Work screw ups...

benjy

Rarely wrenches
Supporting Member
Location
Moab
In my early 20s I was doing some testing on a portable gas chromatograph. Basically I'd put a chemical in front of the device, push start and surf the innernets for 20 minutes, switch chemicals and repeat (when I joined RME).

One Friday afternoon I was testing something nasty, chloroform if I remember right. On my way to the bathroom I kicked over the bottle I was testing... Building evacuated, everyone got to go home early that day.
 

Cody

Random Quote Generator
Supporting Member
Location
East Stabbington
Ha, no. But the same day in a different store I was pulling a pallet through a Shopko and clipped the edge of the Marinelli''s sparkling cider display. That was a mess. I would have taken a death-by-elmo over that sticky broken-glass nightmare.
 

Marsh99

Lover of all things Toyota
Location
Mantua UT
I work in the dietary supplement manufacturing business. I am in the quality department and always get to "investigate" when issues appear. I once got a call about scrapping a full batch of material that was being blended. I went out to the blending area and saw the blending guys sweeping over a foot of powder out of the 20 x 20 room. I watched the the video recording of the room and saw one of the guys didn't lock blender door down properly. When the blender began to spin the door fell off and sent a 1000 kg fly out the open door. The guys didn't get the blender to stop spinning until there was no powder left in it.


Patterson-Kelley_41802058_a.jpg
 

glockman

I hate Jeep trucks
Location
Pleasant Grove
I worked at UVU on the grounds crew mowing lawn during high school. One week we were ahead of the big mowers so they had us getting rid of the gophers around the ponds. We were using smoke bombs that you stuck in one hole and waited for the gophers to come out. When we went to lunch there was a fire truck in front of the admin building. Apparently we were right next to the air intake for the building lighting off sulfur smoke bombs. Evacuated half the building.

A couple years later I worked for the water master there. We had just fixed a 10" water main that was leaking and I had told our summer hire to go across the field and turn on the valve. He had helped me do this several times. This time he decided to crank the valve (on a 10" main) open as fast as he could turn the handle. I yelled at him to stop on the radio but not before it blew the first fire hydrant on that line 15 feet in the air.
 

Tacoma

Et incurventur ante non
Location
far enough away
I've broken a bunch of stuff at Summit, but nothing "major"-- not that it stopped me from feeling like sh*t about each one... Worst was either sending a machine home with a boring bar in a part, which broke our last tool holder for a busy weekend, or grenading a brand new tapping head when I selected the wrong tool. But it could be a LOT worse at a machine shop. I think mine have been relatively small but pricey effups.

I totalled a cherry '72 Chevelle, looked like all original survivor-- by dropping a 40' tree branch on it being a hotshot. I had intended it to be super cool, I'd let it start coming down and just zip the little strap of tree I left, so it would fall on one side of a bigger branch below it, and then it would be so rad and fall into the park and the crowd would ooh and ahh... except that it landed just a little too vertically, and sprung back on the leafy end, and very, very slowly wobbled... and wobbled... and then I watched a 40' hammer swing with increasingly velocity at the C-pillar of that perfect Chevelle. I almost cried when it hit... and I had about 60' of boom to come down from with everyone watching silently. Then they cheered because I finally wrecked something, and told me all kinds of horror stories, about wrecking a 7-11... destroying the Midvale city sign in the median... etc etc. I felt pretty bad about destroying that classic old Chevy, but oddly enough, no owner was found, and no one ever submitted a claim against our insurance for it... weird.
 

Greg

Make RME Rockcrawling Again!
Admin
That could have ended much worse? How'd they get stopped that fast? (maybe they didn't?)

They didn't... derailed a few hundred feet back. Put it in emergency, but not before running thru a crossing with the front wheels on the ground.

There was a road crossing that was iced up... :oops:
 

4x4_Welder

Well-Known Member
Location
Twin Falls, ID
The oil fields were awesome for people tearing stuff up. The T600s liked to brake off fuel pickups from sloshing down the lease roads, then there was this one guy who seemed to think he was training for the Quebec truck drags. He re-settled an ISX block, breaking an EGR cooler that had only been on 50,000 miles, and broke the motor mount bolts two or three times.
Once while I was working on a broken truck (another broken fuel pickup) a four wheeled tanker went past fast enough to catch air right past me. I'm kinda glad I got out of there when I did, people there were nuts. All kinds of wrecks, some were pretty sad.
 

SAMI

Formerly Beardy McGee
Location
SLC, UT
I've broken a bunch of stuff at Summit, but nothing "major"-- not that it stopped me from feeling like sh*t about each one... Worst was either sending a machine home with a boring bar in a part, which broke our last tool holder for a busy weekend, or grenading a brand new tapping head when I selected the wrong tool. But it could be a LOT worse at a machine shop. I think mine have been relatively small but pricey effups.

I don't recall the specifics, but didn't I own a royal blunder on one of Summit's machines?
 
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