News Worker dies in Russian sport stadium roof collapse.

[Notebook]

Like most folk, I think I took safety at work seriously. With my job it was risk of electrocution, which endangers other people as well. It always seemed such a stupid way to die.

This just beggars belief.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-51331181

A safety? cage from a crane.

What were they thinking?

 

[Urwumpe]

Damn, that worked as designed.

The weight of the roof pulled the other parts of the supporting ring inward and pushed the part already cut from the roof outward.

 

[Artlav]

The plan was to cut it off from the basket.

In practice, he was told to get out of the basket for now.

Later, he was told to walk to the next one, so he had to attach the harness to the railing.
So he did made it to the basket when things started collapsing, but was dragged back down by the harness.

Bad decisions combined into a disaster, corners were cut by the decision makers sitting down in safety.

 

[Notebook]

It just gets worse, didn't see the safety harness.

Too late for him and his family and friends.

Why not explosive demolition?

This can't be common practice?

 

[Notebook]

Had a look at fatal industrial accidents in the UK and its way above what I thought.

From UK Health and Safety Executive.
https://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/pdf/fatalinjuries.pdf

As you would expect construction and farming have the greatest.

Strange, when I was an apprentice and went through the local Technical College, safety was stressed.

Thought things had improved.

 

[Urwumpe]

Well, some years ago, a worker died at Volkswagen Kassel in the most avoidable way. He worked inside the cage of a robot and was crushed when the robot started working at maximum speed. As the investigators found out, he configured the robot himself to operate at higher speed while he was working on it.

All safety measures and layers of protection - completeley bypassed and even his coworker outside the cage unaware of his plans.

 

[Notebook]

Guilty of the same thing eventually, so I am being hypocritical.

One machine I worked on, a Rank-Cintel MKII Telecine machine had safety interlocks that stopped the machine if the access door was opened.
In operation dirt would get into the optical path, so these needed to be cleaned by "air-dusters" little compressed air cans.
The 35mm machines were bigger than me and had several parts that could easily take your fingers off.

Some years later worked with a robotic video-cassette transmission system that froze the robot if the tape loading door opened. Guess what happened there.
[ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQ-JavZ_sWM"]Flexi dvcam in action - YouTube[/ame]

Glad to say Sony came out with a system that had the robot internal and all access was through a "Night Safe" where you dropped the cassette in. Bit like Ghost Busters.

 

[Artlav]

Those pesky safety regulations are so inconvenient, frustrating and always get in the way...
No one ever believes it would be him making the news. I'll get lucky this time. It won't move when my finger is in the way. The building won't fold after this support is cut.

So far i haven't seen any comments on why the demolition was carried out this way instead of a dozen cutting charges.

 

[Notebook]

Yes, the idiocy I did was a combination of "We always do it that way" and "its not too bad if it goes wrong".

Nothing changes unfortunately.

 

[Urwumpe]

Luckily, we decided to accept a rather sensitive optical intrusion detection system for our cocktail mixing robot.

Bad: Robot paused often for a few seconds for safety when many people gathered around the robot and the shadows confused the view processor. task planning software did not accept failure and kept on trying to mix the same cocktail until finally finishing all steps successfull.

Good: Nobody got killed by a cocktail glass accelerated to tennis ball speeds or by being hit by a 500 kg robot. Giving a customer a finished cocktail worked fine despite violating all safety rules for robots.


As I heard a few days ago, the same doctorand who supervised the cocktail robot task, is still there after far over ten years. Looks like we had a too great time developing it.