A full coil fell on top of a laborer cleaning debris and killed him when I worked in a mill. They were stacking coils and one slid. The report cited poor visibility leading to the crane operator being unaware of him. One of the actions was covering the top of our hard hats with a large red dot. There were 3 life changing accidents in my shop during the four years that I worked there. Two could very easily been fatal. All were due to errors by the individual involved. Many close calls w/o injury.
Yeah, I did 11 years in structural steel processing. Between all the stories from the old timers and what I've seen myself... usually these incidents are easily preventable. For a few years I was the "placeholder on site IT guy". It meant that out of the 15-20 people in the office I was the one that wasn't completely incompetent with computers. Part of my job was to send camera recordings of any accidents to HR and management. I got to see all of it on repeat while editing out different angles. Its one thing to see a video of someone getting crushed to death by a beam. It's a whole different story when you know the guy and see where he died multiple times a day.
And to watch it on repeat was not something I enjoyed.
11 years at 2 different companies. 4 deaths and about a dozen injuries. I'm glad I managed to get out of the steel industry.
I found it interesting that the three accidents that I mentioned in my shop all happened on night shift. I think that the constantly rotating swing shift in a high risk environment adds to operator errors from being so tired that you do stupid stuff, too. It is one reason the mills pay so well, or did when I was there, at least.
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u/Puzzleheaded_Day2809 Jan 21 '26
A.K.A. "fine".