In fact, Googling for this I found references to another such incident a few years back. And I thought this only happened in cartoons.
I wonder if anyone’s been flattened by a road grader, or crushed by a falling safe or anvil lately.
Useless video.
If the scene described is actually in the video, I couldn’t see it.
One of the repeats, near the end of the guy blathering, shows it for a split second, on the left of the screen, with an arrow pointing it out. Yawn.
When I first saw this, I thought it was referencing a hypothetical mishmash of three different movies…
Mostly the workers on the site get hurt.
Mythbusters had a cannonball escape their perimeters and go over a hill into a house.
They didn’t put it on the TV so as to not harm their image, or to encourage the copycat behaviour. (Even though its an accident, a child may formulate the idea of replicating the trick, with the prepared line “It was an accident.”)… Actually Mythbusters does a lot of things dangerous , or seemingly dangerous… By not showing precautions taken, it leads to the copycat thinking that its a safe thing to copy …
We had an incident with a saw blade a couple years ago on a job site on which I was working.
We were doing some major work on a local water treatment plant and one of the late stage processes was repurposing a series of 10 metre-deep, football-field long holding tanks. This process required garage door-sized holes to be cut into the concrete walls of the tanks to create a long, snaking channel.
Anyway, the concrete cutting trade was well into the process and had cut several holes using a saw very much like this one. Late in the afternoon one day, while cutting with a 62" blade, the entire system popped off its rail while spinning at around 2800 rpm and spun out of control across the floor. The controller who was a good 4-5 metres away from the wall, tried to jump out of the way of the blade, but it still managed to clip him across the back of his right leg, carving a 10 cm wide, 4 cm deep slice through the back of his calf and severing an artery. Apparently when you slice an artery cleanly enough, the ends close up on their own, so there was surprisingly little blood on the floor after the fact. Maybe a couple pints…
Anyway, we were able to extract the worker from the confined space and transport him to the hospital fairly quickly and they were able to stitch him up. Last I checked he was back to work and doing fine, but it took a few months to get there.
Husqvarna sent in their top experts to do an incident investigation and eventually left with the failed equipment to do some exhaustive testing. They apparently had several dozen of these saws out in the field and not only had they never failed, they were designed in a fool-proof manner which would make this kind of incident hypothetically impossible—there was only one way to attach the blade and motor to the rail and if it wasn’t locked on correctly, it couldn’t engage the power. Or so they believed to that point.
A couple months later, they reported back to us that they were unable to find a defect in the machine and they were also unable to reproduce the incident. Not being able to determine what happened or how it happened, their corrective measure was to pull that saw design off the market and replace every single one of the saw that were in operation world-wide rather than wait for something else to go wrong. So full marks to Husqvarna for doing the right thing.
So, long story short, in 14+ years of working in the safety field, I have seen exactly one incident that could not be attributed to human error and that was it. Sometimes really crazy shit goes down and the consequences are scary as hell.
Only thing I’ve seen like that was in the military. A carpenter was cutting plywood with a 10" circular saw. Unknown to him, the guard’s return spring had broken while he was cutting. He finished the cut and set the saw to one side, blade still spinning. It promptly took off across the floor, scaring the shit out of another worker. Nobody hurt, luckily.
For runaway sawblades, this one from a few years ago is even better. It’s a 2’ concrete saw, and after the runaway blade hacks a giant hole in the side of a nearby vacant home, the worker quietly retrieves the blade and goes on as if nothing happened. Neighbor later notices the hole, checks surveillance camera footage, and says WTF.
Methinks that worker is in a WORLD of shit, although I often wonder about how many dozens of unreported incidents happen around my projects. Probably way more than even I assume, and I don’t think too highly of the responsibility of some people.
Not a saw, but when I was in high school a teacher (who was also a friend) borrowed a huge floor polisher from the school to refinish the linoleum in a big kitchen/dining room. It was the kind with a 3-foot pad, a concentric motor, and a long handle from the motor. No wheels; you used it by moving the pad around as it spun. The switch was faulty and finally, even though he let go of it very cautiously, the motor re-engaged just as he took his hands away. The handle, maybe 6 feet long, whipped around like Barry Bonds going for number 715 and caught him on the shin. It’s the only time I’ve seen a golf-ball-size welt rise just like Chuck Jones drew 'em.
A clout on the head, or maybe even on the chest, could have been fatal.
Heh, not being in the industry, I’d have no idea who you’d report this to. Obviously his superiors, or their safety officer, but then who? I suppose the owner of the home the saw attacked, but it was vacant for a year, allegedly. I assume the jurisdiction has some sort of government worker’s safety administration, so presumably you’d report to them also.
At a guess—and this depends on who’s contracted to do the work and for whom—the worker calls his superior, the superior calls the damaged house to check for injuries and, when he finds no one lives there, takes it to the municipal government division tasked with road work to sort out who gets to pay for the damages.
In the grand scheme of things, the repairs might only cost a few hundred bucks if it was just the exterior wall that sustained damage, but the real issue for the worker involved is choosing to not report the incident as it was one with a very high potential for serious harm. Depending on the company, that could get him fired or severely reprimanded at the very least.
Yet further proof that when you have built something foolproof, nature invents a better fool.
Here’s the Woody Woodpecker cartoon “Operation Sawdust”- watch Buzz Buzzard being chased by a particularly malevolent runaway saw from 4:03 to 5:20