Dumbest Safety Violations Ever

serious safety usher inspectors of reddit what is the most maddening dumbest violation you've seen in a workplace i used to work as a safety consultant for an insurance broker one of our insureds had an employee who was tasked to apply a do not enter compactor starts automatically sign on a cardboard box compactor the idiot set the can of spray adhesive on the lip of the compactor knocked it in and then jumped in the compactor to get it of course it started automatically because it's a machine that can't tell idiot from box he's lucky someone else was walking by and saved his life i used to have to climb down the cardboard shoot at work all the time i'd take the key down with me that way the machine couldn't start i was on the workplace health and safety committee the committee head at the time decided to change a light bulb do you think that she used a step ladder on the sloped surface nope office chair with wheels and nobody to hold it still so many stupid decisions in that last sentence of course she fell broke her arm and received workplace compensation the kicker the light bulb wasn't blown she was just using the wrong light switch the light bulb wasn't blown she was just using the wrong light switch row just wow worked in the hospital lab and higher ranked co-worker asked me to take inventory of things from adequate nitrogen storage tank minus 200c mind you i asked her for the proper mitts to handle our stuff and she told me to just use our usual latex gloves wtf my company rents the lab space of the hospital so i'm assuming she doesn't know where it is and doesn't care to ask i proceed to ask the hospital lab staff for proper mits to which i was given after i took inventory co-worker decided she wanted to do a verification inventory check and had the audacity to ask me for the proper mitts foe frick i work with liquid nitrogen in a lab too and i make them buy a new pair if the others are even remotely damaged bugger messing around with that port state inspector for me and most of my colleagues it's things relating to fire safety particularly fire doors the amount of time i've found auto closing doors tied wedged weighted or just fixed in the open position is maddening fire is the worst thing that can happen on a ship and these doors have to be able to be closed at any time but people are too freaking lazy to open a goddang door so they tie them open and then guess what time and time again there is a fire and when we do the investigation assuming there is anything left to investigate we find a fire door fixed open that's allowed to fire to spread people in my industry literally die every year because some freaking ab or assistant engineer to too freaking lazy to open a door short they don't have magnetic fire doors then the ones that are always open then close on alarm worked in a warehouse that repaired tools and equipment for erecting wind turbines there was one beloved program manager that always met schedules early and under budget all the ex loved him but his equipment came back basically disassembled and reassembled with all the safety checks removed so they'd work faster the way they rigged up the electrical equipment was downright scary he'd hire unqualified lifting equipment inspectors for his work site instead of relying on the corporate guys who took their time and kept documentation on everything stuff like that cutting corners whenever he could but he got everything done on time so he was a golden goose every time i hear of an accident at a wind farm i wonder if it's related to that guy wasn't our plant but another plant for our company we have these huge steel drums that we fill with 100 s of pounds of ingredients that go onto a hydraulic lift that lifts and tilts the drum and pours the contents into a kettle the drum shifts forward a little bit on the lift while all the way up and falls back into place on its way down the operator was resting his hand on the bottom of the lift while lowering it back down and the drum fell back down on his finger and pretty much turned it into mush that's not the worst part afterwards the safety lead was doing a review of the incident and another operator showed the safety lead exactly what happened and smashed his finger in the same manner that's utterly golden i taught skydivers to be tandem instructors one drop zone bought a new type of tandem rig and faked their training management had them lie about it to me and another examiner chief instructor's excuse they're all the same anyway he had a malfunction caused by his not knowing how the rig worked and his poor paying first-time passenger had no idea the danger this arrogant prick put him through the worst thing was the training was free seriously wtf for sale tandem rig only used once never been opened small stain we received a complaint about workers using liquid nitrogen inside of a confined space i went out to this sand and gravel company and saw this 30 feet long above ground storage tank there was a liquid nitrogen tank outside the opening and two workers outside i showed mired and discovered one of the workers outside was the foreman and the other was monitoring the air quality for the workers all good right nope the entrance was a small square opening at the end there were about four workers inside the tank using liquid nitrogen to cool the tar in the tank so it could be chipped out so they were introducing a gas which could displace oxygen the person doing air monitoring had a probe only a couple feet long so it was only really checking the air quality of the fresh air mixed with tank air not the air in the workers breathing zone the workers were about 15 feet into the tank they had no confined space training no confined space permit no rescue plan the foreman then copped an attitude and told me i was wasting their time i read tagged the operation normally reserved for only when voluntary immediate compliance seems unlikely and told them it was illegal for them to continue work or re-enter the tank until they met the confined space rules it was a pretty hefty fine the company didn't appeal i think the foreman got fired as management seemed unaware that the activity was taking place and was further upset at the foreman's reaction normally sand and gravel companies in my area do a good job with health and safety it was a rare miss for them a place my father-in-law worked had a guy die in a tank that was being cleaned they had all the required procedures the guy just didn't follow them working alone no ventilation not asked to do the job by anyone he just did it a lot changed after that i worked in a lab doing situma golovkin risk research one day we had workers in replacing the lights and one said wow i always thought those shower things were real pointing at one of the emergency showers in the lab these are for heavy duty chemical spills where you run under the shower and pull the handle to decontaminate turns out ours were just the shower heads in the ceiling not connected to any water we used extremely dangerous chemicals every day we got the showers hooked up pretty quickly after that goddamn i hope whoever installed those originally faced some consequences i work as a fire safety and h s officer at one of my sites this particular one being a small medium-sized shop i was made aware of a hidden room there's a narrow corridor to enter that they blocked off whenever they knew i was coming no fire door so any fire spreads straight onto the main shopping area the room contains a plethora of 400 stroke 415 volt panels and is absolutely rammed with wood cardboard boxes and what felt like every combustible material possible roughly 30 years worth of crap essentially the mother of all fire hazards with enough immediate fuel and oxygen to burn down the building and neighboring stores the maddening part of it was essentially all the stuff at the shop were aware of it but did nothing to fix the issue and even actively work to hide it if you see a fire hazard please fix it or report it also the soul fire escape was jammed due to the door warping and would not open at all having not been checked in i imagine the roughly two months since i was last on site i'm not a safety inspector but this came to mind i am an electrician in las vegas one job site i was on was the remodel of the hotel tower at caesar's palace we started at the bottom floor and worked our way up the tower one floor a week for a year it was horrible air conditions major demolition massive dust because the hotel windows in vegas don't open in order to keep people from jumping out they rely on exhaust fans to circulate air but don't run the fans for the subhuman construction workers like myself then after almost a year coughing and gagging when we were on the very last floor level 44 a team of men showed up in hazmat suits and shut the job down apparently all of the sparkly dust we were breathing every day was almost entirely asbestos fml if the asbestos thing is true and you've got it documented you work there you've got a lawyer's wet dream of a case my dad works on a large renovation project for a national landmark he identified a hazard where workers putting up scaffolding would have to walk along the sloped incline of a plateau that functioned as the foundation for a construction shack all the while carrying the scaffolding components but they didn't he have to walk up the hill or down the hill but along the entire width of the sloped base this is a hazard since workers had no form of handrail's other support and could easily twist their ankles or lose their balance he notified the foreman about this in the morning he didn't think it a problem he notified the site manager of this in response but he was in meetings all morning that afternoon he spots a group of three guys walking on the construction site shorts sandals and no helmets he walks up to them so gents what are we doing you now you need steel toe boots and helmets right yes sir but we're just leaving and heading home we all twisted our ankles and can't continue working sure enough all of them had scraped bruise knees and shins that were the workers putting up the scaffolding every single one of them half an hour later the foreman comes walking over to him what the heck do you think you're doing going over my head like that i have got a schedule to finish here those scaffolds need to be up by tomorrow and wired by the end of the week i don't have time for this i don't know if you've noticed but all the workers for the scaffolding have gone home injured and now since they can't finish the scaffolding the electricians can't start on the wiring the day after tomorrow and the whole project is looking at a two weeks delay at least sad that the workers were injured but hopefully the foreman learned his lesson former safety rep who specialized in industrial food manufacturing working for the largest food companies i am now in school for psychology so i'm interning at a clinic in my interview i said that was my previous career so they asked me to do their eep and exit maps yet they won't buy the fire extinguisher signs the thing i repeatedly tell them to do is unlock one of the doors leading to a exit door they have a storage file room with one of the emergency exits and you can't walk in the room even if the door is unlocked that's no good the latter issue seems a bit too similar to the infamous triangle shirt waste fire this was a fire in 1911 where garment workers were unable to flee a fire because the door leading to the stairs was locked and almost 150 people died i've worked for a couple of engineering contractors in the past my first firm was by far the worst for lack of work ethic and sheer incompetence our usher would have a field day with them one time our reciprocating saw broke the foot that held the blade in place was busted so rather than follow protocol and get another saw my co-worker fastened the blade in place with a plastic wire tie and proceeded to use it the same firm worked as contractors for the company my dad worked for so he has the best worst stories about them on one site they'd found that sections of a pipeline had been sealed with asbestos gaskets the boss of my firm i'll call him jim was present on this site and had to call in a specialist to remove the asbestos jim would never wear safety gear like the other guys claiming to be exempt and so when the specialist turned up in full breathing gear and overalls and tried to do his job jim just stood leaning on the pipe in his normal clothes talking to him my dad and the others are stood well away from the asbestos at this point and he shouts out jim what are you immune immune to what freaking asbestos ah i've breathed loads of it into the power stations it's all political my dad says that jim has defied all facets of medical science by staying alive this long someone post a writing prompt about jim being an immortal who just doesn't give enough of a crap to hide anymore safety inspector for an engineering service company the amount of basic fuck-ups when any floor staff tried rigging equipment to be lifted is too dang high these people have had the correct training but seem to think getting it done quicker is a lot better than getting it done safely oftentimes management supervisors will be encouraging that crap too got called to a factory where the workers had to cut metal on large conveyor belts there were large boxes with built-in gloves that you stuck your hands in to operate the press so for safety workers had on one set of gloves that everyone wore on the factory floor because sharp hot metal and then stuck their hands in a second pair attached to the belt to reach the materials one of the workers felt like this slowed him down so he cut a hole in the safety box to be able to just reach in and adjust the metal to the press except the press came down on his hand leaving four of his fingers perfectly preserved inside the glove they recovered his wedding ring neatly dangling right above the cut-off finger bone i didn't see it personally but someone smoking and another person eating lunch inside of what was a high risk containment during an asbestos abatement in a high risk you have to be naked under your body suits shower when you leave cannot bring anything in or out that hasn't been washed and you have to wear a full face mask it's supposed to be very sterile these guys had their face masks off inside the containment eating and smoking i knew a guy that worked an asbestos abatement mainly large buildings he said they took respirators off all the time as they were hot and they would make snowballs out of the asbestos mush that wetting it down creates and throw them at each other asbestos fights a powder actuated hammer is a gun that fires nails into steel using gunpowder i once had to prevent someone from looking down the barrel of one when it jammed tons of fun around demolition crews too like preventing them from demo eyeing the parts of the building holding up the area they are standing on commonly mistaking the live wires for the clearly marked out disabled wires or constantly starting fires when you need to work out some stress usually they don't mind lending you a sledgehammer to go work out your frustrations on anything to do with traffic around cities is a goddamn nightmare give sympathy to the flaggers they deserve a lot my parents contracted some low bidders to finish our basement maybe 10-15 years ago and one guy shot a nail right through his hand on accident because he didn't think it was on i actually am an osha inspector but i work for a state that has their own state osha plan same as federal osha but a little more strict i can almost guarantee you that if you work construction in my state you have seen us or we have seen you at my office alone which is just one county has over 40 compliance officers yes a lot of people hate us and yes there are some bad compliance officers just like there are some bad police officers when we come on site we would love nothing more than to find zero violations the amount of paperwork we have to do is astronomical we have to treat every case as if it is going to court even though maybe only two percent do people die at work every day from very preventable reasons yes sometimes injuries and deaths are caused by employees not following company rules or taking shortcuts but statistics also show that the companies with very good safety programs have lower accident rates and are typically very profitable as for worst violation that i have seen i investigated a multiple death incident at a company an employee entered a permit required confined space without utilizing the proper precautions the employee became unconscious due to the inert gases that were not properly purged from the space another employee walks by sees the unconscious employee tries to rescue him that employee then became unconscious then again with another employee now they have three unconscious employees who eventually died from lack of oxygen after the investigation the company had no written confined space policy or rescue procedures we found out after performing employee interviews that they were told to hold their breath while they performed work in the space because they were only checking a gauge and it would only take like 30 seconds after about 500 000 in fines and the owner actually going to jail for five months the company went out of business and the worst part is a fire department was located across the street and they were trained in confined space rescue the safety committee at the state psych hospital i worked at was going building to building making a surprise inspection they walked into the hospital chapel and found the chaplain sitting at his desk getting a [ __ ] by one of the patients who was under his desk that old sucker should have gone to prison but they let him take early retirement i do environmental compliance specifically air pollution control one day we received a complaint from a former employee of the company about a whole laundry list of stuff his former employer was doing wrong that's not super unusual people get fired or quit on bad terms and call basically every agency they can't think of for payback anyway we responded when we got there there were a few things that weren't right but the icing on the cake was that they had this pollution control device that was supposed to be collecting dust from one of their processes one problem though all of the dust was on the ground around it we told them in no uncertain terms that it was unacceptable and that they needed to clean it up immediately we also told them we would be back to make sure they did a couple weeks later we scheduled a visit i cannot stress enough that this time they knew we were coming guess what we saw on our return dust all over the ground the kicker is they had this broom and shovel out there the first time and it was still there the second time just leaning on the wall like three feet from where it was the first time for those keeping track that means they either never cleaned up the dust or be that they cleaned up the dust and subsequently spilled more but either way someone had to go out there and move the shovel so despite us telling them that they could not do this and that we were going to come back and make sure it was corrected they went ahead and did actual nothing to improve the situation i've got tons of stories like this one people do some really dumb stuff and then get mad when the notice of violation shows up in the mail my dad went to his workers committee to ask them to mow the patch between the parking lot and the building because the grass had gotten so long that snakes were living in it the committee decided it was too risky to have someone mow it because there were snakes in the grass and the person mowing might get injured this is the problem with safety committees they come up with well-meaning build nonsensical requirements that create contempt in turn leading people to ignore necessary rules where the reason isn't immediately apparent i have many years doing safety inspections i have seen some fun things in my time i have seen industrial fans cord spliced onto an extension cord with the bare wires exposed and charred and the employer saying it's fine because it still worked an owner of a nursing home reached into a used and full sharps container to prove that needles were not being recapped a guy outside of a window on a third story of a house on the edge of a board removing a window pane without any faller protection while his two buddies are inside on the other side of the board holding him up there is level of trust that i do not have with most folks walking up to a house and the owners had made a makeshift driveway out of asbestos siding that they had removed from the building the previous day and seeing kids playing in the area a compressed gas cylinder filling station would receive old cylinders and they would have to empty them prior to repairing or destroying them the guy doing this would take them out back and while holding his breath would secure them and open up the valves to empty them and then go inside this worked okay for a while until it didn't and he got dosed with a massive exposure to arsene gas the company usually didn't deal with this gas but had received from one of their customers for disposal which almost caused complete renal failure these are just a few that i can recall that kinda stuck with me there are lots and lots of run-of-the-mill safety issues that i see all the time but the majority of the time it's ignorance of the lore and not malice for most employers and full sharps container to prove that needles were not being recapped no no no no no not directly relevant but i worked for a company where the risk management executive accidentally shot himself in the leg checking to see if the safety was on on a pistol it was not i've seen two spanish lads grinding at 12 inches tati moly pipe only they had no clamp so one held it at face level and they had no glasses or face guards so they were both desperately looking away to avoid sparks in the eyes a safety squint this will seem trivial and trifling but bear with me i was the h s manager for a metal bashing company the shop floor had designated walkways where safety shoes didn't need to be worn but if you went off those walkways you needed to be wearing your safety shoes i lost count of the number of times i would be on the factory floor and see people from the offices wander into a welder's bay or the manufacturing shop in non-safety shoes the main culprits tended to be sales people but i more than once witness the managing director do it the problem is as any h and s osha professional reading this will tell you what appear to be trivial safety rules are there for a reason if you get one part of the company going yeah but those rules don't apply to me especially if those people are top management it becomes hard to set a culture for the company fire inspector here finding a guy using a propane grill inside a building he was initially pee off when i told him he couldn't do that until i showed him the stratified smoke that was about a foot off the ceiling i had an employee using a hydraulic shear 10 tons of cutting force to downsize very hard metals he got to a piece that was larger than the guard would allow so of course he removed it he went back to sizing the metal of normal thickness the position of the machine was an l so his left hand would move the material then actuate the machine with his right the machine had a deadman switch so if the handle was released behold and the shear would pop back up long story short he cut his thumb off with 10 tons of force this is coming from my step brother he managed a warehouse that had industrial sized rolls of aluminum and other metals these rolls weighed multiple tons each they would use an automated crane they would program each space available and the crane would place the roles where they were delegated my brother tells me about an employee that knew how to work the system with fmla this guy was lazy as heck and knew how to get away with it it turns out he programmed a slot on the top of a stack to be a dead zone no roles would go to that one spot he set up a makeshift bed and would crawl up and take naps he kept this secret obviously if someone had seen this spot was unused and reprogrammed it the automated crane would have placed a four-ton roll on top of him while he slept but some people are wild if you are new to the channel you can subscribe i publish new videos every day until then check another video [Music] bye for now

Channel: UE Stories

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Keywords: safety violation, safety violations at work, safety violations funny, safety violation videos, #updootst, updoot, reddit, r/askreddit, askreddit, ask reddit, r/, best of reddit, reddit stories, reddit story, top posts, funniest posts, funny, funny posts, funny reddit stories, funny askreddit, reddit funny, askreddit funny, askreddit stories, people of reddit, sub, reddit cringe, memes, toadfilms, updoot everything, updoot reddit, story, stories, rslash, comedy, fresh, reddit stories 2020

Id: 6wnIVIItOoc

Length: 25min 19sec (1519 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 15 2021