"died of cardiac arrest after being electrocuted....."

In general the top four hazards in industry are the following: Falls, Struck by Object, Electrocutions, Caught-in/between (dealing with construction). The Aluminium Plant Safety Blog has posted incidents about each of those hazards. Here is a recent incident involving electrocution.

A worker died of cardiac arrest after being electrocuted at his workplace in the Middle East during the month of July 2017. The deceased was an employee in an aluminium fabrication company. He was taken to the hospital immediately after he was electrocuted from a drilling machine, but his life could not be saved as a cardiac arrest followed.

We offer our sincere condolences to the deceased worker’s family, friends, and coworkers. As normal we omitted the personal information about the deceased. We do argue among ourselves on whether or not these posts would be more impactful if we included the personal information of the injured or dead. We don’t have an answer. 

We do not know why the worker was electrocuted. We surmise that the machinery was improperly grounded or hooked up. When we find out further information we will update this post.

On our travels we are invited to speak to factory floor workers, plant management, corporate management, etc about safety related topics. We relish the opportunity to speak to factory floor personnel. On an annual basis we talk to thousands of factory floor workers. We talk about the importance of the being safe and what could go wrong if one does not follow their training. We use incidents on the APSB to emphasize each hazard. We talk about the injured and the dead to reinforce the importance of following their training, never skip steps, and never make assumptions. We will talk about the workers who just had a baby, who were going to retire in two weeks, who filled in for a coworker, who spent 25 years on the job, etc. Each of the previous described a worker died on the job. We talk about the personal information not to demean the dead nor injured. But with the hope that a listener to our presentation can relate. They can relate to some unknown person who died in the same industry that they work. Is that dramatic? Maybe, but the names, the face and their stories haunt us. We pray that by explaining to workers about the past incidents they will understand the safety message their company is putting forth. That is why we do this. We end every presentation with a simple statement “Your safety matters to more than yourself. It matters to everyone who loves you, your family, your friends, your coworkers.” Lastly we state, “we don’t want to weep for you, we pray that all of you are safe on your jobs and your life, because we never want to post an incident on the Aluminium Plant Safety Blog that involves you”.

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