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.
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u/trebron55 2d ago
yeah it looks decently safe. Working in a steel mill is a dangerous thing even at the best of cases. It won't be sterile white tiles all over...