
Guy working a large drillpress at high feed with barely enough emulsion and no ventilation in a 4×4m box. Those fumes fry ur lungs and brain.
India styled cable management hanging atop and from a single pole hangar crane with a max lifting load of 1t, lifting 3t while bending about 10%.
Rod polishing on lathes with hands in gloves and long sleeve hoodies.
Hydraulic oil everywhere, usually collected if not spilled in large barells, then burned during winter in a shady oil furnace that catches fire once a week.
Chemicals in used water bottles with no labeling all around the place.
Everything that you touch zaps you most of the time, especially tap water while washing hands. We once took a tester and turned out everything in that place, even the hangar itself, had 35v running through at all times. Every single thing. Even the tap water.
Tens of unreported accidents a year. There was an employee who blew himself up a few years back. He was doing DIY pyrotechnics and smoked next to a powder mill. Explosives squad was called in, and they found 200kg of explosoves in his closet at work.
I'll share late, because I have a good one. I used to work in a factory that was insanely breaking the rules to "speed up the process" of making the materials they sell. Here's a couple:
1: Acid line running through the inside of the building from source to vats dripped in a doorway when running.
2: a catwalk above gigantic vats of hot nitric acid with no railing that workers went on to dump reagents into the vats, better just wear your respirator! (They never did)
3: the chemical procedure causes a nox gas to spew out and if something goes wrong the entire building can fill with this hazardous gas and you can even see it in the office area spewing across the ceiling; a thick orange/red cloud. No one except me ever left the building.
Someone was fired for smoking pot on the job (almost half of them did) and they notified OSHA of all the violations they could think of. OSHA came in and left without talking to anyone except higher up office staff. A couple days later we had to "sign" a change agreement to "be up to code." The sheet literally had 8 things written on it with a title at the top and crew name signature lists at the bottom. None of it included the most dangerous issues and that was the last I heard of any of it. I left that job shortly after.
Item 2: Tell me you live in Gotham City without telling me you live in Gotham City.
Not OSHA but UK equivalent surveying pressure equipment under PSSR and HSE.
This was at an older factory that we'd just taken the insurance contract over. The stupidest thing I've seen was on a steam boiler that had recently had the burner swapped out for a newer model. Said newer model hadn't been set up correctly in relation to the operating pressure and kept lifting the safety valves. The boiler was rated to 14barg, operated at around 10.5barg, and the valves lifted around 11barg.
Any normal engineer would think to tune the burner properly or get the original unit refitted. What they decided to do, in their infinite wisdom, was to blank off the safety valve outlets, meaning they couldn't discharge to atmosphere. Effectively, they had created a massive bomb.
I only found it after seeing it go through a burn cycle, and watching the pressure shoot past the safety valve opening pressure and hit the SWL (even after the burner had stopped firing) without hearing the thunder and racketing of the safeties lifting. That was a fun phone call to our technical superintendent, and one of the longer reports I'd written (though not the longest).
Not an inspector, but was working on a job where some ceiling installer was on a scissor lift, bunch of guys underneath him, some working with water. Guy had a spotter who wasn't paying attention, as the lift operator was raising the platform, it caught onto a spider box cable (large electrical line) and was about to pull way too much tension. I ran over and yelled to get the operators attention, then was forced to hit the E shut off switch on the ground. He yelled at me, the spotter yelled at me, everyone looked at me wondering what I was doing. I pointed at the cable and asked him what he thought of it, operator saw the cable, and turned white as a ghost as he realized he almost cooked himself and others.
Bonus: I watched from the 5th floor as some gate installers almost killed themselves. They were installed a huge side slider gate to a concrete wall, gate popped loose and hit the ground, then fell over and nearly missed a guy by literal inches, the guy body slammed a porta potty to get out of the way.
I’m not an OSHA inspector but I am a lawyer that works for a very large company. We had a department team building playing laser tag on company premises and 4(!) separate attorneys ended up tripping over decor that had been put up and spraining their ankles. A week later the company president came to meet with the general counsel and saw a bunch of attorneys with matching boots on and freaked out.
I was the UK equivalent (Health and Safety Executive Inspector). I was inspecting and oil and gas production facility owned by one of the super majors.
In one of the pump rooms there was an eye wash station. On top of the eye wash station someone had left a bottle of acid.
It still makes me laugh (as no one was hurt) imagining a scenario like that from a third rate comedy movie where some poor soul got something in their eye, stumbles blindly to the eye wash station, and proceeds to squeeze a load of acid into their face.
Not an inspector, but at my previous job we'd had a bad accident in the factory (someone died) so OSHA came through for an inspection. The bosses had taken us all and said hey make sure you follow all the rules to the letter and be smart about this. I was walking the factory floor when the inspector showed up. He held up his clipboard and clicked a pen and said "ok let's see what we have here", and looked immediately to his left where a guy was pouring paint thinner into a 55 gallon drum from a 5 gallon bucket while having a lit cigarette in his mouth. I knew it was going to be good when the OSHA inspector had a wtf look on his face 5 seconds into the inspection.
I worked as an art fabricator. A client wanted us to spray oil paint with automotive sprayguns. The paint pigments are full of cadmium, cobalt, titanium, etc and it literally said "do not spray" on the side of the paint tubes.
The safety "precautions"? My boss gave us dust masks and stuck a fan in the window.
I was in my early 20s and just thankful to be out of food service. But the client showed up and flipped out when he saw how little protection we were given. Thankfully he made sure we all had proper respirators, tyvek suits, and colossal automotive down-draft air cleaners....3 months into the project.
Anyway...be nice to your wait staff bc heavy metal poisoning was preferable to getting screamed at over a burger.
Are you following up with doctors from time to time? Please get blood drawn, etc., because heavy metal poisoning can become a serious problem decades after exposure. I am sorry that happened to you and hope you can stay well anyway.
Not OSHA cause not USA, but internal company safety inspector:
Guy broke a few bones after doing unsafe stuff without proper equipment.
Guy and his buddies knew the guy would get treated at the plant but would get a written warning for not following protocol (enought of those result in termination). So they hid the guy in a shipping container until end of shift (something like 3 hours) and carried him to the free hospital afterwards.
Well you d what you must. Would have thought the consequences were punishment enough.
Not OSHA inspector, but was something similar. Rooftop flooded for leak test, in sections. Mostly dry, one wet area. Guy took off his boots and socks and walked across 2 inches of murky water filled with nails, screws, jagged shards of cut sheet metal and so on. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. He was a little off.
On a similar note, I was shocked by a 220v cable submerged in water in a similar situation. I was wearing boots. Shocked, but was insulated enough that there was no damage. Regular commercial jobsites are extremely dangerous. Everyone I know who does anything interesting has been dinged up severely, and I've witnessed people falling from ladders, drunk at work, stoned at work, drunk AND stoned at work, on c*ke, MDMA, speed, PCP, people having heat strokes, fainting, breaking their legs and hands, saw a lift (temporary elevator) drop out of control, rocks and pavers fall from a crane, more than once saw someone almost get crushed between a swinging crane load of over a ton....twice there was a major gas line break so big that it would have destroyed more than a city block if it had been ignited. The second gas line was high capacity and was hissing loudly even from a distance. Everyone was yelling "no fuego! NO FUEGO!" I've never seen people run down stairs so quickly. It felt like the building was going up.
One time an actual OSHA guy showed up to the job site (never seems to happen) and his only complain, despite all the obvious hazards, was that people having unlabeled water bottles might result in contamination...
Do you think the OHSA guy was being bribed? An earlier post suggested that too. And I've had a personal experience with a building inspector who I suspect was bribed.
It was actually before I moved into health and safety (not American).
I worked for an industrial demolition company and I witnessed two premature collapses where people in the vicinity almost died and two failed collapses which are arguably scarier because people have to go back into an already weakened structure.
We’re talking like 10,000 tonnes of steel coming down unexpectedly and only missing people by a few meters.
I, unfortunately, was on of those people on one occasion. It was my final day in the industry.
Whew. Premature collapses. Failed collapses. Demolition is a deadly business. I also worry about handling that much high explosive.
An engineer friend of mine was consulting with the USPS on safety and efficiency at a major sorting hub. This facility had overhead conveyor belts carrying packages across the whole building, often over the heads of the workers on the floor. At the tail end of one belt was a spiral chute so packages could slide down to floor level onto another belt.
He was standing with a group of USPS employees discussing ergonomics or something when they heard a low rumble overhead, followed by an awful clanging as an oversized package banged its way down the chute and deposited itself onto the bottom belt.
It was an engine block from an automobile. Someone was mailing an engine block and somehow it ended up on the high conveyor belt where it definitely wasn’t supposed to be. One of the workers said, “That happens sometimes.”
I was the plant safety guy in a small factory. I learned fire safety, tried to follow OSHA rules, met hazardous material rules, etc. We weren't that bad, all the workers cared about their health.
I was on my way to a sawmill in Vermont to buy some wood one morning. I drove by a ramshackle auto repair shop. It was tall, a single truck bay, with sheds, lean toos, a mobile home, a big pile of horror. I thought, "That place looks like it could go up any minute".
I was headed back with a load of lumber, and the place was on fire. The fire was up under the roof, smoke was gushing out all the soffits and the gable ends. I stopped. Some guys were pulling a burning Volvo out of the truck bay. They had called the fire dept.
I had a premonition that the place could blow up. I got into my truck and left. I met a fire truck down by the road. Then the place blew up. It put the guys through a fence. No one died.
Edit: It made the TV News.
[Fire in Guilford VT](https://www.mynbc5.com/article/guilford-vermont-fire-garage-update-december-2021/38531660#)
2m deep trench with no shoring
Working at heights and on construction sites wearing flipflops
Working on live electrical wires with no electric insulation
Used condoms in the middle of the factory
And so on and so forth
Guys working in a 25 foot deep trench with oil contamination all around them with no ventilation and shoring that didn’t reach the top of grade.
I work in underground mining in Western Australia, some of the s**t I have seen is unreal.
My favourite is a guy stripping off his hard hat, overalls, gumboots and safety glasses to jump into a 1000L IBC full of the saltiest water known to mankind to cool himself down. This was a severely overweight guy as well.
I’m confident he no longer has a job in mining after the incident.
As a young guy in 1970 I worked at a copper mine in their mill. The process of extracting copper from the pulverized ore in the flotation tanks requires your water to be alkaline. If the water in the pond became too acidic over time it needed to be treated to make it alkaline again. Enter drums of cyanide tablets that were dropped into the pond to perform that trick while we ran like scalded cats in the opposite direction with no respirators.
Not as an OSHA inspector but I’ll share my story.
At the time I was working for a testing laboratory tat tested products for safety in potentially explosive atmospheres where flammable gas mixtures might be present. This customer was relatively new and a bit over their head so they had a number of non conformances. Which required repeat testing.
The proper way to test products like this is to build a representative circuit and run the 2 ends of that circuit into a small chamber that is filled with an explosive gas mixture. There are rotating disks inside the chamber with small filaments that simulate the opening and closing of a switch over and over again. If the circuit has enough energy you get an explosion that is vented outside.
This one customer was attempting to replicate the failure I advised them of and then work on a solution. The customer called me and said he couldn’t replicate the failure. I asked him how he was testing it and he said his other engineer was out in the parking lot and had a large trash bag with the product inside of the bag and they were pumping hydrogen inside the bag while the engineer was reaching into the bag activating the stitches. I told my customer to immediately go outside and tell his engineer to stop as he had created a hydrogen bomb that could explode. He protested a bit not believing me and wanted me to explain why what he was doing was dangerous.
Wouldn't be allowed to do it now of course but the science teacher I had in High School used to fill a balloon with hydrogen and then with the class hiding behind the benches would pull the balloon tied to a small trolley with a string towards a bunsen burner...🎈 He made science FUN!!🤣
Summer Student, 1984, Mississauga Stamping Plant, Electric Arc Welders. My partner inserted the part into the welder, added 3 metal plates, pushed 2 buttons and "ZAP" 8 Electrodes welded the pieces together. Repeat, 1000 parts per day.
The problem was that the plumbing hoses providing water to cool the Electrodes were leaking everywhere. Water was running all over the welder. My partner Nick was standing in a puddle of water 2 inches deep, on a concrete floor operating and Electric Arc Welder. Sparks were flying everywhere.
I repeatedly tried to get Nick to stop working and contact the supervisor. I told him that "When He Got Electrocuted" I would refuse to perform Mouth to Mouth Resuscitation. Finally he stopped work and contacted maintenance.
No old man's profits are worth having yourself killed. Even if you like him.
Health and safety inspector here.
There are so many good stories. A septic tank made out of metal Amaco signs (metal in earth = corrosion). The septic guy was jumping on the top of the signs, and they started crumbling... so he got a poop bath.
Owner of a company crawling inside a 90 foot long oven to look at grease build up, in front of the whole crew, immediately after a safety meeting with said owner and crew discussing how this is a confined space and it cannot be safely entered without safeguard in place.
Finger pie when we had an amputation and a temp lost their ring finger dye to an irising hopper... we got to the pie before it made it to the oven.
What else... forklift undocking where the truck left with our operator and forklift still inside. Got 1/2 mile before the forklift and operator fell out the back onto the city road.
Guy who got covered in hypochlorite, ph 14 stuff, all in his eyes and face and all over his body, and miraculously escaped with a 2x2 inch patch of discoloration instead of having his eyes melted out of his head.
So many fun stories.
Worked at an aerospace manufacturer and we had large Ipsen heat treat and braze furnaces. The furnaces were purged of oxygen using argon to prevent discoloration of the exotic alloys in the parts. During preventive maintenance a maintenance man walked inside to inspect it and collapsed, a second man rushed to help and promptly collapsed, guy #3 was on his way in before everyone screamed to stop. Seems the argon was turned on and no one had checked. Argon displaces all the oxygen especially in confined spaces.
I worked with a guy who wanted to collect our lock out tag out keys for "safety." Not so exciting, but bizarre and kind of scary.
For those who don't know, every contractor on site has a key to lock machinery that need maintenance out of their functions. So, in theory, the machine doesn't function until the locks from every worker are personly removed when work is finished, and everyone is a safe distance away.
These things would have smeared my mascerated body all over the place. I trust the locks a little more in my own hands.
Nope - the only way you get my lock out key is when you prise it from my cold, dead hand!
Not OSHA, but I worked in the printing industry and the thing that gave me anxiety every time was our paper delivery.
We'd order a pallett of A4 80 gram paper. 80 boxes in total at a weight of 1,000 kg/2205 pounds/1 ton. The pallett had to be moved by a hydraulic paper trolley. The truck itself had a tail lift but we didn't have a proper loading bay, so they had to lower it on to the floor. Problem is, the tail lift wasn't big enough for the trolley, which would slightly hang over the edge of the lift, leaving no space for the operator to safely ride the lift down.
What they had to do was, load the pallett on to the paper trolley as normal inside the truck and then pull it out on to the tail lift, but because the trolley wouldn't fit on the tail lift with the operator, the operator had to jump off the lift, but timing it in such a way that he'd activate the locking mechanism of the hydraulic trolley so it wouldn't follow him off the tail lift. I also need to add that the weight of this would make the tail lift slope toward the ground.
When standing on the ground, the tail lift was just below head height, so the trolley operator was in a situation where the slightest miscalculation would send 1 ton of paper + momentum + gravity crashing on to him.
My heart rate would accelerate every time I watched this.
People have no concept of why paper is designated by weight. 100 sheets of 17"×22" paper is a full sheet. 100 of those sheets determines the weight on the package (20-lb., 24-lb., 60-lb., 80-lb.) Even when cut into reams, I was well aware that even paper can pose a safety issue. I can't imagine what it must be like to deal with an actual TON of paper.
I worked at an onion warehouse place in 2017, a guy came methed out to work, everyone knew he’d do it often but no one said anything cuz he still did his job. That’s until we were all at lunch and came back him running literally on the onion belt on full speed like a treadmill and just running without a care as if he was working out at home. We slowed it down, turned it off & fired his a*s. Then we had to sanitize the whole belt for HOURS. By we, i mean my sister and I cuz the sanitation crew was apparently also high.
I thought an onion belt was a fashion statement and claim to seniority. I also never regarded the outside layer of an onion as being sanitized.
Does food standards count? Cos you have all the general mankiness, infestations and whopping hygiene breaches. But the ones that really stick out to me in the year and a half I was tangentially involved were the ones where they just carried on as if nothing was wrong for something that normal folks just stared open mouthed at. Two ones I particularly recall:
1) a mince mixing machine that had black machine oil dripping down in directly into the mixing bowl.
2) the shelf with bottles that went: mayo, barbecue sauce, bleach, ketchup...
Oh hey, a question that actually applies to me! Too bad I got here a bit late.
The worst thing i've seen on this job is someone who was digging a trench, with completely unsecured shoring, about 10 feet deep, with wall width of approximately 4 feet, part of it being UNDER concrete. Trenching is one of the #1 causes of workplace fatalities. If we get a call of trenching with no shoring, we get sent out IMMEDIATELY, one of 4 things that get us sent out like that.
The old guy that's been in the office 15 some years looked at it, said it was the worst trenching he's ever seen. and he very often does trenching. it was to the point he was surprised it didn't collapse.
That and one time a dude actually was in a trench collapse. He was buried up to his neck, and while he was trying to be rescued, his wife cam and told him that she was pregnant! Luckily the dude survived. News put it as a real heartwarming moment, but the whole situations was super easily avoidable.
Remember folks, OSHA has very few inspectors. We likely won't go to a place unless we receive a complaint, but if we receive a valid formal online complaint from a current employee and they request an inspection, we're required to go out on it.
Why are people commenting about the weather? I see not reference to it in this entry. What am I not understanding?
(Not OSHA inspector but...)
I was visiting a new Oil and Gas site in Russia to resolve some issues with equipment our company had supplied. My contact was responsible for that whole area of the site, so I used to accompany him on walks round in the morning to check on the status of things.
One morning we rounded a corner to be confronted by a paint team working on the side of a large square metal structure (Large like four or five stories high) The paint team, like a lot of the other assembly crews, were predominantly from Asia, where Health and Safety is rather more lax than it should be. Their painting method consisted of a guy on a "trapeze" with a bucket of paint and a roller, being lowered of the side of the building on a rope, and moving from side to side applying the paint with his roller, while his mates held on to the other end of the rope.
My contact screamed at them to stop, and I witnessed a massive dressing down of the entire paint team. (fully justified as he would have been within his rights to have the entire team fired on the spot) He explained that this technique was not acceptable, and the proper way to paint the building was to contact the scaffold team, and have them erect scaffold, and then paint the wall, while wearing harnesses, etc, etc. The team lead nodded and said he understood, stood his team down, and we continued our walk around the site.
The next day, we were doing the same walk, and approached the same structure, expecting to see that the scaffold team had started work, as it would take a couple of days to erect the scaffold , before the painting could be started.
The whole building was finished, immaculately painted, and no sign of the team, or evidence of scaffold being there!!
We tracked down the team lead who swore on his mothers life that the scaffold had been erected, the painting done, and the scaffold removed, within the space of about 23 hours.
It transpired that this was the last job the team had to complete before their contract finished, so no doubt they were keen to get paid and begin the long journey home, and no further action was taken. But looking at the dried paint in the sunlight a few days later, you could clearly see roller marks in a gently arc over the entire surface!!
Those poor Asian workers, doubtless dumbfoundedly experiencing some jumped up arsehole bellowing at them just for behaving normally.
I'm a safety guy for a construction company, craziest thing I saw was a guy dislocated both his shoulders while pushing a mobile scaffold. It had too much momentum, and when he tried stopping it, both arms popped out of the socket. We are talking about hundreds of pounds of steel going a few inches further than he wanted.
The funniest thing I saw was a guy walking right into a beam. Somehow, I was the only person to see him do it. Everyone else just saw him getting up off the floor after I lost my s**t laughing.
I bet the guy that had his shoulders dislocated was very wary of safety protocols moving forward; what a painful lesson to learn
Mandatory not inspector, but I've spent some time the last few months reading safety regulations. So having just familarised with the regulations on working at heights I see on my way home two guys on the roof of the building they're constructing next door assembling a non sufficient railing along the edge of the roof without any additional safety measures.
Only half the building had a roof on at the time and they were standing at the end of the part that had a roof. So in one direction they had the insufficient railing they were assembling, which may or may not have stopped a fall, and in the other they had a 7-8m drop without anything to protect them (where they hadn't placed the roof yet). It wasn't a flat roof either, some rain and it would have been really, really dangerous.
It was just interesting walking home, seeing this and thinking "I just read about this, that is definitely not allowed".
Safety engineer here. I've had solar panels installed on two different roofs, one a two story with a super steep roof. You can bet they were using safety harnesses up there because I made sure they did.
Not an inspector, but if you are have a look at basically any tree work site (Ive worked for several arborist gigs and 100% of them have had something).
I've seen things as simple as refusing to wear seatbelts or not quite up to code equipment, or working in very rapidly fading light. All the way to "non-safety" around high voltage lines (one of which caused damage shall we say to more than one person luckily no deaths), outright refusal to wear critical safety gear, or extremely lucky "I can't believe nobody's dead" instances.
There are times when the entire month/year is just one long OSHA violation. Granted "not all tree work companies" and I have seen safe ones, I'm just not lucky enough to have worked at one that is willing to slow down for .000002 seconds in the name of profits. In fact I've been yelled at on numerous occasions to just hurry up and do "X" because we have 3 more jobs to do.
Wow. I guess they could afford the penalties and the ensuing lawsuits, should anyone is injured or killed.
I was inspecting a salad bar and saw rat s**t at the bottom. I then went to the back room where and saw something horrific.
A guy sitting at his desk doing payrole nude. As I leaned in to tell him about the rat s**t salad toppings, I almost had a heart attack at the sight before my virgin eyes that no human should ever whitness…..
In the back ground, I noticed he was NOT SEEDING HIS TORRENTS!
As a company safety manager, you really learn that “virtue is its own reward,” because precious little else will be coming your way. Your bosses will often treat you like an impediment to profit, and the workers (and I have to single out the males especially) give the strongest push-back. The only times I had any opportunity to feel vindicated was when I took injured workers; old-timers who’d fought me at every turn on PPE, lock-out, etc., in the ER bloody and crying like little kids. I just felt too sorry for them to gloat.
I did stupid stuff when I was young and thought I was bullet proof. One that comes to mind was feeding cows square bales of hay with a tractor and trailer. I'd get the tractor going in a direction with a lot of open space, tie the steering wheel so it wouldn't turn, step off the tractor and jump on the trailer, feed the bales one at a time, jump off the trailer, climb back on the tractor, move to the next pasture, and repeat the process.
If this was before you were 24/25 you probably didn't have the brain structures to think you weren't safe- kids literally lack a bit the brain that deals with risk
Load More Replies... This has been completely out of my wheelhouse and despite that, I really enjoyed it. More like this, less bridezilla, please!
As a company safety manager, you really learn that “virtue is its own reward,” because precious little else will be coming your way. Your bosses will often treat you like an impediment to profit, and the workers (and I have to single out the males especially) give the strongest push-back. The only times I had any opportunity to feel vindicated was when I took injured workers; old-timers who’d fought me at every turn on PPE, lock-out, etc., in the ER bloody and crying like little kids. I just felt too sorry for them to gloat.
I did stupid stuff when I was young and thought I was bullet proof. One that comes to mind was feeding cows square bales of hay with a tractor and trailer. I'd get the tractor going in a direction with a lot of open space, tie the steering wheel so it wouldn't turn, step off the tractor and jump on the trailer, feed the bales one at a time, jump off the trailer, climb back on the tractor, move to the next pasture, and repeat the process.
If this was before you were 24/25 you probably didn't have the brain structures to think you weren't safe- kids literally lack a bit the brain that deals with risk
Load More Replies... This has been completely out of my wheelhouse and despite that, I really enjoyed it. More like this, less bridezilla, please!
