Working at a steel manufacturing plant where they melt the scraps and pour it into a mold. They needed a new, much larger crane so they were installing this huge 250 ton overhead rail crane and I was elected to go up and start installing the 4" rigid conduit on the frame for the power feeds once the "H" frame was in place. Nothing else was there, just the frame, which was I beams about 4 foot tall and about 12" wide on top and the end frames with the roller assembly on, which was about 24" wide so you could work on it. The top of it was 80 feet off the ground and there was no barriers, safety ropes, etc.... did I mention I hate heights?
So, they give me an 80 foot boom lift to get to the top of this unit, but an 80 foot lift really only goes up to about 75 feet, so I had to grab all my tools, go up in the lift all the way to the top until the bucket was leaning against the frame about 4 feet from the top of the rails, and then climb up on the bucket rails, reach up to the frame top and climb up.... once I got up there, the top of the rails was covered in metal slag from airborne metal particles from the melt process and it was like walking on tiny, microscopic marbles with nothing to hold onto if you fell. I somehow got to the end of the rails and looked at the job, went back and jumped back into the boom bucket and went down to look for the foreman. I told him he could fire me if he wanted but I'm never going up there again without all the proper safety equipment in place.... he was not very happy with me that day, but I could care less...
This is the same place we had to replace the thermocouples under the melt crucible after the melt had been shut off for 24 hours. It was still so hot our plastic hard hats melted down around our ears and the bill flopped down in front of our eyes after about 10 minutes- the maximum they would allow us to work under there at a time due to the heat. And this was while they were running a 3" fire hose in the bottom of the pit the whole time we were working down there and not a drop of water accumulated in that pit all day long... drank over a gallon of water that day and still didn't piss...
Bob
Last edited by Sheister; 06/19/21.
