There were two workers standing in the upper left corner of the frame when the spill happened. I wonder how they fared.
Yeah, it was not like a couple tons of water spilled on the floor. Looked like an explosion, with a lethal, semi-liquid mass remaining on the floor for a good while. Watching the clip, I envisioned people reaching just a bit outside the frame and getting their feet burned off at the ankles, faceplanting into the hot metal.
I don’t think there was an explosion, it’s just that the molten metal was so bright it swamped the camera light receptors until it cooled a bit.
Certainly, it did set burnable things on fire.
I’d like to see the report on what went wrong with these events, like that one.
That one was pretty simple really. The crane operator thought he’d gotten the hook off the bucket’s bail as he pulled the crane away. But he was mistaken, the hook was still barely engaged to the bucket bail and he pulled the bucket over on its side instead.
The next more upstream “why” would be interesting to know.
Was there a camera that should give him a good upclose view that was inoperative? Was the glass on his control cab so filthy it was hard to see? Was the physical layout such that he had a crappy angle to see what the hook was doing? Was this guy working 60 hour shifts? Was the required pace of work so quick that a mistake was inevitable? Was the operator drunk / stoned / phoning? Does the crane have twitchy, poorly maintained controls? Is there a procedure that requires he lift the hook above the bail to prove it’s clear before moving laterally? If not, why not? If so, did he ignore it or not know it or was it sacrificed officially or unofficially on the altar of greater throughput?
I read that story shortly after my kids were born. It was horrendous to read that as a new dad. Unfortunately my response to horrendous things is to binge on them because… I don’t know why. Maybe unconscious aversion therapy, except it doesn’t seem to work for me.
Anyway I read all the medical details of every woodchipper incident I could find for about a month, and I’m slightly more anxious and disturbed from having done so. But I can tell you that neither me nor anybody I know will ever get pulled into a woodchipper. There have been many safety lectures.
I’m also well-versed in cockpit voice recordings from airline crashes, and I have a pretty detailed knowledge of nuclear weapons, disasters and near-misses, and the various test series, if anyone wants to hire me for their kids’ birthday party.
I hadn’t noticed them and would have blurred the link.
The accident was fairly slow in happening and even once the spill occurred, it seemed to take a while to move to the upper left corner, so perhaps they were able to get out of there?
Is that kind of hook and moving crane method a normal way smelters move crucibles? It seems like a system designed to eventually have this kind of accident. If the crane mechanism has a malfunction or the operator makes a mistake with the delicate detach procedure, then it seems really easy to tip over the crucible.
Maybe so. The camera bloomed pretty severely, but by 1:23 or so it’s faded, and you can see that the leading edge of the tsunami is not all that fast.
Where I work, when there’s an injury or a near miss, we’re required to fill out a “five why’s” report, which makes you think your way up the chain of causality to something at or near the root cause. It doesn’t undo what already happened, but finding out e.g. whether the crane operator was drunk, exhausted, or had poor visibility provides something more concretely correctable, more likely to improve future outcomes, than just telling him “be more careful in the future.”
Being chased by molten metal certainly would give one incentive to get the hell out of there as quickly as possible.
Saw a video once of a somewhat similar accident at a steel mill leading to a similar problem on the floor of the factory, and that one included people not only running away but running up stairways and ladders at phenomenal speed to reach catwalks and platforms out of harm’s way.
Yeah, I tried to convey that but apparently failed. “Looked like” meant literally: looked like [but I know really wasn’t].
It is. It’s like any other disengagement, like a trailer hitch not quite or ‘failure to set the brake/put it in park’ or scarf gets caught on the ski chairlift. You’re disengaged unless you’re not.
Unrelated anecdote: I was at a foundry on a downtime day and they were cleaning out the crucibles/transport vessels like seen in this vid. I guess heavier metals sink and stick to the walls so they tip them on their sides, chock, and send a guy inside with a pneumatic jackhammer. I don’t know what kind of ear protection he was wearing but my foam plugs were certainly not adequate and I wasn’t even that close. It was nausea-inducing, can’t-think-straight noise.
No kids, but there are two tools I refuse to have in my house: a deep fryer and a chain saw. Something about those two risks just stands out as beyond the pale.
I’ve never had a personal or first-person bad experience with either, but I’m just not going there.
As kid my Dad used to comment on various ghastly accidents by saying that some people just have really weak imaginations. His point being that just a little thought could have anticipated the bad outcome. I took that message to heart from a young age. I’ve done some serious dangerous shit over the years, but not without thinking it through as best I could. Uncontrolled risk is just not worth it.
That’s certainly how we do it in my biz.
To the degree that we record everything done by everyone everywhere every day and screen it via computer for screw-ups that almost happen. Trying to find the seeds that might sprout into a serious screw-up or worse yet, bent metal or hurt people.
Yeah, that’s the typical Army “Blame it on the dead guy” ploy.
That reactor design was perversely unsafe - the reactor was way too sensitive to the position of the control rods, and could go “prompt critical” if they were withdrawn too far. There had been many reports of the rods sticking, and all if would take is one to come loose after being stuck to cause the reactor to suddenly emit 100’s of MW of power.
That one is bad, but these are pretty horrible, too:
Here’s another synopsis of Therac-25. This told from a software dev POV.
Nobody got hurt by the recent UAL 238 engine failure at DEN, but the vid was eye-catching.
My dad once mangled his thumb using a chainsaw. He was holding a branch in one hand and the chainsaw in his other hand; the saw jumped up out of the kerf and rode down the branch to where his holding hand was. Thankfully the damage wasn’t too bad, and he recovered after some stitches and some time. In the aftermath he admitted he had become complacent after having owned/used it for years, and that complacency is what led him to do convenient-but-risky things like holding the branch he was cutting.
Having an active imagination can help a person to foresee/forestall danger, but years of uneventful experience can lull some folks into a false sense of security that coaxes them into cutting corners on safety, just like my dad did.