I can check that gear in a minute, so don't touch anything, okay?
Hey! Get down from there! Now!
Hey! Turn it over!
What if it bumped that control by accident? You'd be mincemeat by now.
What have I told you? You don't work on equipment when the engine's running.
Well, I told him not to touch anything.
All right, I guess I wasn't thinking.
You weren't thinking? You mean you'll work on engines and machinery and
not think of your own personal safety?
Here. Shake hands with danger.
Shake hands with danger. See the guy who ought to know?
I used to laugh at safety. Now they call me Three Finger Joe.
Shake hands with danger. Find it
any where you choose.
Be careless for a moment and spend a lifetime with the blues.
Earth-moving machines are designed for safety, but
they're big enough to hide a man.
Your earth dollar! Just about dead, you could have killed me.
This mechanic is lucky he's able to complain.
He should have protected himself by removing the key and putting a do-not
-operate tag on the controls.
Any time you pick up a wrench, reach for a control, use a grease gun, grab a
welding torch, or work on any machine while forgetting safety,
you're shaking hands with danger.
[...]
Okay.
All right, now you take the loader up behind the hill where they're working, and
I'll drive up on the road and I'll meet you at the top, all right?
Okay, Cliff, I never operated this model before.
All right, all you have to do is back it up and then let it down nice and easy
like. Do you want me to do it?
No, no, I can handle it. There's no sweat there. We can take care of it.
Okay, all right. I'll see you later.
What this man didn't know was that the operator had left the
lift lever in the raised position.
So the arms would rise automatically when the engine started.
All right, yeah, yeah, I'm on.
I'm okay.
A qualified operator would have known better.
The man shouldn't have tried to perform as an operator when he wasn't one.
Well, you were kidding me. You said you didn't know how to run that thing.
Chuck Hamlin is no beginner.
Before he begins changing an O-ring on an excavator boom, he checks.
Oil temperature down, engine off, bucket grounded, hydraulic lock engaged.
Okay, you'll have that O-ring installed in minutes.
The men's with danger take a chance that you won't fall.
You'll save yourself a minute, but you may damn well lose it all.
Wherever possible, the stick should be extended in the boom lowered so the
work can be done at ground level.
Finding that impossible, the next man used the service truck
as a safe work platform.
Climbing with tools can create a hazard.
Use the steps and the grab irons.
Keep at least three points of contact, two feet and one hand unencumbered.
Any shortcuts and you're in vitamin injury.
In fact, taking shortcuts is often a quick road to trouble.
For example, consider what happened to Harry Sanders.
Harry has come to work with a problem.
His son is having a football injured knee operated on this morning.
Harry wants to finish this job and take a couple hours off to visit his son.
The operator has complained that the scraper is shifting too slow
and the controls are sluggish.
In a hurry, Harry pulls only one axle.
The service manual says to pull both axles and disconnect steering.
But Harry knows with one axle removed and the differential
unlocked, the machine shouldn't move.
He's taken a shortcut before.
While waiting for the operator to return, Harry starts the machine
in order to judge the problem.
While he waits for the engine to warm, Harry's thoughts
drift to worries about his son.
The accelerator feels stiff, so then he checks
the feel of the service brakes.
His attention is divided.
While thinking about his son, his hands and feet go through motions he
believes have become automatic.
In this absent-minded state, he unconsciously starts to steer, jams his foot
on the differential lock and the machine takes off.
Lucky for the stunned operator, the machine stops itself.
Harry is only bruised, but in a crowded area he could have killed someone because
he ignored safe procedure to save a few minutes' work.
Now, most people have days when they come to work with worries,
hangovers or distractions.
Those are times for being doubly cautious.
When the body's on the job but the mind is elsewhere, it's danger time.
Glenn Greenwood was victim of another kind of mental hazard, ego.
How you doing, hotshot?
It's stuck in there tight.
Did you get that pin, driver?
No, but I got this drift. Just give it a whack.
Glenn knows the risk of striking hard against badly chipped metal, but he's
wearing safety glasses and there's a macho thing involved here.
Glenn doesn't want his friend to sneer at him for being overly cautious.
So Glenn shakes hands with danger.
Maybe his friend would have laughed if Glenn had insisted upon playing it safe,
but he sure as hell isn't laughing now.
With tools, the time to make sure you have a safe ending is
before you start using them.
They should be the right tools for the job and in safe condition.
If Glenn's friend had ground off that mushroomed face, taking care of the tools
he uses, he could have prevented that accident.
Some old timers think accidents happen only to greenhorns.
Hey, Rat, I got a bracket on. You want to come take a look at it?
Let them learn the hard way, they say.
Now let them learn the hard way can be an attitude that
results in serious injury.
Sorry about that.
One word of caution from the old timer would have saved a lot of
pain and lost work time.
And even the old timer can lapse into carelessness.
The safety gap is correct when he starts.
But he doesn't think about how much he's grinding down the wheel.
He gets by with it on that longer piece.
Shake hands with danger, step right up and say hello.
Grinding wheels and metal are what made him.
Three-finger Joe.
Fingers aren't the only things to think about when working with track.
A
near miss due to the mechanics failure to restrain the
track before he unloosened it at a high point.
Here they're about to push a high-sprocketed machine from an old set
of tracks onto a new set.
With both tracks removed, the machine is free to roll.
On a slight grade, it may just take off.
Hey, get away from us.
[...]
[...] tap under.
If they'd had an operator in the machine, he could have stopped it
by dropping the ripper or blade.
They should have planned proper blocking and restraint.
But better still, they should change one track at a time.
Then there can't be a roll away.
Hurry and failure to heed safety warnings can also endanger
those due in routine maintenance.
Despite constant warnings about hot oil and pressure systems, some optimist
always thinks he can get his hand away in time.
Oh, God. Oh, gee. Hot. Oh, oh, gee. Somebody help me.
Needn't have happened.
The temperature gauges, pressure gauges, and the safety caps on cooling systems
are there to prevent accidents from occurring.
The people who shake hands with danger are those who don't learn
beforehand what they're getting into, like the owner whose brake road a
chamber has been losing air pressure.
Hey, Sam.
Hey, Bill.
I got the brake chamber off the loader.
I got to run into the dealers to get some repair parts.
While I'm gone, will you take it apart to save us some time?
Okay, Bill.
At this point, the service manuals call for the insertion of a threaded
tool to hold the spring force.
Sam hasn't read the manual.
He doesn't know he's releasing a force that might be as high as 1,750 pounds.
[...]
Whether you're working on anything from nitrogen accumulators to inflated tires,
it pays to know the kind of power you're dealing with beforehand.
Warnings about gasoline are as old as use of the fuel.
Yet somewhere, somebody is always deciding it won't hurt to use it as a cleaning
fluid just this one time.
Oh, he'll empty the pan very carefully just as soon as he finds a
rag to wipe off the carburetor.
Meanwhile, the fuel keeps vaporizing.
I've only got about another hour to go on this thing.
I've got to get that thing washed over there.
I'll be done in a minute.
It's possible to become overconfident about handling dangerous materials.
A good reason why safety instructions should be repeated at frequent intervals.
Oddly enough, it isn't lack of familiarity with a job that causes most accidents.
Often it's the routineness of the work that makes a person overconfident.
Bill Myers is changing buckets, a job he's done at least a hundred times.
If he were new at it, Bill would be watching and thinking about every step.
Now it's so routine that caution has been dolled.
The hole is dry. The pin won't slide in.
There's no stick or swab in the grease can, but he could surely find one
if he took the time to search around.
This is the moment, that split second when a man decides between being safe
or shaking hands with danger.
If he couldn't find a stick or a swab, Bill could have had the linking members
moved apart and greased them separately.
It would have been a nuisance, but Bill Myers would give anything to be able to
go back and do it the right way.
Hey Ernie. Yeah, I got this hose off the dozer blade here. Why don't you put this
bolt on that end bit? I'm going to take this into a shovel.
Alright, I'll get her done.
He should have blocked both push-arms, and he should never have relied upon
anything as unstable or crushable as building blocks.
Improper blocking and failure to block are major causes of crushing accidents.
We're dealing with enormous weight, and we should never depend upon
hydraulics alone to hold it up.
I'll show you something back here.
Ted, the position this truck bed was in without these locking pins in, and you
working underneath the truck bed, you didn't have to fail, you'd have had it.
So these pins should be in place as such.
Now it's always important to look out for the other guy. Safety is always in the
hands of people on the job.
The warnings and cautions are there for those who heed them.
Safety procedures are spelled out and illustrated in lubrication and maintenance
guides, operator's guides, and service managers.
The protection is there in machine design and safety devices.
Safety instruction, emphasizing knowledge and awareness, prevents accidents
by encouraging safety consciousness, and protective clothing helps
shield the body from the unexpected.
The human element remains. It can lend itself to safety or turn a routine
situation into a dangerous one.
Hey, Bob. I've got to get this machine out of here. That engine's not running.
I don't care if it's on or not. You see them trucks? Them trucks got to come
through here. I want this out of here right now.
Now we all know that the service man doesn't always work under ideal conditions.
Mechanical Murray is an excavator with a dead engine. It won't start, which means
the brakes are locked, which means it's going to sit right here until Bob
disconnects the final drives. Then he'll have a machine he can move.
What he should also have, but doesn't, is a second vehicle to provide braking.
Shake hands with danger. Hurry up and get it done. It
takes two men to move the same, but I'll make do with one.
Put the motor off there. Get that machine out of there.
Now Bob isn't dumb. He wouldn't try towing it all the way to the shop without
help, but he just wants to drag it 100 yards or so and
get that foreman off his back.
Bob Murray will never again tow a freewheeling machine without
having control over the braking.
Bob was lucky. Others were not.
Shake hands with danger. Shake hands
with danger. Shake hands with danger.
And friends I used to know, compared to them I'm lucky to be
just three finger Joe.
Thanks for watching.