Almost got killed this evening
 

I was on one of my TV shows at a power plant and five minutes after I got there a stunt rigger drops a cordless drill from 20 feet up on a catwalk and it smashes to the ground between me and the Unit Production Manager, we were maybe four feet apart. I was so shook up, I didn't think to take a picture of the smashed cordless drill with my iPhone. They should have cleared the area below, when working above like that.

Its bad ju-ju when you kill the Safety Guy or one of the Producers.

Damn! Glad you're okay. Would a hard hat have made a difference? Is it standard protocol for people to wear them in such locations? Might be worth implementing a policy about it for exactly that kind of reason!

At what height do tools have to be tethered?

We typically don't wear hard hats (in fact, shorts, T-Shirts are normal). Some power plants require hardhats, steel toed boots, etc. This one is mothballed, so no such requirements. This was a typical one, too many people, from too many departments doing too many things. I'd just gotten there and was sort of assessing what was going on. In five more minutes, I'd like to think that I would have had cleared the area below.

13 years ago on one of my first Tech Scouts with the TV show "Alias" I was in Chinatown in downtown LA we were at lunch at a local Chinese restaurant, and the restaurant owner's little kid dropped a wooden bowl from the mezzanine above and it hit me on the head and required a few stitches.

My job is generally safe, but I'm around people loading pyro all week long. I have a set of "Nomex" type shirt and pants, and I only wear 100% cotton socks and underwear when we are doing that stuff. For some explosions, we load gasoline into plastic bags (shudder).

Jr

Good question, and I don't think we have an industry answer. But in thinking about it, I'm sure as schit going to bring it up with the Industry-Wide, Labor-Management Safety Committee, which meets every month. That Committee represents all the Unions in Hollywood and all the major studios. We publish the motion picture industry Safety Bulletins, which are interesting if you want to look at them. Lots of weird stuff regarding filming safety, infant actors, venomous reptiles, a bunch of really weird stuff that you've probably never thought of regarding filming. Its a public website, so I'm not giving any secrets away. http://csatf.org/bulletintro.shtml

You might also be interested in the Industry Safety training program. We hire lots of workers from the Industry and have developed an Industry-wide safety training program, so if you work for Disney, Warner Bros, Fox, Universal, Sony, Paramount, you get the same fungible or transferable training. You can find it at the same website here: http://csatf.org/sppdesc.pdf

While I don't run it anymore, I was the Architect of that training program. Its since been modeled by most the of refineries that hire outside workers from the same contractors. I think we've included something like 40,000 Hollywood crew members in the program.

It's worse ju-ju to have cordless drill land on your head from 20 ft. up. Glad you're okay.

Hugh, close one. Luck is really on your side. I once had a hammer drop off the top of a ladder onto my head. This young man who was working for my plumber left it up there. That was only a 6' ladder and it hurt like hell.

My BIL was a fire sprinkler fitter on a high rise in LA someone dropped a big ass wrench 10 stories and when he went to retrieve it, he found it spot welded to the steel deck.

Typically, I enjoy hearing of the safety aspects of your job.
Tonight, I'm REALLY glad to be hearing from YOU. Yowza!

I'm a Field Engineer with GE Healthcare and work in Diagnostic Imaging, specifically Nuclear Medicine. One of my other responsibilities is I'm a certified Smith System Driving Instructor. I've always been drawn to the safety aspect of my job and I'll probably move into more of an active Safety role in the next few years.

For me, my usual work environment is one room and I control who's there and who comes in. When I think of your world, even I get antsy.

You must get challenged endlessly by naysayers.

That's nuts.

Those big commercial jobs are dangerous because there are so many people and they all do not know each others bad habits.

My work isn't just production safety like stunts and special effects. Its also about logistics. Case in point, we filmed the movies "Deja Vu" and The Guardian in NOLA, before Katrina. "Deja Vu" is a pretty good Sc-Fi move if you haven't seen it.

We planned for Katrina, knew hurricanes could be a factor, maybe we shouldn't have filmed there, but not my call. You may recall the hundreds of yellow school buses that got flooded. We had hundreds of production and personal vehicles between those two show. We lost exactly one pickup truck, one trailer and one really large photocopy machine, that is it. My fault, I was there and didn't check the automatic garage openers, and their manual over-rides, which failed in a power loss, the manual over-rides were rusted and trashed, I should have known better, but won't make that mistake again. Lesson learned.

We had an evacuation plan, nothing elaborate, but we had a plan.

I can tell you for a fact that the NOLA police didn't have one case of bottled water for emergency supplies. NOLA like most cities got millions after 9/11, that money "disappeared"

We evacuated 750 people from those two shows on chartered flights, and by car, a day or two before because we watched the weather and had a plan.

You have the best job in the world. Just enough headache to keep you busy but you really have to know your job and know enough about every aspect of specialty type construction, fabrication, rigging, safety, and logistics. Problem solving is the most fun, but I reckon that a lot of red tape gets in the way.

Glad you are alright Hugh. Sometimes it takes an incident or near accident like this(it reminds me of a recent near car accident I had) to reassess life and think how lucky we are to be alive. It no doubt indicates how steps can be taken to prevent this kind of thing happening again.....

Glad you're ok, Hugh.

Yes, Hugh, very glad to hear you are unscathed in this incident. I'm going to send a link to this thread to my Son in Law, who is a Project Manger/ Safety Engineer in Chemical Refineries.
Keep safe, that hard hat sounds like a great idea!!

Good time to buy a lottery ticket?

Stay safe, Hugh!

That's really scary Hugh! I'm relieved that you dodged the drill-bullet! Not long ago, they were remodeling my office building. Lots of workers on the interior, running cable, hanging new lights, working up in the ceiling, etc. Every time I walked past them or they were working around me, I could feel my shoulders shrug and the hair standing up on my neck, just waiting for something to drop. I finally convinced HR to let my team work from home until the work was complete in our area.

I've actually seen that twice. It's worth watching more than once just for the story line but I also greatly enjoyed the detail in the shots. The backgrounds are filled with little things to look at, the texture of wood, peeling paint, shadows, etc. Very much enjoyed that movie.

VERY glad that the drill missed you...

angela

You're head is pretty hard Hugh, you would have been just fine, might have even sharpened the bit a little.

Glad you're OK!

i have witnessed a few deaths on film sets. All in Vancouver.
I have also seen Production Managers freak out about the loss of production time, due to having to clean up the mess.

My wife is permanently disabled, due to a generator operator's haste.
i.e. : too lazy/tired/stupid to hook up the generator grounding rod.

My friend, I am pleased to see you are not dead.

What did your boss(D.R.) have to say about it?

Glad to hear you are okay Hugh.

I don't think a hard hat would have helped.

At the steel mill I worked at in 1979 somebody accidentally drooped a tool from the top of a three story coke oven.

Hit the door cleaner on the head standing just below, he was wearing a hard hat and other safety equipment, it didn't save him.

Served as a story to scare us new guys to be careful, all the time and not just some of the time.

Where was the "safety steward", or is that your job too?

I'm the Safety guy, but had only been on set a few moments. I have a dozen TV shows in Los Angeles, I can't be on all of them at once. The 1st Assistant Director is responsible for safety on the set, but in reality that doesn't happen for small details.

Like Jr., my first thought was TOOL LANYARD! As Safety Guy, do you have the authority to require they be used? That could have ended badly. Glad you're OK.

:D good one.

Glad it missed you, Hugh.

Yep, I'm going to be working on tool lanyards, and a policy for not working under people up high on Monday. Too many people doing too many things with too little time.

I just googled tool lanyards, they're dirt cheap.

Hugh, surprised you couldn't see that coming with that nice transit of yours... ;)

Glad you have this figured out. This is the right approach to safety.

Yes, red DANGER barricade tape is even cheaper than tool lanyards. Good policy, IMHO.

In the long run tool lanyards are cheaper as there is less time lost and fewer damaged tools.
Win-win

Best
Les

I was thinking the same thing. Seems like anything that could come down should be tethered.

Mentioning falling objects made me think of this video from a couple of days ago. THAT was a close one!

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/vHHePSpIk3c" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Your industry is not OSHA regulated? That was a serious near miss and is reportable.

Whew! Makes one think, just like that could be game over. I'm quite surprised that union doesn't run a tighter ship. Someone is responsible. Construction trade unions used to be quite strict from equip. operators to carpenter, plumbing, electrical.

I've throttled back big time on jobs and really infuriated on what's happened though in the building trades. Since the lack of jobs, the union guys have invaded in the private sector and non-union projects. No one heeds safety, no union supv. its a free for all at job sites. The illegal alien workers have also mixed in and often chaos. Nobody cares anymore including the trade unions. I hate them all. They only care about extortion dues.

Had a project I walked away from. Get this.... a G.C. was having HIS own new home built. I bid the framing job but was too high. He ended up hiring a Mexican illegal crew. They messed up everything, from walls not square or plumb and the worst.... the second floor elevation was off!

The builder / owner finds out and decides to call me and help out. I agreed and straightened out some of the inside walls and build the stairs. But he kept the Mexicans on board and had them frame rafters, sheath and shingle the roof. They destroyed and burned out their compressor and then plugged into mine. I was borderline OK in allowing them to do so. Next, they borrow some of my tools and the end of one day, loaded their van up with my tools! Good thing I took a break at that moment and caught them.

But the last straw was when I was cutting in the basement lower level stairs three floors below, these clowns just kept on working on the roof directly above. I repeatedly told them to move elsewhere and work on the other side of the dwellings roof. They just didn't get it and later on a long length of 2 x 6 fell within inches of me. I blew the stack, packed up and phoned the G.C..

Azzholes builders deserve a crappy built America. Its drives me absolutely crazy to see the millionaires having multi million dollar homes built by illegals and they are schit built!

you can get killed walking your doggie!