March/April 2005
By John Gilstrap
Note: The following stories are real, and all happened during a four-week period in 2004. The names have been changed for privacy reasons.
Raul, a scrap plant worker, was essentially invisible on the day he died. No one even knew his name. He had a nickname, but that doesn’t help much when notifying next of kin. No one knew that he had four kids in Mexico or that he was sending a substantial chunk of his meager paycheck home to them every month. The oldest of his now-orphaned children is seven.
Raul didn’t speak English, and his employer didn’t speak Spanish, but everyone was fluent in the language of commerce. He did his job and he received his pay, content to be living the American Dream.
He died during his break, sitting where he was supposed to be at the moment he was supposed to be there. It was 9:20 on a Sunday morning. A few yards away, a burner had just finished removing the trucks from a tank car. A crane lifted the tank off of the track and set it down on what must have been uneven ground. When the crane let go, the tank rolled into a second tank car that, in turn, crushed Raul where he sat. By all estimates, he died quickly.
Around the same time and a couple hundred miles away, Frank was using a rag to wipe down the bushing on the crane he was operating. The rag caught on a loose cylinder pin connected to the crane’s shear attachment. When the pin came clear, the shear activated, all but severing his right hand.
Meanwhile, in the next time zone, Patrick was down in a baler, cleaning out a jam. Up above, in the control room, a couple of workers were goofing around when they accidentally hit the activation button. The blocks Patrick had inserted to keep the baler from cycling sheared easily. He scrambled to make it out, but the ram caught him below the waist.
Finally, there’s James. He was up on a manlift, supervising Alex who was torchcutting some two-inch pipe that hadn’t been drained of the flammable liquid it once contained. Alex saw the spray coming and was able to pivot out of the way, but James caught the liquid full on and was drenched from face to waist. He was 30 years old. He burned to death eight feet off the ground.
I don’t know how to explain such a bloodbath in the span of four weeks, but these horrific incidents are consistent with the near-geometric increase in workers’ comp, property, and general liability claims that our RecycleGuard insurance partners have been seeing in recent months.
Maybe the strong scrap markets have led to longer work hours and greater exposure. Maybe everybody’s working too hard. Maybe it has to do with language barriers. Or sunspots.
Whatever the root, here’s a statistic you can take to the bank: Every accident reflects 1,000 near-accidents. Over the same four-week period, that’s 4,000 bullets dodged. Not accidents prevented, mind you, because prevention implies purposeful precaution. That’s 4,000 pieces of runaway scrap and accidental activations and fires that, by sheer luck, didn’t hurt anyone.
One insurance representative I talked with recently said she’s never seen such a rash of catastrophic accidents. Literally and figuratively, it’s a trend we can’t live with.
Last July, when I spent my first day as an ReMA employee mingling at the board of directors meeting in Washington, D.C., easily half the people I met offered the same jovial greeting: “Boy, do you have your work cut out for you.”
They meant well, but they had it all wrong. My work’s actually pretty easy, certainly by comparison. People in the ReMA office aren’t losing limbs and lives. The heaviest machinery I operate is my car.
All I can do is prod and push and motivate and create opportunities. All I can do is shout long enough and loud enough for people to shift out of neutral and start treating worker safety as a genuine, legitimate piece of the greater management puzzle.
The real work, in other words, lies with the owners and managers of scrap facilities whose efforts can have an immediate, lifesaving impact.
I don’t know how the stakes could get any higher.
—John Gilstrap, director of safety for ReMA
Raul, a scrap plant worker, was essentially invisible on the day he died. No one even knew his name. He had a nickname, but that doesn’t help much when notifying next of kin. No one knew that he had four kids in Mexico or that he was sending a substantial chunk of his meager paycheck home to them every month. The oldest of his now-orphaned children is seven.