a fella I grew up with and worked with died this past weekend
 

Crushed by a roll of paper:(.

Attachment compliments of savannahnow.com. I would put link up but it pops up a bunch of stuff that interferes with reading through the article.

Life is short. Try to enjoy every minute:).

Sometimes life can be too long.

Oh yeah, life goes on,
long after the thrill of living is gone.

Life can't go long enough.. Too early. Sorry to hear. It sucks I know. :(

Since most people don't really care for their jobs, I'm always saddened when I hear of someone who died at work. Giving your life to your job should never be that literal.

Sorry to hear about your long-time acquaintance. Thoughts and prayers to his friends, family and loved ones. Very tough thing to deal with.

I work as a subcontractor at that mill. Sad when this happens.

Damn. Sorry.

Sorry to hear about the demise of a friend. It always seems to bring the issue closer with a friend I find.

Does the surviving direct family of a member that is in a work related accident resulting in death there receive any lump sum compensation? Used to be 300-350 thousand here in Nova Scotia.

This from workmens compensation. May be higher now with inflation for all I know. This applies even if the employee was totally negligent.

Sorry for the loss of your friend Jim.

Stay away from those paper rolls my friend!

Sorry to hear that, Jim. :(

What a way to go.

And you don't know when it's your time. That's been my father's mantra since my mom's passing. Not to the point of recklessness or anything. ;) I have taken that to heart a bit myself.

I'm sorry for your loss.

Is there is a more detailed writeup I'd be curious to see... or if you care to share more details - I also work in an industrial environment (power plant) and I feel that stories like this should be shared (maybe not immediately)- as a way to combat the 'it wont happen to me' attitude that you get from working around this stuff every day. I'm sorry if I'm coming off as too brusque or invasive.

If I may - a few years ago (I had just started as an EE at a coal plant) and an electrician was scheduled to do work up near some 20,000v transformers. The transformers had been tagged out, that tagout was reviewed by the operators and the Engineer who ordered the work. Drawings were correct and up to date, the electrician did his own ZEV (zero energy verification) as did his supervisor... suffice to say, the electrician found an exposed conductor of a nearby, untagged 20kV transformer - He lost his leg and was out of work for more than a year.
The station learned a lot that day. We could lawyer the crap out of "who was responsible" and "why was X not checked" and whatever. The fact is that one electrician didnt get to go home for a few months and the whole station took a pause to remember that what we do everyday is inherently not safe, no matter how many OSHA-approved best practices we throw at it.

Keep fighting the good fight.

-John

About six years ago, a close colleague and friend of mine roughly my age died from Hep C. We had taught in the same dept for years, gone to the same graduate school and shared a lot of ideas in common. It changed me. I had known of course, in the abstract, that death was always possible, but his death left an icon on my decisionmaking screen. I was more willing to spend money to satisfy some goal I had, and more likely to decide to do something sooner rather than later. My decision to retire early was probably effected by Dave's demise. I think that change was good. It would probably have happened anyway at some point, but his death was the catalyst.

I did find out a little more. Seems he was working on an paper roll elevator limit switch and somehow was crushed by the elevator with a roll on it. At our mill I just put one of these devices in and it is capable of handling 10,000# paper rolls. Anyway it sounds like elevator came down on him where he was trapped and conscious for three hours while they worked to get it off of him. He died within a couple minutes of getting freed.

For anyone that has never been in a high speed production facility there are dangers lurking everywhere you turn. One of the paper machines here is capable of making a sheet of paper 132" wide and it can run at speeds up to a mile a minute. You don't want to get caught up in that.