Hello this would be a scary job on a rainy day.
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=810_1250754029
Frank
Yeah, but look where it is – IRAQ. No UL or other electrical safety laws in effect. They even got away with improperly wiring facilities used by U.S. soldiers and causing them to be electrocuted, and nothing is being done about it.
Sure, it is a little “rustic” but how about that rotary car dumper?
-George
Nope! Albania, as it says on the screen.
I’d have to bet on somewhere in Eastern Europe. Some internet looking up stuff showed that moskyt.net, the name that showed at the end of the video, is hosted in the Czech Republic. The speech of the mine crew sounded more East Europe than Arabic.
George V.
Did you see that guy almost get waked in the nads by the wooden rotary lever?!?!? (1:13) LOL
Not enough money in the world to make me do THAT job!
That video made me realize how much our workplace safety standards are taken for granted. I don’t know how many OSHA violations are broken in that video alone. I especially like the guys driving the locos. That caused me to shake my head. Hope there is no hole in glove.[swg]
Yes, in Albania is where this from.
And yet long before OSHA ever came into existence, the Golden Gate Bridge was built with only 11 fatalities. (I say only 11 because it was a rule of thumb at the time that there would be 1 fatality for ever $1 million of the project - the Golden Gate Bridge was a $35 million project).
Why? Because the bridge’s chief engineer, not some government bureaucrat, insisted on stringent safety measures being enforced. The bridge was also completed on time and under budget!
I wonder how many construction projects of similar size and scope have been able to make that claim since the institution of OSHA?
-George
Also, it’s copyrighted 1995. Wonder what’s happened in the meantime.
As for the rotary dumper, the basic concept was pretty much standard in Western Japan in the late 1950s. I’ve seen them, ranging in size from power-driven units that could rotate a couple of five ton capacity cars at a time to homemade, mostly wooden, designs that were barely large enough to take a 500mm gauge wooden box on four wheels.
The colliery that had the largest dumpers used battery locos (and gravity) for power - plugged into heavy-duty outlets when not moving. The smallest I saw (which I hope to model with reasonable accuracy) was a feature of a mini-mine run by three couples and a dog. There was a four-wheel microdiesel for long hauls. Twin 0-5-0s attached to human arms handled the switching at both ends of the route from shaft to cleaning plant.
Chuck (Modleing Central Japan in September, 1964 - with coal mnes)
George,
I agree. Apparently OSHA is designed to not let anyone use common sense anymore.
…and 137 engineers later. [:O]
Probably not as dangerous as it looked. Seemed to be a standard arc welder handle and glove.
I bet it played heck on the motor starter though! I noticed the guy took his helmet off to go under the line.
Igor the human pantograph! Ed
I know thay were not speaking arabic, I worked in the middle east for 17 years; it had to be an eastern european language. Before OSHA, common sense or the lack of it was the workplace norm. Many companies had a good, strong safety program OSHA or not; others, usually smaller companies, just did what it took to get the job done even if it was stupidly dangerous like in the video. In the video, the workers have done it this way since the original equipment broke and the company did not want to spend (or did not have) the money to fix it properly.
I don’ t know. Everyone is making lots of assumptions here. The power could be 6V - 18V. I’ve seen (well in fact I’ve made) car electrical systems make more sparks than that. If there is more voltage in the wires then the real danger is the lowness of the wire. The dangerous job is the people walking on the ground that could bump into the wire, not the guy sitting down in the power car so his head isn’t going to hit the wire by mistake.
[(-D]
Those facilities were built by KBR/Haliburton, not the Iraqis. And that’s why nothing is being done about it.
But off topic rant is off topic.
As for the mining railroad, looks like they were making do with what they had. I wonder how old that equipment was. Love the switch, and how he threw it with his foot.
Looks like standard pre-20th century U.S. industrial practices to me.
Mark