You’d probably enjoy r/catastrophicfailure.
I couldn’t remember his name until I saw it at the bottom of that Wiki page, but I knew it reminded me of Phineas Gage, who survived having a spike blown through his head in the mid 19th century, although unlike Dr. Bugorski, he did not make a reasonable recovery. He “healed” but was not the same again, personality-wise.
Given that we (in the US) were among the countries leading the industrial revolution, it’s understandable that we were among the first to experience a lot of “OMG, we had no idea how dangerous that was” accidents, and it’s got a lot to do with why we’re pretty good at avoiding them now. But it’s not like we’re hoarding all of that knowledge. Other countries that are following in our tracks have access to all of our learning experience, but seem not to be utilizing it.
Two WTF disasters that stick out in my mind:
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The escalator death in China (CNN article, with optional video). The treadplate on the escalator landing was not secured with screws. Department store workers knew this, but did not stop the escalator. A woman rides the escalator to the top, and the treadplate shifts when she steps on it; she falls through into the escalator machinery and gets crushed to death. Why were the screws gone? And fergodsake, why didn’t they stop the escalator?
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Tabletop stove refueling fire in China (article with a couple of still frames, no video). Restaurant server refuels stove on customers’ table from a large but mostly empty jug of alcohol. Stove, extinguished but still hot, ignites fumes and turns the jug into a gigantic whoosh bottle, blasting flaming alcohol all over one of the customers. The article speaks of the victim “writhing in agony for several seconds before somebody rushes over with a small cloth and tries to beat out the flames”. Having seen the video, I’d say it was more like twenty seconds; the server was trying to beat out the fire, but she was using a small dish towel, and it was a very big fire. In the end, the victim was left with third-degree burns pretty much on the entire upper half of her body, fucked for life (google “xiao qian burns” for a follow-up if you want). The server apparently had no idea of the hazard involved in refueling a hot stove with other people sitting right in front of it, because nobody had trained her. Is there nothing like OSHA in China? Or does a Chinese OSHA exist, but with no teeth and nobody gives a rat’s ass?
Not meaning to single out China with these two incidents, as similar stuff seems to happen in other countries as well. But these were two that really stuck out in my mind because the people who suffered were third parties being exposed to risk due to someone else’s negligence.
I think it goes to how a society values human lives. A low valuation leads to careless design and use of machinery. It also leads to higher acceptance of violence.
I’ve seen his skull.
On YouTube there are also lots of close-call videos that depict the same sorts of screwups, minus the soul-crushing reality that somebody just died making Cheezy Poofs or whatever.
I recall one where a steel mill went haywire and shot a spaghetti-like rod of orange glowing-hot flexible steel a 100+ feet across the factory floor. Imagine a red-hot 6" diameter rope of floppy gooey steel. The end hits the ground right behind a guy & begins to pile up around him as he looks over his shoulder and scampers away before being touched.
Eye-catching to say the least.
As the signs in physics labs warn: Do not look into laser with remaining eye
When I was a boy, upon meeting a distant one-armed relative for the first time and staring, as boys do at that kind of thing, my Dad told me that “The Whizzer” (a textile machine) took his arm. He didn’t describe the machine and I’ve never found references to it on Google, but boy it stuck with me.
BTW, have you heard about the man who lost his left arm and left leg in an industrial accident? Not to worry, he’s all-right now.
Yet oddly enough, he leans left.
I can’t even watch non-accident related videos of rubber being milled - just terrifying, but the machine operators seem really casual about it.
While it’s inevitable that early industrializing nations like the United Kingdom, Germany, and the United States would be the first to experience a variety of industrial accidents, it’s ridiculous to think that they “had no idea how dangerous that was.”
Have you done any reading at all in the industrial relations of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era? It’s not that people didn’t know how dangerous industrial work was; it’s that there was little or no willingness on the part of employers and government to make conditions safer, or impose regulations. The employers had little or no incentive to improve safety, because they didn’t have to pay into workers’ compensation insurance plans, and they also didn’t generally face massive lawsuits from workers who were injured on the job. And, with massive immigration from abroad, combined with significant internal migration from rural areas to American cities, there were so many workers that an employee who lost and arm or an eye could just be replaced with a new, warm, unskilled body.
Unions and other employee advocates spent much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century calling for, among other things, shorter hours and safer working conditions. Labor unions in places like New York, for example, marched in support of improved workplace safety, but these calls were constantly rebuffed by employers. These concerns included things as easy to fix as locked doors that prevented egress from industrial workplaces, allegedly to prevent shirking and theft. It took the death of almost 150 young women and girls, with bodies strewn on the streets of New York City, for regulators to take these issues seriously.
Here’s a fresh one that’s similar but different (no people are in this clip):
The forklift operator couldn’t have had any idea about what was in the bale he put in the furnace. The thing upchucked without any error on his part.
No video, but the 1983 Byford Dolphin diving bell accident is perhaps the most horrific industrial accident I’ve ever heard of.
This was pretty bad too:
One of the workers was nailed to the concrete ceiling by the control rods and fuel rods ejected at high speed by the explosion.
They were all killed instantly or fairly quickly by trauma, but all were also massively irradiated, far beyond hope of survival. Dead2.
I’ve read better articles on the accident specifically; ghastly all around.
In the early 1950s, my dad and one of my uncles worked at an iron foundry during the summer, to help pay for college. They could make a LOT of money doing that - and I shudder to think about the nonexistent safety guidelines compared to nowadays!
I remember seeing a video of a guy getting sucked into a jet engine. It was winter and he had a hood attached to his jacket. The hood slipped down and was the thing that caused him to get pulled in. It went fast and it was ugly.
That actually happens more often than you’d think, including a time circa late spring/early summer 1990. I got dispatched off the freeway to an industrial park area in Milwaukee County. A forklift driver did exactly what happened in the video you linked to. Nobody was hurt.
But on one side of the warehouse the shelves had hundreds of pallets, each that held four 55-gallon drums of motor oil. On the other side were zillions of boxes of bottled motor oil. The place supplied garages and quickie oil change services and auto parts stores. There were thousands of gallons of oil about 3 feet deep oozing out of the building. It was definitely a safety hazard until they got it cleaned up. We had to block off the surrounding area until a special team came and cleaned up that gawd awful mess. Took over 4 days for them to do so!
Turned out that the company did not train the forklift driver at all, whatsoever. Just told him to jump on the thing and go to work. It was like his first week there.
I’ve heard claims that SL-1 might have been murder/suicide, not an accident. Allegedly one of the operators was having an affair with the spouse of his co-worker. Both of them died in the disaster.
I work at a government safety agency and I am familiar with a bunch of industrial accidents that would turn one’s bowels to water.
Check out the Qinghe Special Steel Corporation disaster (Qinghe Special Steel Corporation disaster - Wikipedia). A ladle containing 30 tons of molten steel fell from an overhead track and flooded into a room full of workers.