Shop Safety

A review of best practices by Popular Mechanics magazine, inspired by the death of a Yale student whose hair was caught in the chuck of a metal lathe.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/home/skills/yale-students-tragic-death-prompts-a-shop-safety-review?click=pm_latest
I guess she should have been wearing a hair net. . .

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That's a good article, and they mention jewelry, including rings. I'll never forget what I saw in the safety class for new employees at IH many years ago. I was already real careful about sleeves and loose clothes from doing car engine work. At the IH safety class they showed 2 pictures I remember well. A wedding banded finger with about 2 feet of tendons hanging from it. It was on a drill press chuck. The ring fit right in a groove of the chuck. Violated the "touching moving machinery" rule but it was the ring that got the finger. Second picture the finger looked like the first one. Except it was about 8 feet off the ground on the back of a T-25 dozer, stuck on some kind of groove up there. Salesman had jumped down, but left the finger behind. I put my wedding band in a drawer.
--Vic

On 4/15/2011 10:45 PM, Vic Smith wrote:
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I grew up in construction, and my father beat those dangers into me and all the rest of the workers. I've driven a desk for a couple decades now, but I still can't bring myself to wear any jewelry or anything tied around my neck. And when I pointed out the danger, they even switched the standard-issue badge lanyards to the break-away style with the velcro at the back of the neck. (I just clip mine to the front of my shirt)

On 4/15/2011 9:45 PM, Vic Smith wrote:
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I've never worn any jewelry and if I wear a watch, it's plastic with a plastic band like a divers watch. My oldest brother got his Twist-O-Flex watch band between the positive battery lead and ground on a tractor, he got branded when it lit up. :-)
TDD

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We have been round and round the real issue here, and no one has brought it up. She had the "right" to be stupid. To wear her hair long in a dangerous environment. I don't see anyone standing up for her saying she had the right to do what she did. This great country has been fostered now for hundreds of years by each person's "rights" to do this and that. We must allow people the "right" to exercise their "rights" even if their "rights" end up getting them killed. We do it all the time, with junkies, fast drivers, overeaters, lots of people.
It's just too bad that we have taken this to such an extreme, so far away from the intent of those who wanted to guarantee us our "rights".
Ahh, the liberal bent.
Steve, who is right

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Confined space entry is one of the longest and most complicated sections in OSHA regs. I had to formulate a company policy on it when I was in safety, and I had those yearly CDs. The section was HUGE, and the intricacies were many. Just by doing confined space entry alone, you violate OSHA, high work probably the same, it's been twenty plus years since I was in safety.
Steve

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a
We've had an awful lot of close calls lately. The huge airbus spinning the small jet on the JFK runway and the 1st lady's near miss with a 200 ton military cargo jet occurred in the last week or two. The FAA chief has ordered a top-down safety review.
< http://www.dallasnews.com/business/airline-industry/20110414-faa-chief-orders-top-to-bottom-review-of-air-traffic-control-system.ece >
""Incidents of near misses and close calls, and serious mishaps that have been reported - I am just a little concerned that our luck may be running out," Mica, the chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said in an interview Thursday."
With bigger and bigger jets carrying more passengers all flying to major urban centers, the law of averages is at work and sooner or later, you'll have another Tenerife where two jumbos collide and lots of people die.
March 27, 1977- KLM Flight 4805 and Pan Am Flight 1736, both Boeing 747s, collide on the runway in the Tenerife disaster (Los Rodeos Airport) Tenerife Canary Islands; 583 of 644 people on board both aircraft are killed in the worst accident in the history of commercial aviation.
At Tenerife, collateral damage was limited because the two planes were still at the airport.
There's a good list at Wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incidents_involving_commercial_aircraft
including the details of the mid-air collision I remember as a kid:
December 16 - The 1960 New York air disaster: United Airlines Flight 826, a Douglas DC-8, and TWA Flight 266, a Lockheed Super Constellation, collide in mid-air over Staten Island in New York; all 128 aboard the two planes and six people on the ground are killed.
While I agree that collision avoidance avionics have improved tremendously since the 1960 crash, planes just keep getting bigger and bigger and the airspace more and more crowded. The articles about the JFK crash mentioned that the Airbus that was involved was so large that special precautions had to be taken for every take-off and landing. To me, that's just asking for trouble.
-- Bobby G.