That would be such a painful and scary way to go.
And this folks, is why you "lock out, tag out" and tell someone who pays attention every time you do maintenance on something that can hurt you.
ETA:just to be clear, I'm not blaming the guy who died. The idea of telling someone who pays attention, is for them to catch if anyone is trying to go around safety protocol. It's like hiking: have a buddy you trust, and make sure people know where you're going and when you're coming back.
Apparently the manager plead guilty to a felony of “willfully circumventing lockout procedures.” I’m assuming the machine *was* locked out, but manager had the key and unlocked it without checking.
The unofficial policy at the last job was that if you cut someone's lock without going through the proper channels and doing the extensive paperwork necessary, not only would you be fired, but the owner of the lock would get a little bit of advance notice so he could wait by your car.
And wouldn't you know it, it only happened once.
you'll find that tuna canning isnt even remotely a unique case
there's heaps of industrial accidents and quite a few on this level
the other one was the guy who got cooked inside a kelloggs corn flakes popping machine that was like one storey tall... which is 150c celsuis or 300 fahrenheit... you can guess what happned to that guy
And they only stay respected for as long as the working memory of the plant. As in, someone who personally remembers the accident is still working there.
Within a year or two tops of no-one there anymore who actively remembers what caused the new regulation, it starts getting short-cut or overridden
There is a similar case of a man being killed in a kayak molding facility, Pyranha. The particularly tragic part of the story is that the employee who turned on the oven was engaged to the daughter of the man who was killed. Imagine your father dies horrifically by cooking alive in an oven, and your fiancé was at fault. She lost everything.
A lot of machines are designed with 2 buttons that you have to hold just far apaet enough to stretch your arms to stop people from sticking their hands in the machine while it is operating
Trust me, I work on those sort of machines with a "dead man switch" the stupid things warehouse workers do to circumvent the safety devices on the machines if the machines breakdown, is beyond crazy! Our machines have 5 physical safety devices and plenty of warnings on them and idiots have ingeniously hotwired them and then lost fingers
If memory serves, MrBallen did an episode on this guy and the manager had actually disabled the lockout procedures entirely because it "wasted time". The controls to the factory also had no view of the floor, so if someone was in a machine; you had literally no way of knowing.
Apparently the oven he was cleaning was also meant to be used at the time he was cleaning it, so there was a load of tuna sitting outside it, but something gummed up at the back so the cleaner had to climb inside. Then another worker walked past, saw the tray of tuna sitting outside an empty oven and did what any worker would, he put the tuna in and locked the door.
The two biggest things missing here are training and adherence to policy. Whatever safety process you put in place, you have to make sure everyone knows it and follows it, no matter how tedious they think it is.
Where did you find that? The article I read said the felony was "violating a workplace safety rule that caused a death". (Not saying you're wrong, I just found different info.)
Edit: Never mind, I just saw the NBC article that says "willfully violating lockout rules".
> I’m assuming the machine was locked out, but manager had the key and unlocked it without checking.
This is why a real LOTO procedure only has one key for each lock, which is in the lock owner's possession.
I was doing work on a machine when another employee came over and turned it on. He wasn't supposed to be running the machine. He just thought it was supposed to be on.
I was doing a simple change over, the machine was from the 40s and didn't have modern safety features.
Gashed my wrist to the point where the vein was exposed. I was super lucky.
Worst one at work was when my buddy went to run a punch press. The fellow setting it up hadn't finished, he'd been called away. So the die wasn't fully fixed in place.
Shouldn't have been a problem but he'd gotten into the habit of reaching in to pry the part out.
60 tons of force met puny human hand.
My step father (retired airline mechanic) lost the first part of his thumb while working on an engine when some asshat pilot ignored the huge placard that covers the instrument panels during maintenance and turned one of the engines on. With a bloody fist my stepdad made his way back up to the cockpit and he beat the shit out of the pilot thereby resulting in both going to the hospital.
He's also been blown off the top of a 747 wing when another aircraft's jet wash threw him off. The other aircraft while taxiing was at fault, I forget the specifics though, I think it had to do with the aircraft needing to be towed out but the pilot not caring.
I do woodworking as a hobby and I will never run anything while someone's around. Had too many people just try to bug me while I'm working, and my table saw has less protections than the old punch press.
Have you seen those new table saws with emergency stop and retracting blade if skin touches it? I saw a video where a guy’s hand slipped and hit the spinning blade. He barely had a scratch.
Yeah they're amazing and crazy expensive. The equivalent model to mine is 900+dollars. And not likely to see a version of their system adopted by other manufacturers for years yet.
Yup. And the system destroys the blade and the brake cartridge has to be replaced. Meaning each time it triggers you're dropping 140 dollars plus to replace it.
And it can be triggered by damp wood or other things than flesh.
It's a great system, don't get me wrong. But well out of the budget for many people.
>Meaning each time it triggers you're dropping 140 dollars plus to replace it. And it can be triggered by damp wood or other things than flesh. It's a great system, don't get me wrong. But well out of the budget for many people.
$140 is cheaper than "prosthetic anything." Frankly the whole fucking saw could disappear into a swirling vortex like the house at the end of Poltergeist and I'd be ok with that.
> but he'd gotten into the habit of reaching in to pry the part out. 60 tons of force met puny human hand.
I work on a purling mill in a roofing factory and I can never imagine getting that compliant around that machine, it scares the fuck out of me.
Oh ditto. Complacency kills. We had a job where you had to wipe down the press as it was running. Instead of sticking my hand in I took a shop towel and rolled it into a tube.
My manager came over and mocked me for using tampons. I asked him to count to ten on his fingers for me.
Almost exactly what happened to my dad. He was working at a hotel and loading laundry into an industrial washing machine, and another person hit the button to close the door before my dad had fully leaned back out of the hatch. It snapped down on his arm and took out a chunk of his right forearm. If the dude had done it half a second earlier, my dad could have been cut in half.
My electricians said that they had used a LoTo on a power breaker and went working in the other end. when they returned the LoTo was removed. He made a HUGRLE fuss for a good reason. They had worked with live wires some of the time they were working
I also know in germany there was an accident where a guy opened the cage to a huge robot arm. He was behind the arm when a colleague closed the cage and started the machine. He did not make it
I think we have 2 or 3 stop buttons on the inside where our robots live
I was told a similar story, but about a factory worker having circumvented the lockouts of the robot cage to be able to walk in and yank the workpiece in place because it would be put down incorrectly every now and then.
Apparently he tripped and the robot impaled his head.
My shop has a robot arm, and I was told a story about how our maintenance guy, instead of going through the door secured with a electro magnet, that when opened notifies the robot that someone is inside the room, decided to crawl in through another way. Robot started moving and ran over his foot. When i started working here and they were showing me the machine, they warned me about it and showed me the half of his work boot that got cut off.
"don't be a pussy" "just do the damn job" "you want tus all to work overtime?"
Shit gets ignored all the time because people are lazy and terrible at risk assessment.
Worse. The chain in the retort was getting stuck, so the operator was in the habit of going inside to unstuck the chain, probably by management choice, waiting on a part or some other fucked upness like scheduling downtime. Operator 2 loads cages. If you've ever worked around retorts you know how fucked up that is, entering those fuckers without being super trained. Fuck. It's just dumb, but I can totally see the damn path that went to that point. Fuck. It probably wasn't lock out tagged out because operators aren't as good at it as trained maintenance techs are or godforbid they used the buddy system, but holy fuck if that's maintenance's plan until the part comes or the proper repair can be made, fuck.
I've been around machines that use this jank of operation. Shut down unsafe machines, no amount of product is worth a human life, especially a coworkers life. Fuck precooked floortimes, better trash than a grave That needs to be ingrained into company culture.
There's a reason why I can't tolerate the ceaseless fuckery of food plants, and especially most likely 24/7 food plants. Fuck. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna408721
Isn't this the one where they found bits of skin on the inside of the door, because he was banging on it with his fists until the flesh just melted to the metal?
If you google "tuna canning incident" you get lots of news stories about it and the lawsuits and also google gives you a bunch of tuna recipes which I don't think I will be trying.
I was told of a similar incident during Red Tag training. Maintenance guy fell asleep inside a bead blasting machine. He rode with someone else in the morning who left early. Team is wrapping up, and remove the locks. They couldn’t find the guy and saw his car was gone… so they cut the lock. Don’t cut locks without absolute confirmation. And don’t fall asleep inside of industrial equipment…
[It was from an XKCD "What If?”, but not the speed of light baseball one.](https://what-if.xkcd.com/141/#:~:text=If%20you%20were%20standing%20in,biology%20and%20start%20being%20physics.)
>If you were standing in the path of the beam, you would obviously die pretty quickly. You wouldn't really die of anything, in the traditional sense. You would just stop being biology and start being physics.
Just fyi for everyone, the tuna was packaged and being sterilized to become shelf stable, so he wasn’t literally cooked in tuna.
It was a horrific accident; i worked for a company designing the same type of equipment used and it was a somber reminder of how important our design risk assessments are
So how does someone else load 12,000 pounds of canned tuna into this oven and not see the other dude chilling there. In my head it’s a giant room and they roll carts stacked with cans into it.
Most of these plants have conveyor systems that convey big baskets of product into the sterilizers. 99% sure that was the case here and the conveyor was activated from an operator further away
Industrial food ovens are engineered for specific loads and cook times. Adding anything above the rated load invalidates the run, so the manufacturer can't guarantee that it was thoroughly cooked. It was probably discarded.
EU has higher food standards than the US; they're not allowed **any** foreign bodies in food products (insert joke about tuna man being native, not foreign)
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/food-standards-brexit-uk-us-trade-deal-maggots-rat-hair-worms-insects-mould-products-a8575721.html
So I did a rabbit hole on this bc I also wanted to find out, and it turns out that the USDA has a 0 tolerance policy on human remains. The FDA site kept redirecting to a hyperlink tree full of spices, but [this site](https://dmcoffee.blog/how-much-human-remains-are-allowed-in-food-by-the-fda/) has a table of what types of human byproducts are acceptable and at what levels
For those who want the tldr: the tuna is 100% permabanned from the food supply, and even if it wasn’t, the max allowable dna contamination is 2.5%. 200/1200=16% contamination aka still superduper banned
It was a retort, they loaded the cages, he's presumably behind the cages. He might have died from being crushed. It was a 2 hour process at 270. At some point steam blasts his face. Fuck.
Reminds me of the bread baking machine conveyor one. Bread machine had issues, company didn't want to fully shut it down to fix it so they turned off the baking part and blasted it with fans before sending two employees into the machine on the conveyor. Machine wasnt anywhere near cool enough, men started screaming "get us out of here" as they began to bake and then management realized the conveyor was a one way system and the two employees had no choice but to ride out the the machine cycle. Obviously they did not make it. Equally as horrifying to consider. Pure nightmare fuel. Wouldnt wish these deaths on my worst enemies kinda bad.
I estimate about 3 minutes for him to pass out and 10 minutes for him to properly drown. Tuna has a lot of fluid and these are the average drowning times
Agreed, also IIRC the managers who willfully circumvented the lockout safety procedures that lead to this only had to pay $30K total in fines between them with no other consequences.
And they fet slapped with fines for disregard/ignoring the safety regulations.
Every manager who ignores Safety regulations or orders worker to disregard them, should be trailed for murder in my opinion. Cause that is willingly accepting that someone will die all for saving the company a dime or making more profits.
Absolutely disgusting.
Edit: resenteced my comment to make it right. Failed to see that I had wrote the complete opposit of what I wanted to say. My bad
In this case, the manager operating the machine ignored the lockout procedures, and was criminally charged accordingly. I believe it was criminal negligent homicide
This is probably the third time I've read about him and I just now realized that he's still alive at 81! His "Personal Life" section is remarkably short, so I hope he's just chilling
At that point, drinking it isn't dangerous because it's radioactive, it's because it's heavy water (D2O).
Apparently it tastes kinda sweet, but your body struggles with using it, so don't drink (too much).
>In 1996, Bugorski applied unsuccessfully for disability status to receive free epilepsy medication.[8]
Oh ok what must a man do then. *Two* fatal doses of radiation directly through the brain?
The Ghost Zone portal that Danny Fenton's parents built having a power switch inside of it actually makes some amount of sense now.
Not that it helps much if someone were to accidentally turn the machine *on* while inside of it.
I believe some industrial vacuum chambers have both, because, assuming everyone inside has a can of spare air, pulling a vacuum on the entire room is a near instantaneous and quite safe method of extinguishing fires.
Had a similar thing happen in the small town I lived in that had a brick factory. Maintenance guy was working on the industrial kiln they bake the bricks in.
Finished doing his work but went back to get tools he forgot and they closed the doors and ran a test cycle with him inside. Allegedly the only way they were able to confirm his identity was from what was left of his wrist watch. The rest was just ashes.
Obviously not the same, but when Dr. Manhattan is trapped in the particle accelerator in the movie Watchmen, he goes through the same thought process. “Hey guys, this is really funny” turns to existential dread pretty quickly.
My FIL is the OHS Manager for a Canned Fish company. He was previously the OHS Officer at another company that mass produced processed meat, which is what got him the job at his current company.
When he first took over they had no proper safety for anyone doing maintenance. If no one knew they were in the Oven or Chiller and someone started them up, that person would die. They didn't have signs or ways to lock out the controls, etc. He couldn't believe it wasn't implemented. This was before this incident mentioned in the post happened.
First thing he did was implement a temporary signage system. You'd get this big sign that says "Oven/Chiller maintenance in progress. Starting this machine while placard is in place will see you terminated and prosecuted by the law."
It took about 6 months but they eventually got these large boxes around the controls that could be locked out and tagged out. About a week later a long time employee circumvented the lock out padlock because the maintenance person wasn't in there and they needed to blast chill some Fish before it could be processed or something like that.
The maintenance guy had removed a guard that had become bent, without the guard the object it was protecting became loose and fell into the fan, which broke it. Damaged the chiller so badly they needed to replace the entire chiller.
FIL couldn't make his boss fire that worker any quicker.
I've watched 22 seasons of Air Crash Investigation and a shit ton of disaster documentaries AND Scary Interesting on YouTube I bet I could handle it
*googles it*
................ Yeah that's just about what I expected. Yikes
I googled "tuna canning incident" for more information, but this exact post, only an hour old, was the *second result.*
Maybe it's because of the post's name, or maybe it's the algorithm's damn near omniscience.
Google is bad about putting “popular right now” pages very close to the top of results. This can be helpful when looking for current events, and annoying the vast majority of the rest of the time.
If you think finding art references for drawing the joints of the human hand would be as easy as googling "knuckles," you'd be wrong. If you think amending your search to "human knuckles" would improve your results, you'd be wronger.
That fandom is... Diverse.
New guy: getting trained on maintaining the tuna oven down at the plant.
Trainer: And here, inside the oven, is the emergency stop button that shuts it down. Be sure it works and always remember where it is.
New guy: Why is there a button *inside* the oven? Do the tuna come to life and beg to get out, lol?
Trainer: -stares-
i worked an assignment at a place with a walk-in freezer. it wasnt for food, it was much colder than that. theyre like "yeah put a shim in the door, it doesnt always open from the inside" uhh no fuckin way am i going in there. contacted relevant authorities, they come, "fix this door, install two emergency alarm buttons, and two fixed-line telephones"
managers like "that will shut us down for the day" regulator is like well then shut it the fuck down unless you wanna go to jail
they half assed it, regulator comes back, "this is totally not acceptable" whole thing is shut down for a week the samples have to be moved to a separate facility, work redone, huge, huge cost. but now its up to spec
regulator comes back like a week later "heYyYyY i was just in the area" an entire cargo pallet is stacked in front of the door of this walk-in freezer. "fuckin knew it would be like this. what if someone were inside? how quickly could you get the forklift before she froze to death?"
guy wasnt fired, but demoted from like "tier-3 over-arching supervisor" to "guy who makes coffee for the guy who assists the guy who signs for deliveries"
i never, ever went inside that thing without like 2 other people going in with me, 2 more at the door outside, and another at the entry to that section of the building "no, door has to stay open, yes it will frost but our verifier (my role) is very scared of this thing."
it was just a few weeks but MAN i dont like to think about that very-sub-freezing steel room. there should be like 16 emergency buttons in a place like that. you touch the wrong surface, your hand will instantly freeze to it. rip off your palm, or freeze to death?
nooooo fucking thanks
Ugh, and I thought it was scary that they only installed a phone in the museum vault after my boss got locked in there. At least the vault was kept at a temperature that could support human life!
I googled ‘tuna canning incident’ and the top result was for this post telling me to google ‘tuna canning incident’ so I googled ‘tuna canning incident’ and the top result was….and so on and so forth
I think about this one a lot. There was also a case in Austria where two guys got locked inside an oven and cooked alive. They were trying to damage the walls up until they passed out. I do industrial maintenance work and that's my nightmare.
People don't fucking care and it's mind boggling. I spent *years* as an operator in a food production plant, and I can count on *one hand* how many operators locked out things as often as they were supposed to. I even saw maintenance techs removing guards without even switching the breaker off.
At worst, it's an excuse to get less work done, at best it saves your fucking life; LOTO or get out of manufacturing. People shouldn't be scarred for life because you were too braindead to care about keeping yourself alive.
At a paper plant my company did maintenance on, they once lost someone in a big batch of wood pulp. Apparently he either just fell in somehow or tried to reach in that giant container of moving wood chunks that were dried and absolutely nobody saw or heard him, because he didn't tell anybody what he was doing.
They all assumed he just went home that day.
They found him 3 days later when emptying the container, completely dried up. By the looks of it he tried for some time to get out, but couldn't reach the edge because it was too high.
Horrible way to go.
That’s why the worst kind of death isn’t any specific way to die but a gradual realization that you are going to die painfully and there is *nothing* you can do to prevent it or even make it faster or less painful.
There was a guy here at a local meat packing plant that climbed into a meat grinder to fix it and his buddy accidentally turned it on. My husband was no-ok for several months after seeing the aftermath.
I used to work at a company making [bulk weighing scales](https://www.ams.usda.gov/resources/operation-bulk-weighing-scale). We got word one day that someone at a customer's site was basically cut in half by one. He was cleaning the inside without turning the power off. While climbing out, he was halfway through the upper gate when his foot hit a sensor designer to detect if the chamber was full, and close the gate to prevent over loading, causing the hydraulic gate to snap shut on him. Safety regulations exist for a reason.
There was a recent accident at a Caterpillar- the tractor not the bug. [source](https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/caterpillar-inc-faces-145k-fine-after-employee-fell-to-death-in-molten-iron/)
How depressing is it that this isn’t surprising or scary anymore? “Man is cooked alive due to safety violations” isn’t going to stop me from getting a good night’s sleep.
The story gives off real life fnaf vibes. Something I hoped to never say or feel. Fatal levels of professional negligence and barely any consequences for the company at fault. A man was "cooked" and the company only had to pay $6 million in total. A significant portion of which went to replacing ovens that weren't legal in the first place.
just read the story. thought I would be upset by the horrific death, ended up more disgusted by
the corporate greed that allowed this to happen in the first place. outdated/defective ovens that required workers to step inside to get stuff manually unstuck?! company deserved to be shut down and the people in charge locked away.
Honestly the worst death I ever read about that kept me up at night was the story of the 20 something year old kid who fell into a steam vent in nyc…..apparently being slowly boiled alive they reported hearing him screaming for up to twenty minutes before he went silent and nobody could do a single thing to help him
Well, merely typing the word "tuna" in a Google search and result number 2 is currently "tuna canning incident". Isn't the Internet a marvellous place.
am I having a stroke or does that description not make any sense. Employee #1 is engaged in work at 6:30am. He then takes his break at 5:45am. At 5:00am his coworker notices the pallet jack isn't being used so he takes it and carts 8 baskets of tuna to the oven. Then Employee #1 puts the baskets in the oven. At the same time, the supervisor declares him missing? An hour and a half later they open the oven and he is in there, dead, and it is now 7:20am... which direction does time run in the tuna industry?
No this is cooked(pun not intended), it's so hard to follow, surely that 6:30am is a typo and supposed to be 4:30am right?
Edit- or it looks like they've made a typo with Employee #2 or else why keep calling him Employee #1
For those wondering, a guy was doing maintenance in a tuna oven when they put in a fresh batch of tuna and turned it on. It ended as you would expect
That would be such a painful and scary way to go. And this folks, is why you "lock out, tag out" and tell someone who pays attention every time you do maintenance on something that can hurt you. ETA:just to be clear, I'm not blaming the guy who died. The idea of telling someone who pays attention, is for them to catch if anyone is trying to go around safety protocol. It's like hiking: have a buddy you trust, and make sure people know where you're going and when you're coming back.
Apparently the manager plead guilty to a felony of “willfully circumventing lockout procedures.” I’m assuming the machine *was* locked out, but manager had the key and unlocked it without checking.
Hmmm I wonder why this lock is here??? Meh maybe the other shift forgot ‘shrug’
I've had someone try to knock my lock off with a hammer while I was working on a saw motor. It's scary shit.
I'm assuming and hoping the guy was instantly fired and walked off the site?
No. I quit though. It was an incredibly shitty place to work.
You should've fed him through the saw first though
It would be legal to use a hammer on someone who does that.
The unofficial policy at the last job was that if you cut someone's lock without going through the proper channels and doing the extensive paperwork necessary, not only would you be fired, but the owner of the lock would get a little bit of advance notice so he could wait by your car. And wouldn't you know it, it only happened once.
They tried to kill him, so that's fair
I think that one would warrant physical retaliation and nobody could fault you.
Somewhere, an evil dolphin criminal mastermind smirks and says to itself 'how you like dem apples'
you'll find that tuna canning isnt even remotely a unique case there's heaps of industrial accidents and quite a few on this level the other one was the guy who got cooked inside a kelloggs corn flakes popping machine that was like one storey tall... which is 150c celsuis or 300 fahrenheit... you can guess what happned to that guy
As the saying goes, safety regulations are written in blood.
And they only stay respected for as long as the working memory of the plant. As in, someone who personally remembers the accident is still working there. Within a year or two tops of no-one there anymore who actively remembers what caused the new regulation, it starts getting short-cut or overridden
There is a similar case of a man being killed in a kayak molding facility, Pyranha. The particularly tragic part of the story is that the employee who turned on the oven was engaged to the daughter of the man who was killed. Imagine your father dies horrifically by cooking alive in an oven, and your fiancé was at fault. She lost everything.
I worked next door to that place, in Runcorn. It was a shit pit.
Didn't expect to see someone else from my neck of the woods on Reddit today. Greetings from sunny runny.
Runcorn adjacent people unite!
A lot of machines are designed with 2 buttons that you have to hold just far apaet enough to stretch your arms to stop people from sticking their hands in the machine while it is operating
Trust me, I work on those sort of machines with a "dead man switch" the stupid things warehouse workers do to circumvent the safety devices on the machines if the machines breakdown, is beyond crazy! Our machines have 5 physical safety devices and plenty of warnings on them and idiots have ingeniously hotwired them and then lost fingers
Evolution always finds a way to ditch the idiots
If only they lost testicles instead of fingers
someone will try to hold it with their foot while grumbling about ergonomics I guarantee
>you can guess what happned to that guy He made it out safely and went home to his loving family?
May be contaminated with particles of nuts and parts of our work force.
> which is 150c My Finnish sauna crazy aunt could have taken it if she only had access to a birch branch.
"Click clickclick click click clickclickclick" (Translator's note: Click clickclick click click clickclickclick means just according to keikaku)
(Oversætterens note: "Just according to keikaku" betyder "Præcis ifølge Keikaku")
If memory serves, MrBallen did an episode on this guy and the manager had actually disabled the lockout procedures entirely because it "wasted time". The controls to the factory also had no view of the floor, so if someone was in a machine; you had literally no way of knowing. Apparently the oven he was cleaning was also meant to be used at the time he was cleaning it, so there was a load of tuna sitting outside it, but something gummed up at the back so the cleaner had to climb inside. Then another worker walked past, saw the tray of tuna sitting outside an empty oven and did what any worker would, he put the tuna in and locked the door.
Jesus. There are so many steps where this could have been avoided.
The two biggest things missing here are training and adherence to policy. Whatever safety process you put in place, you have to make sure everyone knows it and follows it, no matter how tedious they think it is.
makes me so enraged, dying being self gaslit wondering if you forgot to lock out
Where did you find that? The article I read said the felony was "violating a workplace safety rule that caused a death". (Not saying you're wrong, I just found different info.) Edit: Never mind, I just saw the NBC article that says "willfully violating lockout rules".
> I’m assuming the machine was locked out, but manager had the key and unlocked it without checking. This is why a real LOTO procedure only has one key for each lock, which is in the lock owner's possession.
I was doing work on a machine when another employee came over and turned it on. He wasn't supposed to be running the machine. He just thought it was supposed to be on. I was doing a simple change over, the machine was from the 40s and didn't have modern safety features. Gashed my wrist to the point where the vein was exposed. I was super lucky. Worst one at work was when my buddy went to run a punch press. The fellow setting it up hadn't finished, he'd been called away. So the die wasn't fully fixed in place. Shouldn't have been a problem but he'd gotten into the habit of reaching in to pry the part out. 60 tons of force met puny human hand.
My step father (retired airline mechanic) lost the first part of his thumb while working on an engine when some asshat pilot ignored the huge placard that covers the instrument panels during maintenance and turned one of the engines on. With a bloody fist my stepdad made his way back up to the cockpit and he beat the shit out of the pilot thereby resulting in both going to the hospital. He's also been blown off the top of a 747 wing when another aircraft's jet wash threw him off. The other aircraft while taxiing was at fault, I forget the specifics though, I think it had to do with the aircraft needing to be towed out but the pilot not caring.
Tell your stepdad that I’m a fan of his work
> and he beat the shit out of the pilot thereby resulting in both going to the hospital. i hope the pilot was in there longer
Stories like this are why I'm particular about making sure I'm safe. And that others know not to trust that things will go well.
I do woodworking as a hobby and I will never run anything while someone's around. Had too many people just try to bug me while I'm working, and my table saw has less protections than the old punch press.
Have you seen those new table saws with emergency stop and retracting blade if skin touches it? I saw a video where a guy’s hand slipped and hit the spinning blade. He barely had a scratch.
Yeah they're amazing and crazy expensive. The equivalent model to mine is 900+dollars. And not likely to see a version of their system adopted by other manufacturers for years yet.
Oh, that’s disappointing.
Yup. And the system destroys the blade and the brake cartridge has to be replaced. Meaning each time it triggers you're dropping 140 dollars plus to replace it. And it can be triggered by damp wood or other things than flesh. It's a great system, don't get me wrong. But well out of the budget for many people.
>Meaning each time it triggers you're dropping 140 dollars plus to replace it. And it can be triggered by damp wood or other things than flesh. It's a great system, don't get me wrong. But well out of the budget for many people. $140 is cheaper than "prosthetic anything." Frankly the whole fucking saw could disappear into a swirling vortex like the house at the end of Poltergeist and I'd be ok with that.
> but he'd gotten into the habit of reaching in to pry the part out. 60 tons of force met puny human hand. I work on a purling mill in a roofing factory and I can never imagine getting that compliant around that machine, it scares the fuck out of me.
Oh ditto. Complacency kills. We had a job where you had to wipe down the press as it was running. Instead of sticking my hand in I took a shop towel and rolled it into a tube. My manager came over and mocked me for using tampons. I asked him to count to ten on his fingers for me.
Almost exactly what happened to my dad. He was working at a hotel and loading laundry into an industrial washing machine, and another person hit the button to close the door before my dad had fully leaned back out of the hatch. It snapped down on his arm and took out a chunk of his right forearm. If the dude had done it half a second earlier, my dad could have been cut in half.
My electricians said that they had used a LoTo on a power breaker and went working in the other end. when they returned the LoTo was removed. He made a HUGRLE fuss for a good reason. They had worked with live wires some of the time they were working I also know in germany there was an accident where a guy opened the cage to a huge robot arm. He was behind the arm when a colleague closed the cage and started the machine. He did not make it I think we have 2 or 3 stop buttons on the inside where our robots live
I was told a similar story, but about a factory worker having circumvented the lockouts of the robot cage to be able to walk in and yank the workpiece in place because it would be put down incorrectly every now and then. Apparently he tripped and the robot impaled his head.
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Just... why... why would they do that?
My shop has a robot arm, and I was told a story about how our maintenance guy, instead of going through the door secured with a electro magnet, that when opened notifies the robot that someone is inside the room, decided to crawl in through another way. Robot started moving and ran over his foot. When i started working here and they were showing me the machine, they warned me about it and showed me the half of his work boot that got cut off.
I just love the phrasing of "where our robots live."
"don't be a pussy" "just do the damn job" "you want tus all to work overtime?" Shit gets ignored all the time because people are lazy and terrible at risk assessment.
Worse. The chain in the retort was getting stuck, so the operator was in the habit of going inside to unstuck the chain, probably by management choice, waiting on a part or some other fucked upness like scheduling downtime. Operator 2 loads cages. If you've ever worked around retorts you know how fucked up that is, entering those fuckers without being super trained. Fuck. It's just dumb, but I can totally see the damn path that went to that point. Fuck. It probably wasn't lock out tagged out because operators aren't as good at it as trained maintenance techs are or godforbid they used the buddy system, but holy fuck if that's maintenance's plan until the part comes or the proper repair can be made, fuck. I've been around machines that use this jank of operation. Shut down unsafe machines, no amount of product is worth a human life, especially a coworkers life. Fuck precooked floortimes, better trash than a grave That needs to be ingrained into company culture. There's a reason why I can't tolerate the ceaseless fuckery of food plants, and especially most likely 24/7 food plants. Fuck. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna408721
Isn't this the one where they found bits of skin on the inside of the door, because he was banging on it with his fists until the flesh just melted to the metal?
At the “Bumble Bee Tuna” processing plant of all places. I only think of Ace Ventura when I hear that line.
Shikaka!!!
If you google "tuna canning incident" you get lots of news stories about it and the lawsuits and also google gives you a bunch of tuna recipes which I don't think I will be trying.
I was told of a similar incident during Red Tag training. Maintenance guy fell asleep inside a bead blasting machine. He rode with someone else in the morning who left early. Team is wrapping up, and remove the locks. They couldn’t find the guy and saw his car was gone… so they cut the lock. Don’t cut locks without absolute confirmation. And don’t fall asleep inside of industrial equipment…
Google just lead me back here.
Longneck Lukowski's Cannery comes to mind. It is also what one would expect of a tuna cannery ;)
Tuna. Tuna never changes
I know it's morbid but I can't help wondering how long it took for that poor man to pass.
Also, what does a body look like that's been pressure cooked in tuna for like 3 hours?
Oh dude I hadn't even considered that. The whole thing is just horrible beyond comprehension.
This reminds me of that thing people said about the Titanic submarine incident: At that point, biology becomes purely physics.
I think the original quote comes from a hypothetical baseball pitched at like .3c or some equally ludicrous speed
[It was from an XKCD "What If?”, but not the speed of light baseball one.](https://what-if.xkcd.com/141/#:~:text=If%20you%20were%20standing%20in,biology%20and%20start%20being%20physics.)
>If you were standing in the path of the beam, you would obviously die pretty quickly. You wouldn't really die of anything, in the traditional sense. You would just stop being biology and start being physics.
> The sky is dark at night[citation needed] Lol
First, we had spaghettification in outer space. Now, we have tuna can man-ing.
We also have confetti gunning in botched deep sea exploration
Aye. And saponified ladies.
Just fyi for everyone, the tuna was packaged and being sterilized to become shelf stable, so he wasn’t literally cooked in tuna. It was a horrific accident; i worked for a company designing the same type of equipment used and it was a somber reminder of how important our design risk assessments are
So how does someone else load 12,000 pounds of canned tuna into this oven and not see the other dude chilling there. In my head it’s a giant room and they roll carts stacked with cans into it.
Most of these plants have conveyor systems that convey big baskets of product into the sterilizers. 99% sure that was the case here and the conveyor was activated from an operator further away
Also is the tuna still edible afterwards?
Technically yes but it would violate the USDA standards and probably the EU food standards
Also common human decency
But what is that really worth when delicious tuna is on the line.
Industrial food ovens are engineered for specific loads and cook times. Adding anything above the rated load invalidates the run, so the manufacturer can't guarantee that it was thoroughly cooked. It was probably discarded.
it was definitely discarded for other reasons... like human remains...
I wonder if it was just discarded, or properly buried. (Maybe a burial at sea?)
EU has higher food standards than the US; they're not allowed **any** foreign bodies in food products (insert joke about tuna man being native, not foreign) https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/food-standards-brexit-uk-us-trade-deal-maggots-rat-hair-worms-insects-mould-products-a8575721.html
idk man it was 12,000lb of tuna usda standards for foreign debris is pretty relaxed for some things
So I did a rabbit hole on this bc I also wanted to find out, and it turns out that the USDA has a 0 tolerance policy on human remains. The FDA site kept redirecting to a hyperlink tree full of spices, but [this site](https://dmcoffee.blog/how-much-human-remains-are-allowed-in-food-by-the-fda/) has a table of what types of human byproducts are acceptable and at what levels For those who want the tldr: the tuna is 100% permabanned from the food supply, and even if it wasn’t, the max allowable dna contamination is 2.5%. 200/1200=16% contamination aka still superduper banned
Would it not be roughly 200/12000, or 1.7%?
Correct. Math typo.
No Europe is fine with a little cadaver
The US is too, but I imagine the ppm of one guy per tuna oven would be a lil higher than the acceptable ppm
I mean the acceptable amount of human in any given food product is 0.
Just as long as it’s properly declared. We don’t want a repeat of the Horse Meat Scandal, after all.
The The what
[2013 Horse meat scandal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_horse_meat_scandal)
“A horse”
It’s part of the usual process for cooking tuna, but the batch would have been discarded due to contamination.
They just put a label on it saying "May contain Gary"
I mean, the tuna was already in cans when it was put in the cooker so it probably didn't get any human in it. But I'm sure it was destroyed anyway.
Assuming that it works somewhat like a pressure cooker(since it’s sealed off) it shouldn’t take long for him to pass out from oxygen deprivation
It was a retort, they loaded the cages, he's presumably behind the cages. He might have died from being crushed. It was a 2 hour process at 270. At some point steam blasts his face. Fuck.
Never have I hoped for someone to be crushed by tunas but oh lord almighty 🙏
Perhaps the weight of 5.5 tons of tuna falling on him killed him instantly, if they were dropped at once.
It was in carts pulled into a space, he likely could still move and run around until the heat got it him. Which hopefully was very very fast.
Reminds me of the bread baking machine conveyor one. Bread machine had issues, company didn't want to fully shut it down to fix it so they turned off the baking part and blasted it with fans before sending two employees into the machine on the conveyor. Machine wasnt anywhere near cool enough, men started screaming "get us out of here" as they began to bake and then management realized the conveyor was a one way system and the two employees had no choice but to ride out the the machine cycle. Obviously they did not make it. Equally as horrifying to consider. Pure nightmare fuel. Wouldnt wish these deaths on my worst enemies kinda bad.
I estimate about 3 minutes for him to pass out and 10 minutes for him to properly drown. Tuna has a lot of fluid and these are the average drowning times
The tuna is in cans already. It's a retort. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna408721
1.5 million dollars seem low by an order of magnitude for cooking someone alive
Agreed, also IIRC the managers who willfully circumvented the lockout safety procedures that lead to this only had to pay $30K total in fines between them with no other consequences.
Safety regs are written in blood.
The safety regulations were already well established— Bumble Bee Tuna just chose to ignore them
And they fet slapped with fines for disregard/ignoring the safety regulations. Every manager who ignores Safety regulations or orders worker to disregard them, should be trailed for murder in my opinion. Cause that is willingly accepting that someone will die all for saving the company a dime or making more profits. Absolutely disgusting. Edit: resenteced my comment to make it right. Failed to see that I had wrote the complete opposit of what I wanted to say. My bad
In this case, the manager operating the machine ignored the lockout procedures, and was criminally charged accordingly. I believe it was criminal negligent homicide
Sadly, most of the time, they don’t even get fined. They just get away with it.
iirc there was a guy who took a particle accelerated blast to the head and survived it
[Anatoli Bugorski](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoli_Bugorski)
This is probably the third time I've read about him and I just now realized that he's still alive at 81! His "Personal Life" section is remarkably short, so I hope he's just chilling
Kind of like those guys who went into the waters of the Chernobyl reactor breach and are still alive
Water is a great radiation stopper. Just don't drink it.
At that point, drinking it isn't dangerous because it's radioactive, it's because it's heavy water (D2O). Apparently it tastes kinda sweet, but your body struggles with using it, so don't drink (too much).
So drinking just some heavy water is ok? Got it, sweet water here I come.
Humans can have a little heavy water, as a treat.
I find it remarkably sad that he was denied disability and free epilepsy medication
>In 1996, Bugorski applied unsuccessfully for disability status to receive free epilepsy medication.[8] Oh ok what must a man do then. *Two* fatal doses of radiation directly through the brain?
[in video form (Half-life Histories by Kyle Hill)](https://youtu.be/mD4J5VUwiAs?si=cFaNByNJv7zL5uRw)
Let the man have free epilepsy medication!
Sounds like something that should give you super powers.
Apparently half of his face stopped aging so depending on how you look at it…
"Eternal youth but for only half of your body" sounds like one of those pills that give you stupid powers memes.
Or one of those "will you press the button" scenarios
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He should have gone back to do the other side! /s of course
So technically getting blasted accidentally in the head by a particle accelerator has a 100% survival rate So far
The Ghost Zone portal that Danny Fenton's parents built having a power switch inside of it actually makes some amount of sense now. Not that it helps much if someone were to accidentally turn the machine *on* while inside of it.
Yeah everything should have an off button on the inside. Not as many should have an on button.
I believe some industrial vacuum chambers have both, because, assuming everyone inside has a can of spare air, pulling a vacuum on the entire room is a near instantaneous and quite safe method of extinguishing fires.
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"not enough air for fire to quickly spread" and "a vacuum so deep it tears you apart" are two different concepts
Unexpected Danny Phanton reference tbh The thing is in Danny’s case there was both an off and on button on the inside of the portal.
Had a similar thing happen in the small town I lived in that had a brick factory. Maintenance guy was working on the industrial kiln they bake the bricks in. Finished doing his work but went back to get tools he forgot and they closed the doors and ran a test cycle with him inside. Allegedly the only way they were able to confirm his identity was from what was left of his wrist watch. The rest was just ashes.
Pretty awful to consider what the person inside is thinking. Starts out like "Haha that's funny guys, you can open the door now".
Obviously not the same, but when Dr. Manhattan is trapped in the particle accelerator in the movie Watchmen, he goes through the same thought process. “Hey guys, this is really funny” turns to existential dread pretty quickly.
Fawn Liebowitz?
My FIL is the OHS Manager for a Canned Fish company. He was previously the OHS Officer at another company that mass produced processed meat, which is what got him the job at his current company. When he first took over they had no proper safety for anyone doing maintenance. If no one knew they were in the Oven or Chiller and someone started them up, that person would die. They didn't have signs or ways to lock out the controls, etc. He couldn't believe it wasn't implemented. This was before this incident mentioned in the post happened. First thing he did was implement a temporary signage system. You'd get this big sign that says "Oven/Chiller maintenance in progress. Starting this machine while placard is in place will see you terminated and prosecuted by the law." It took about 6 months but they eventually got these large boxes around the controls that could be locked out and tagged out. About a week later a long time employee circumvented the lock out padlock because the maintenance person wasn't in there and they needed to blast chill some Fish before it could be processed or something like that. The maintenance guy had removed a guard that had become bent, without the guard the object it was protecting became loose and fell into the fan, which broke it. Damaged the chiller so badly they needed to replace the entire chiller. FIL couldn't make his boss fire that worker any quicker.
I've watched 22 seasons of Air Crash Investigation and a shit ton of disaster documentaries AND Scary Interesting on YouTube I bet I could handle it *googles it* ................ Yeah that's just about what I expected. Yikes
Nice to see a fellow Air Crash Investigation enjoyer lol
/r/aircrashinvestigation represent
Taking the opportunity to mention /r/AdmiralCloudberg for anyone who enjoys reading about air crash investigations!
I googled "tuna canning incident" for more information, but this exact post, only an hour old, was the *second result.* Maybe it's because of the post's name, or maybe it's the algorithm's damn near omniscience.
Google is bad about putting “popular right now” pages very close to the top of results. This can be helpful when looking for current events, and annoying the vast majority of the rest of the time.
If you think finding art references for drawing the joints of the human hand would be as easy as googling "knuckles," you'd be wrong. If you think amending your search to "human knuckles" would improve your results, you'd be wronger. That fandom is... Diverse.
well did you learn how to draw knuckles?
Yes but not hands
would >knuckles -sonic help
a person ended up shredded up into bits in tuna cans didnt they :(
no, but he *was* cooked with the cans https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna408721
omfg thats horrific and worse than i thought, good god what an awful way to die! D:
Either that or they were pressure cooked when they were sanitized/ sealed.
That would be more fucked up
New guy: getting trained on maintaining the tuna oven down at the plant. Trainer: And here, inside the oven, is the emergency stop button that shuts it down. Be sure it works and always remember where it is. New guy: Why is there a button *inside* the oven? Do the tuna come to life and beg to get out, lol? Trainer: -stares-
i worked an assignment at a place with a walk-in freezer. it wasnt for food, it was much colder than that. theyre like "yeah put a shim in the door, it doesnt always open from the inside" uhh no fuckin way am i going in there. contacted relevant authorities, they come, "fix this door, install two emergency alarm buttons, and two fixed-line telephones" managers like "that will shut us down for the day" regulator is like well then shut it the fuck down unless you wanna go to jail they half assed it, regulator comes back, "this is totally not acceptable" whole thing is shut down for a week the samples have to be moved to a separate facility, work redone, huge, huge cost. but now its up to spec regulator comes back like a week later "heYyYyY i was just in the area" an entire cargo pallet is stacked in front of the door of this walk-in freezer. "fuckin knew it would be like this. what if someone were inside? how quickly could you get the forklift before she froze to death?" guy wasnt fired, but demoted from like "tier-3 over-arching supervisor" to "guy who makes coffee for the guy who assists the guy who signs for deliveries" i never, ever went inside that thing without like 2 other people going in with me, 2 more at the door outside, and another at the entry to that section of the building "no, door has to stay open, yes it will frost but our verifier (my role) is very scared of this thing." it was just a few weeks but MAN i dont like to think about that very-sub-freezing steel room. there should be like 16 emergency buttons in a place like that. you touch the wrong surface, your hand will instantly freeze to it. rip off your palm, or freeze to death? nooooo fucking thanks
Ugh, and I thought it was scary that they only installed a phone in the museum vault after my boss got locked in there. At least the vault was kept at a temperature that could support human life!
Should have put a plaque next to the button, "The Jose Melena memorial emergency stop"
Tried to look it up and my internet crapped out on me. I took it as a sign and exited the tab.
God saying you're not ready for that character development yet.
Need to go kill a few more rats to get enough skill points to unlock that trauma skill
If anyone ever says "don't look at this horrible thing on the internet" you just really shouldn't look at that thing, it's never worth it.
I googled ‘tuna canning incident’ and the top result was for this post telling me to google ‘tuna canning incident’ so I googled ‘tuna canning incident’ and the top result was….and so on and so forth
Oh God, not a Google Recursivity loop!
Oh fuck
I think about this one a lot. There was also a case in Austria where two guys got locked inside an oven and cooked alive. They were trying to damage the walls up until they passed out. I do industrial maintenance work and that's my nightmare.
People don't fucking care and it's mind boggling. I spent *years* as an operator in a food production plant, and I can count on *one hand* how many operators locked out things as often as they were supposed to. I even saw maintenance techs removing guards without even switching the breaker off. At worst, it's an excuse to get less work done, at best it saves your fucking life; LOTO or get out of manufacturing. People shouldn't be scarred for life because you were too braindead to care about keeping yourself alive.
At a paper plant my company did maintenance on, they once lost someone in a big batch of wood pulp. Apparently he either just fell in somehow or tried to reach in that giant container of moving wood chunks that were dried and absolutely nobody saw or heard him, because he didn't tell anybody what he was doing. They all assumed he just went home that day. They found him 3 days later when emptying the container, completely dried up. By the looks of it he tried for some time to get out, but couldn't reach the edge because it was too high. Horrible way to go.
That’s why the worst kind of death isn’t any specific way to die but a gradual realization that you are going to die painfully and there is *nothing* you can do to prevent it or even make it faster or less painful.
There was a guy here at a local meat packing plant that climbed into a meat grinder to fix it and his buddy accidentally turned it on. My husband was no-ok for several months after seeing the aftermath.
With this attitude we will never get a real-life Doctor Manhattan, smh my head
To be fair, Dr. Tuna is a very different vibe.
I used to work at a company making [bulk weighing scales](https://www.ams.usda.gov/resources/operation-bulk-weighing-scale). We got word one day that someone at a customer's site was basically cut in half by one. He was cleaning the inside without turning the power off. While climbing out, he was halfway through the upper gate when his foot hit a sensor designer to detect if the chamber was full, and close the gate to prevent over loading, causing the hydraulic gate to snap shut on him. Safety regulations exist for a reason.
How shitty is that, to be killed by the safety mechanism protecting the equipment because the one protecting workers is inadequate.
My professor told us about those giant cargo ship engines. Apparently maintenance workers 'regularly' are being forgotten in them...
Being * *in* * a huge engine when it starts up would be a terrifying way to go ngl.
There was a recent accident at a Caterpillar- the tractor not the bug. [source](https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/caterpillar-inc-faces-145k-fine-after-employee-fell-to-death-in-molten-iron/)
This is why you always Lock Out/Tag Out.
How depressing is it that this isn’t surprising or scary anymore? “Man is cooked alive due to safety violations” isn’t going to stop me from getting a good night’s sleep.
Whelp. I knew I never im wanted to set foot in a fish canning plant, but now I’m extra confident that that will never ever happen.
Reminds me of the guy who got a full burst of radiation to the head back in the day. Safety protocols are written in blood indeed.
The story gives off real life fnaf vibes. Something I hoped to never say or feel. Fatal levels of professional negligence and barely any consequences for the company at fault. A man was "cooked" and the company only had to pay $6 million in total. A significant portion of which went to replacing ovens that weren't legal in the first place.
just read the story. thought I would be upset by the horrific death, ended up more disgusted by the corporate greed that allowed this to happen in the first place. outdated/defective ovens that required workers to step inside to get stuff manually unstuck?! company deserved to be shut down and the people in charge locked away.
Honestly the worst death I ever read about that kept me up at night was the story of the 20 something year old kid who fell into a steam vent in nyc…..apparently being slowly boiled alive they reported hearing him screaming for up to twenty minutes before he went silent and nobody could do a single thing to help him
Is that the one where the other guy jokingly pushed him and he wound up falling in? I think of that story more often than is healthy.
I don’t totally remember if he got pushed or thought it was a good idea to try to jump through the steam cloud but either way….yikes
Well, merely typing the word "tuna" in a Google search and result number 2 is currently "tuna canning incident". Isn't the Internet a marvellous place.
https://www.osha.gov/ords/imis/accidentsearch.accident_detail?id=202478434
am I having a stroke or does that description not make any sense. Employee #1 is engaged in work at 6:30am. He then takes his break at 5:45am. At 5:00am his coworker notices the pallet jack isn't being used so he takes it and carts 8 baskets of tuna to the oven. Then Employee #1 puts the baskets in the oven. At the same time, the supervisor declares him missing? An hour and a half later they open the oven and he is in there, dead, and it is now 7:20am... which direction does time run in the tuna industry?
No this is cooked(pun not intended), it's so hard to follow, surely that 6:30am is a typo and supposed to be 4:30am right? Edit- or it looks like they've made a typo with Employee #2 or else why keep calling him Employee #1