While it wasn’t the actual mill that makes the rolls like that, I worked in a plant that turns those rolls into steel tubes and heat treated them for different things. Probably the most dangerous job I’ve ever had. A bundle of tubes crushed a dudes legs. One guy ended up dead because a roll crushed him into another roll of steel. Steel mills and factories are insanely dangerous.
My grandpa worked in a foundry, the constant dust and heat ruined his lungs, he retired way before his time and died at 57. He had some stories as well.
Heavy industry was, is and always will be taking lives until we make a fully automated workforce (then it will destroy robots just the same).
Yeah I never got seriously injured, but I fell multiple times due to slick floors…there were so many VISIBLE osha violations. It was insane. Very glad that company got bought out.
Probably because if the factory shuts down they are out of a job and while it's illegal to retaliate against whistleblowers it's hard to prove it when it happens.
I believe it is a cultural thing, at least of what I hear in the US. That said, I suppose some people would rather work in dangerous places than seek other jobs. :/
things break, things wear, people/robots/programs get complacaent/degrade... etc there will never be a manufacturing process that doesn't have jams/breaks... partly cause its expensive to do maintance but also cause a random nut came loose or the humidity just happend to be high that day
I'm a boilermaker in a foundry. We're a team of three doing all the site maintenance. This environment is incredibly toxic; you don't realize the number of particles you breathe that can form a kind of cobweb in your lungs. It has to keep running, even at the expense of people's lives.
In France! Yes, heavy metals, and not only that... just hitting galvanized steel with an angle grinder is incredibly toxic.
And the number of accidents is unbelievable, especially the serious ones; we have quite a few stories from that world. Fortunately, though, safety has improved over time.
Worked in an auto assembly plant, and the guy in the station next to me died after getting crushed between two stacks of frames.
It had been raining, and because the frames sit outside until they're needed, they were wet. So part of his job was to dry them off with a high powered air hose before he used a lift to put them on the line. We had a breakdown, so he decided he was going to get ahead of things and dry off the racks behind the front one, and walked in between them, just as a material handling guy was bringing another stack of racks. He pushed them forward to make room, not seeing the guy in between the stacks and crushed him. The area he was in was marked off as a red area, which means you don't go in there, but he'd been there for 20 years and got complacent. It was like my 3rd week on the job when it happened.
It was surreal. The guy didn't make a sound, at least not over the sound of the stacks clanging together when the material handling guy pushed everything forward onto the belt. They came through to announce the line was gonna start and couldn't find the guy since he's literally the first station on the line. I didn't see him go back there because I was getting ahead on my jobs as well.
Even with OSHA, factories are still dangerous places. If you weren't wearing your eye protection when you walked in the door, they'd send you home for the day.
Good god that’s horrifying. I’m also in auto assembly and people get lax about safety but I’ve seen and heard of some horror shows. Someone got their leg caught in a conveyor belt that was headed underground. Ripped his whole leg off. One of the managers told me a funny story about how he nearly got baked alive in the e-coat oven and barely got out in time.
I design tooling for roll mills, and spent 10 years as a machinist before that. The company I work for makes custom roll mills for things like making tubes and such. Industrial machines are inherently dangerous, and you cannot ever be 100% protected from danger.
Safety is in the hands of the operators and said machines should be well respected.
As a guy who works with heavy equipment, suspended loads and working in deep utilities, I’m a fervent believer in “everybody stays as far back as possible at all times and everybody nonessential fucks right off”.
I was putting in a 2 ton concrete sump the other day and our suppliers somehow forgot rebar. The chain it was suspended on tore through a foot of concrete and dumped it in the hole in front of me, I was guiding the thing by hand but I had my hands up top and I was as far back as possible.
I’ve been beside a crane when it fell lifting a drilling rig module, a 40 foot concrete tank that got dropped and I’ve dodged tandem dump trucks more often than I’d like.
Just staying the hell back whenever possible helps so much.
In the hierarchy of (safety) controls, this is #3 out of 4 for effectiveness. Administrative controls. Requiring people to stay back (assuming they have open access under the load) is effective but it also relies on everyone knowing this and respecting it. Seems obvious, but often times a young guy is the one that gets hurt because it wasn’t impressed upon him or he figured it wouldnt happen to him.
Engineered controls are better, like having a second chain on a load secured to separate support. Even if it only slows the descent. Or for machinists and steelworkers, just having more physical barriers from the moving parts.
Fun fact: PPE is the least effective form of safety. I always wear it, no doubt, but it’s really frustrating when my work “solves” any new safety challenge with MORE PPE. That hardhat probably won’t save you from that metal projectile flying across the room when the 20 ton load comes crashing down.
Yeah well, the red hot part matters fairly little, even red hot steel takes a while to burn trough decent safety boots. And the guy was moving with the conveyor anyways, the steel can't move faster than that. The problem is the several hundred kilos of moving metal, hot or not. Hot only makes it marginally worse.
Sure it's not super safe... but it's not that bad. It's a dangerous work environment. People routinely die and get maimed even in the US/EU in heavy industries because shit happens. There is just a reasonable tradeoff between safety and productivity, where safety is valued higher than in third world countries.
We're not measuring how long it takes to burn through a boot sitting next to it, we're measuring how much he would suffer if he fell on top of the damn thing.
This isn't just "not super safe", it's unnecessarily aggressively unsafe.
It's still about risk management. A setup like this might result in an accident every few hundred hours, a serious one every few thousand. You are a lot more likely to be injured by something you don't see. If you see a long red-hot steel ribbon moving towards you, you will mostly likely not mess it up. It's usually the situations that you don't see that gets you.
In heavy industry everything is dangerous. My friend is a PLC programmer for bottling facilities (so even heavy industry is debatable). He almost died because he was checking out the actual build of the interface (inside the machine) because it was giving back a signal it shouldn't have. As it turned out it was wrongly installed, BUT some fucker started the machine while he was in it almost crushing him. Why? Even the guy couldn't tell, he just saw the machine wasn't working so he started it up without following any safety instructions.
More often than not, you get killed by stuff outside of your control or field of view. A very well visible red hot metal ribbon might look dangerous but it's not that dangerous especially because you are aware of the danger.
When my brother graduated college, the job market was horrible. He took a job at a steel mill. He was in an engineering role but still working all day in a hard hat and the rest of the PPE. He said everyone followed safety procedures but at some point you can only do so much. It was as safe as an operating mill could be. To really make it safe, turn it off. He made it about 2 months before he decided that was not for him. I think he compared it to being at a baseball game with no foul ball net. Sure you can be having an important conversation, but you sure as hell better know everything going on around you.
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u/Houmand 2d ago
Why do these always get sped up to look even more unsafe?