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Deaths that OSHA wish they could have prevented. Here you will find many deaths by machine, but also people falling in furnaces, getting run over by forklifts, and more!
Slavshit
Sandshit
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I work in a steel mill, before I got my current job at the blast furnace, I was at a place like the one shown in the video (BOF shop, converter platform). I did exactly the same work. The poor guy was measuring the steel temp with this long lance with a disposable thermometer at the end.
What probably happened is that a huge chunk of slag mixed with steel fell into the converter (during the process, some slag and steel splashes at the doghouse walls and doors around the converter and cool down. After some time, these chunks get pretty huge (and heavy ofcourse), and can fall down at the slightest shake. This caused the steel and slag (probably mostly slag) to splash out of the converter and at the poor worker.
This once almost happened to my workmate, right after he took a steel sample. He was lucky that he was already done, a few seconds earlier, he would have been burnt to a crisp.
As some people here talked about safety gear: My steel mill (in Austria) is pretty modern, they actually invented the process used for steelmaking in almost all steel mills today, and we don't have much more protection gear too. When measuring the temp, we are told to wear a fireproof apron, but if something like that happened, it wouldn't protect us anyway.
The pictures of silver-clad workers are at a blast furnace, where I now work, and where we wear similar fire resistant coats. Although those just protect you from the iron sparks, any larger splashes would burn right through it.
I hope I could help.
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why not just have a fucking robot that does the temperature reading instead?
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Such systems do exist, but they are expensive, not as reliable and sometimes can't be installed for various reasons.
In my mill, we had a so-called sublance, which is a giant automatic lance that takes such samples and measures the temp, but it often didn't work. Often, the sample/measurement just failed for some reason and measuring again using the sublance would take too much time, so I just did it manually. Not that huge of a deal, at least how we did it in that mill, because we cared a lot about safety.
Usually it is the engineers who would love to automate simple things, and the workers prefer manually doing it because they know how shitty and unrealiable such things are (keep in mind that a steel mill is an extreme work place. Sensitiv electronics often get damaged.)
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Well it basically the same on why people don't spend the resource on bomb disposing robot.
Because the people with money and power don't care about it, and the people that work on it either too lazy/cheapskate to use 3 to 4 month of their salary to build it or mostly likely they were told to follow the rule and change is not acceptable.
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This is fantastic insight. Thank you.
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