Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Biggest Screw-up You Personally Seen Where You Work ?

I saw a Steerman crash after only one pass through a rice field, applying fertilizer, back in the mid 1970's. Seems like they forgot fuel that morning. He dumped his load, and tried to land but a rice field with levees, is not a good place to land. miles

my dad told me a story one time when i asked him why he quite cowboying. Him and an uncle owned a ranch in the bloody basin area of arizona in the 20's, ranch still there. He said he roped an ol range cow one day that went around one side of a tree where him and the horse went around the other, got pretty tangled up. He said he didn't know if he should shoot the cow or the horse first. Determined he had to have a better way of making a living so went back to the railroad.
I could mention the first time i tried branding and castrating calves. And the guy on the horse holding the calf let the slack out just as i was attempting to toss him. And be being stupid enough to hold on as he sling shotted me into the railroad tie corral. I was seeing birdies for quite a while.

I wouldn't know where to start.

Here's a non injury massive facepalm.

an 8'diameter, 84 foot deep caisson with a 6' rebar cage, poured in place concrete.

With the wrong PSI mix.

good times...

Maint. supervisor at a feed mill I drove for decided to use a cutting torch to remove a motor from the grain leg;blew up the leg,a big part of the mill.He had 2nd and3rd degree burns on about one fourth of his body, injured 3 other workers and the feed mill was down for 6 mo. Damned if the didn't make him feedmill manager a year later!

Screw up and move up!

PHD"s miscalculated the yield of a nuclear device or containment requirements at the Nevada Test Site.Besides vaporizing two full up birds ( nuke warheads) The fire ball burned thru two fast closure debris doors, turned cured cement into a plastic state and filling everything,took out about a mile of two tunnels,all equipment and 1500 feet of 15 foot diameter steel piple. Only one steel door at the very end kept it from venting into the atmosphere.

About $20 million dollars worth of "Oh $hits". It was about twenty years before DOE announced that test even went off as it was classified before that.

I spent about two months in radiation protection gear sifting thru rubble trying to find experiments.

Saw something like this too at Camp Lejuene...The Duty Officer, a 2Lt, was being relieved in the S3 office in the morning. Half asleep on his feet, he racked the slide, then dropped the mag, squeezed the trigger and BOOM! Shot a SSgt right through the knee.

When I was in Basic Training a kid who had been in military school was showing off twirling his M16
and doing manual of arms type stuff.
When he banged the buttstock on the sidewalk the rifle fired and blew a hole in his tshirt. He fainted and hit the ground. The drill sgt. came over and started feeling for an exit wound and then started yelling at him to get up
etc.
Turns out the rifle had been used at a military funeral and still had a blank in the chamber.

F--k...

Heard about a guy my Dad knew, who was a cement truck driver. He rolled one truck and was warned to be more careful. He rolled another one, that was full of cement. By the time the truck was recovered, the cement was all set up inside the drum. He was told he could do one of two things - resign, or get a jackhammer and get busy. He quit.

13 dead over 40 yrs period in the oilfield, 12 offshore, 1 onshore. Personally knew 8 of them. Equipment failures, cranes, popped ropes, falls, burns, crushed and personal/personnel fk'ups via shortcuts. Life can be so fragile. Pays to handle with care and pays to pay attention. Doing multiple RCAs (root cause analysis)on these things is no fun especially when you know them.

But things have much improved by lessons learned the hard way.

That's what I'm thinking too.

So many of them involving multiple lives and millions of dollars lost.

Guy backed a 980 Cat grapple loader up on top of a Toyota Camry a couple years ago. It was friggin' awesome. He doesn't work in the wood yard anymore.

Many years ago I worked one summer in a cemetery. One morning a pallet of headstones arrived on a flat bed truck and one of the full time employees picked out five of us to help unload them.
He got a call on his radio to report to the office and he told us to wait until he got back and he would unload the stones and none of us were to touch the fork lift. No sooner had he left when one employee jumped on the fork lift and attempted to move the pallet. Within seconds the pallet crashed to the ground and broke almost every headstone. All three supervisors showed up within minutes and instead of doing anything to the guilty employee, they took the full timer who was in charge into the office and chewed him out good for almost an hour. Later that day the employee who dropped the pallet attempted to apologize to him but all he got from him was a cold stare and "Get away from me and dont speak to me"

When I was a splicer for a three letter telecommunications giant,I was on a job to put new cable/drops/network interfaces in an old trailer park in southwest Dallas.
We were just starting the job and were out surveying just how to start when I saw some guys from an irrigation company digging with some guys with shovels.
I found their boss and told him to stop because they haven't called for utility locates and nothing was marked. The guy told me that he didn't have time for that $hit and wasn't going to stop his guys from digging.
It pissed me off and I reiterated to him that they had to stop because this was an old park and the power was direct buried... NO CONDUITS... AT ALL...
This time he just turned his back and walked away.
It wasn't 5 minutes later when one of his guys stuck a sharpshooter shovel right into one of those buried power lines.
The kid was in his late teens or early twenties and when I got to him he wasn't breathing and the heal of his left boot was blown out and smoking.
I started CPR and got him breathing again,but not before he puked into my mouth... He didn't regain consciousnesses by the time the ambulance arrived.
He died of septic shock a couple of weeks later.
I was deposed by a couple of lawyers and never saw his boss again because if I had,he would have remembered me for the rest of his life.

Someone on the 7th floor of a building in mlps being constructed moved a 4x8' sheet of plywood marked "hole" so they could slid a bin full of nuts, bolts, screws, washers, and such. The bin fell two floors and killed the guy it landed on.

guy banging a valve on a wellhead with a sledge, valve let go, guy looked like someone had taken a giant cookie cutter to half his chest, instant death.