Long range shooting and two dead

[Stomper]

Anyone with a scintilla of sense knows you stand well outside the swing radius of them things!

 

[Certaindeaf]

Sounds like they were doing the prairie dog? Dug pit, pop up to tend and then "ow"? I don't know.
Anyway, I think they did it wrong.

 

[ZigZagZeke]

Yeah... sub-stations are NOT the place to get slack... at all.

As a former power plant technician, I can attest to that fact. There's no room for complacency.

 

[Mark W.]

I work for a paving co. We do all levels of work from repairing gravel logging roads for the forest service and doing driveways for rich people to re paving sections of Interstate 5 and resurfacing Airports.

One job was grinding up ad resurfacing a few miles of Interstate 5 south of Salem. It was summer it was Night the grinders we were using were tearing up a strip of road about 8' wide and 3" deep moving at about walking speed. It took like 5-7 minutes to fill a 32 ton dump truck and trailer load. Some of the chunks were the diameter of a basketball most the size of a softball.

The state inspector was this onery old guy we had worked with a lot always walking between the trucks and generally being in the way. Only this job he had some cute little college intern girl following him around and then he had her collecting tickets and doing some sort of bookkeeping. It took me almost a week to get to a point where I could actually talk to her and explain to her that she REALLY needed a hard hat that I had watched chunks of asphalt the size of basketballs miss her by only a couple feet as the bounced off the truck being loaded in front of me. She was clueless. The old guy had never told her anything about needing a hard hat. He walked around with a baseball cap on. Once I explained she could easily end up brain dead or worse from getting hit in the head by a 40lb chuck of rock she finally got a hard hat.

We have an amazing safety record at the company I work for on the job injuries are very rare. But some of the people we work with don't have the same caution.

 

[mjbskwim]

Yeah ,Mark, what amazes me is how a flagger is willing to stand behind your truck,40 some feet away from you,when all you have is a couple of mirrors to see her.
And they wonder why the get run over

 

[Mark W.]

OH flaggers are some of the bravest people you will ever meet. Not saying accidents don't happen but we bust our bubblegum on the CB to make sure we all keep track of the flaggers. We had one get hurt real bad last year at OSU when a low boy driver was locking down a load and the breaker bar flew out of his hands and wacked her right in the middle of her face. Poor little thing ended up in the hospital for a few days and left with a scar. I was amazed he wasn't fired. But I guess other people saw it happen and it was a fluke accident. We have had a few flaggers that were way more work to keep track of then they were worth. Ones that moved around all the time so that we were spending more time trying to figure out where they were then working.

 

[tionico]

I was running a Hitachi 700 excavator,putting in 72"concrete pipe at night.The city of Seatac had hired an inspector as their guys were busy on other stuff. If you had asked the inspector,he had built every hiway in Alaska...himself
So I'm most interested in the guys in the 20' ditch below me and everyone else needs to watch out for me.I had noticed the inspector standing on the right side(blind side) of my hoe.
Figured I'd tell him later that was a bad spot but I was lowering 2400lbs of concrete in the hole with folks below me
Long story short,I got some pea gravel from behind me and swung around to every eye as big as saucers. The inspector was about 6'2 and was standing on 2" of dirt. My counter weight was about 5'8" off the ground
His hard hat took some dirt off the cat walk as he duct under the thing going around as fast as I could swing it
The '700' designation is for 7 metric tons. And the ditch was about 20'
He left right after that

and you never had to say a word, did you? Recent built 'hoes I've seen lately have warning signs in the area of that counter..... "keep XXX feet back, machine may swing without notice". Well, I guess HE noticed...... good job he had a brain bucket on, not sure how much brain he had in there to protect. Bet he went "Code Brown", too.

 

[tionico]

Yeah ,Mark, what amazes me is how a flagger is willing to stand behind your truck,40 some feet away from you,when all you have is a couple of mirrors to see her.
And they wonder why the get run over

whenever I am around a moving vehicle, I always make sure I can see that mirror. And if its backing faster than I want to run, I'l step aside and let it run... over whatever is there that's not me.

 

[Mark Torrence]

Yes! Sad! I shoot long range as often as I can. I can tell you it is VERY difficulty to find a good safe place to shoot any real distance in these parts. I can also tell you that NO ONE I know EVER spots from down range. ALWAYS behind the muzzle. If you MUST see your target then you use a Bullseye Target Cam! OR you spend the half hour and go down to the target with a COLD RANGE! At over about 600 or 700 yards it doesn't really matter what kind of spotting scope you have the hits are just too small to see. Condolences to those involved!

 

[Mark Torrence]

By the way as a Paramedic I work in the street/traffic all the time and I can tell you no one watches out for you better than you! STAY ALERT!