Posted By fats van den raad
Operator fell on his backside after hands slipped from a valve spanner on wich he was pulling.
Supervisor's comment on incident report form "This was the operators own fault as I had warned him earlier for not wearing a hard hat"

??????????????
Further investigation revealed that the operator came out of the control room without his hard hat earlier on in the shift and was reprimanded by the supervisor. As far as the supervisor was concerned, every mishap that befell the operator from then on would be due to the hard hat issue.

Posted By Zoe Barnett
In my previous life in the docks industry a very very very senior member of the board slipped over, bruising his bottom and getting his Savile Row trousers muddy.

The accident form was duly completed by an umsympathetic manager who stated that the main cause of accident was: Silly old sod should have been looking where he was going.

Posted By Karen Todd
I've not called people muppets, but I have called them idiots (not to their face).

At a structural steel company I worked for, before my time, there was a rather accident prone bloke who worked there. He had a number of amusing, but potentially very serious accidents which were frequently recounted.

The company had both sideloaders and counterbalance FLTs. One day he was driving in through a roller shutter door and crashed the FLT into the frame of the door. The MD came out and went ballistic and asked him how it had happened. His reply, "I forgot I was in the sideloader"...

Another incident. He was driving a lorry with a beam on it which overhung the lorry at the front and back. He had to turn the lorry as he took a wrong turn. He was doing a 3 point turn and guess where the end of the beam at the back of the lorry ended up? Straight through a red BT phone box. Had anyone been in the box they would surely have been killed.

Thank goodness he'd left and gone to wreak havoc elsewhere by the time I joined the company.

With regards to the chair - I know a safety manager who this actually happened to and she damaged her coccyx and had to sit on a rubber swimming ring for weeks afterwards (which everyone found extremely amusing). The chairs were new chairs and one of the corrective actions was to check all chairs. The check revealed a couple of other dodgy ones.

Karen

Posted By Paul Adams
Any traffic accident in Saudi Arabia is automatically your fault if you are a Foriegner on the basis that if you weren't in the Kingdom, it wouldn't have happened!

Posted By steve e ashton
Two:

A very macho electrician using a screwdriver to prise cable clips out of wall.... The screwdriver slipped (inevitably) and entered his eye socket (it did not penetrate his eyeball). The managers investigation report, complete with typo, was forwarded to the MD and others. It recorded that "...the electrician was indulging in gross male practice and would be disciplined accordingly.....". The safety committee spent around half of one meeting trying to decide whether the typo was deliberate or not.

A Chemical Process Operator, using weak acid in a plating shop and not wearing suitable hand protection, went to the loo but failed to wash his hands before using the urinal. He was subsequently hospitalised in severe pain with chemical burns to a very sensitive part of his anatomy. The supervisors investigation recorded that "...in future, the man would wear protective."
I initially thought this was another typo, and queried it with the supervisor. His response was that no, he hadn't intended to write 'protective gloves'. A novel use of a common latex item with the end cut off was what he had in mind to protect the vulnerable anatomy......

And they say health and safety is boring!

Steve

Posted By Merv Newman
I was site HSE manager and just by coincidence the European HSE manager had his office on the same site. One morning he turned up in medical explaining that he had scratched his eyeball while opening his copy of the Financial Times. Was later advised (not by me) to switch to the Daily Mirror. Smaller pages so less dangerous.

Posted By Laurie
I once received an accident report from from a senior manager in which he had put "Action to Prevent Recurrence - Brain transplant requested"

Since he was the cause of this particular accident I was quite impressed - in my experience such people are not normally so forthcoming!

Long term readers will remember my "Circumstances of Accident- IP was
Playing "Vampires". Group members all close their eyes and he bumped into someone" !! (Subject's date of birth was 1985"

Laurie

Posted By fats van den raad
Not accident related, but still indicative of how managers sometimes think (or not)
In a previous life I was an instrument technician for a largish chemical company. On one of our plants we had gas fired furnaces that was situated in their own rooms on the ground floor of the plant, along with all the relevant control instrumentation. In addition, there was also a stop/start facility for the furnaces on the first floor of the plant, remote to the furnaces.
I got called out one night because one of the furnaces had tripped out and the operator was unable to re-start it. The SOP at the time was for them to try re-start 3 times, and then to call us out if still unsuccessfull. When I got to the plant, i went to the furnace room and successfully started the furnace on my first attempt.
This same scenario happened on a regular basis over the next few months. This really intrigued me, and I started to systematically investigate the root of the problem, without any luck. The controll system was quite old, and I even started to systematically replace instrumentation and rewire the furnace in order to resolve the problem, again with no luck. A few weeks later I was working on an unrelated system on the first floor of the plant. I saw an operator come mooching down the plant, wiping his hands on a paper towel. He approached a "flip-top" type dustbin to throw away the paper towel, and I paid no further attention to him. The next moment an alarm sounded.... You guessed it, the furnace had tripped out again. I immediatly realised what the problem was that had haunted me for so many months. The remote stop/start control fr the furnace is situated aginst the wall directly above the bin. As the bin lid gets flipped open, the lid just lightly hits the furnace stop button. Because the button has years of accumulated dirt and residue on it, it does not jump straight back to it's original position, but slowly works it's way back over 30 minutes or so. This is why the operators were unable to start the furnace, but when I got there 30 minutes or so later, it started with no problem.
I immediatly went to the operation manager's office to tell him about my discovery.
"John" I said, "you know that furnace problem I had been working on, well I solved the mystery" I explained to him what the cause of phantom trips was. To my astonishment he replied, with all sincerity and seriousness." Well, you'll have to move the stop/start station then!!!" I just stared at him in total disbelief. "what about we just move the bin?" I asked. He looked at me blank for a bit, then said "Yeah, I suppose that would work as well!!"

Posted By fats van den raad
People that have worked in foreign climes may be well aware of this, but for those that aren't:
In countries such as Nigeria any accident on site has always as the main cause "God's will" someone loses a finger, it is God's will, a pickup overturns on site, it is God's will..... even to the extent that we found it very difficult to explain to employees why they should wear PPE such as safety glasses. If you use the reasoning that for example a piece of concrete can fly up from a jack hammer and hit you in the eye, the stock answer was almost always "It would be God's will that I lose an eye" In the end we got around this by arguing that maybe the whole reason I was there was because God sent me to tell them to wear PPe because He didn't want them to get injured!!