I’ll start out by admitting this: I’m a blessed man. Not lucky. No one has this much luck. I’m blessed by God because there’s no way I’d still be alive without His Divine intervention. True statement. Ain’t lying.
When I started out in the shipyards safety was a wink and a nod. OSHA wasn’t much of nothing when I started in the yards, we pretty much started the same year, 1971. At any rate, you listened to the old heads (there’s a reason they got old and not dead) and you did your best. Still…in my first four years I saw one guy get killed and knew of two more. The one I saw was a tech rep from a paint company who was helping us find out why a new paint system wasn’t working well. It was our first offshore boat, for the oil industry, a 180 foot long vessel with a long flat after deck. The tech rep was going down into the aftermost space and was a large fellow who had a bit of a struggle getting through the manhole (18”x23”). He was most of the way in and asked a helper to hand him a trouble light. In those days we didn’t have a lot of explosion proof lights to use in dangerous atmospheres, this was just a incandescent light in a cage. The helper handed it down, the rep dropped it, the bulb hit the deck below and shattered and BOOM! Still cooking gasses from the paint in a charged atmosphere exploded, shooting the tech rep almost ten feet into the air and onto his back. Deck plates were ripped loose from their welds. Several people had foot and ankle injuries. I ran over to the rep and he was literally cooked from the shoulders down. We got Life Flight to get him to the nearest trauma center but he only lasted 6 weeks before he passed.
I won’t go into detail about the other two incidents, just that they were just as ugly and honestly, just as stupid. I’ll say this right now: I hate the word “accident”. After my years of working in the yards and being a foreman with 150 people under my care and supervision, there are NO ACCIDENTS: just failure to follow proper procedure. The paint rep broke several OSHA regulations, foremost was using not using an explosion proof light. In my books, he killed himself. Thank God he didn’t take anyone else with him. NO ACCIDENTS.
I’ve had two extremely near misses, where the good Lord decided I wasn’t ready to go to Heaven yet. The first, when I was still fairly young. The ship I was helping to build had a segment of the ships exterior painted the night before. There were 5 gallon steel buckets all over the place that the painters hadn’t cleaned up yet. I needed to cut out some construction aids (shaped pieces of steel cut from scrap that we weld to the hull and use wedges and comealongs to move steel where we want it to go. I grabbed a bucket, turned it upside down, laid a piece of scrap across the bucket and started cutting. I wasn’t at it more than five minutes when my world went black. Stand by for chemistry lesson I should have already known: First, it was two buckets, one smashed hard onto another. Second, as I cut, I caught the remnant paint in the upper bucket on fire, causing gases to be expelled..but…there was a tight seal and they couldn’t escape…so…BIG BANG! Think Mentos in a soda bottle. The upper bucket exploded from the lower, pushing the plate and the bucket into my face (I was bent over at the waist). According to witnesses there was a good 6 feet of clear air beneath my feet. I hit the ground out like a light. Co-workers ran over to see what they could do. First they had to pry my fingers from the torch. It was still lit and even though the rest of me was somewhere else, my arm and my hand were rigid keep that torch away from me. I came to in the Rescue van on the way to the hospital. Amazingly, other than a world class broken nose and an amazing set of scars, I was fine. I found out years later that I had a pressure fracture in the big vertebrae at the top of my shoulders. Yes, I should have died that day. My fault, pure and simple. That bucket should have snapped my neck like a dry twig. I still have eyes only because I was religious about where good burning goggles with three layers of eye protection. There was glass everywhere but my eyes….
The next was NOT my fault…but I shouldn’t have trusted the idiot in charge because I knew he was an idiot. We were cutting out and replacing a bulkhead (wall for you land lubbers) in a big tanker. This bulkhead is over 80 feet tall from the deck to the bottom. We started at the top with cutting from one side of the bulkhead. My buddy Leon and me were the designated burners because we were the best with a torch. The plan was to cut around the perimeter and vertical frames, leaving a couple of uncut spots until we hooked the crane up to it to lower to the bottom of the ship. Here’s how we planned to do it (and I had no part of setting this up…that was the idiot in charge). A 1-1-1/2” hole was drilled into the main deck and a long braided metal cable passed though to the bottom where the riggers did there thing and put an eye into the end of the cable. The same was done at the upper end for the crane to grab. When we were ready to cut it loose, we would cut slots to put shackles through (a contraption shaped like a C with a threaded bolt through the open end), the crane would take tension and we would cut the last bits loose. The plate would pop out and they would lower it to the bottom. Getting the scrap (and new plate) out is another story but that’s for later. For me, here’s where the problem started: The plate popped out…but instead of popping straight out so the crane could lower it…instead, it popped out and went SLAM outboard hard and got hung up by a shell beam. The damn plate was stuck because the idiot that laid out where the hole was supposed to be didn’t understand basic math: he was off by at least 2 feet!
So…we sat down, talked it over, and came up with a plan for someone to go on the other side of the bulkhead, where the plate was hanging, climb up 80 feet of shaky wire supported staging (we called it “Monkey Staging), cut a hole in one end, hook another cable to it and have an air hoist in the bottom of the tank pull it off the shell. Guess who got nominated? Actually, I volunteered. I simply couldn’t stand the thought of letting someone else do something that stupid and dangerous. I climb up the staging, pull my torch up, cut the hole, hook up the shackle and we prepare start winkling this 8 tons of steel out of it’s trap. I’m trying to make myself heard on a walkie talkie in a big booming echoing tank, to the crane operator on the hill and to the guy in the bottom of the tank and all of a sudden the biggest guillotine came whooshing by my face. The plate flicked my glasses off, tossing them into the other side of the bulkhead and oh…breaking the crap out of my right arm. I’ll tell you right now: I was damn glad that all I got was a broken arm. That damn hunk of scrap should have flicked me off the staging like a flea. It should have ripped the staging down, send me with it to the bottom. Instead, I got a broken arm. Blessed by God again. And still alive today to tell you the tale.
So when I tell you I know about safety, best believe me. There truly aren’t any accidents. Just people not following procedure. Because when they do, like when I was a foreman, no one gets hurt. I had the lowest cost per man hour for workmans comp of all the divisions in the company. I was living death on stupidity, because I knew far better than them, that stupidity kills.
I am glad God was looking out for you, I prefer a world with Byron in it, to one without.
I'm with Scott. Thank God you ducked when you were supposed to duck and all.