"The man died on the spot from his injuries....."

If allowed to only speak to one department in an aluminium plant. We request permission to speak to maintenance departments. Here is a recent incident emphasizing the hazards that maintenance department workers are exposed to on a daily basis.

One morning in April 2021 in (Eastern Europe) on the territory of the foundry of (company name removed), a 51-year-old mechanic-repairman died. This was reported by the  press service of the (location name omitted) Directorate of the Investigative Committee.

According to the preliminary version, the deceased was engaged in troubleshooting a non-working mechanism when he was crushed by a mold for molding sand. The man died on the spot from his injuries.

On the fact of the fatal tragedy, a criminal case was opened under the article "Violation of safety rules during mining, construction or other work." Now all the details of the emergency are being established.

We offer our sincere condolences to the deceased worker’s family, friends, and coworkers. We pray that overtime they remember their loved one for how he lived and not how he died.

For years we omitted the age of the worker for the best of intentions. We decided to start including the age of the worker in these posts. It is our sincere hope that maybe, just maybe a reader can relate to the age of a worker and realize the importance safety plays in their lives.

Our industry does not discriminate against race, religion, age, nor sex. If a worker fails to follow their training, skip steps, make assumptions they can be injured or killed. We know this, sadly after posting incidents for the past decade.

When we speak to maintenance workers, we talk about the hazards associated with hydraulic rams and machinery that moves. We offer the option to make a physical device that can be placed inside the machinery, or prevent the rams from activating. This device (we recommend a section of crane rail) is not an alternative to lock-out-tag-out or safe isolation. This device is the last measure of safety. We propose this measure because we have posted incidents where workers stated that they followed the proper loto measures and the machinery moved or the hydraulic rams moved. This idea of a last-ditch device was presented to an extrusion company. Afterwards the maintenance department head commented that there was internal discussion of this topic prior to us presenting it.

 

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