Quote:
Originally Posted by pennsiveguy
Once a month or so you'd hear the telltale "roar" of a unit of lumber getting dropped or tipped over and coming undone. You just hoped you didn't see blood oozing out from under it when you found it. In the lumber and construction business you'd usually expect to have a couple guys die on the job every year; it's gotten better lately, I think. We had some guys who had been in some nasty accidents. One guy was unloading a box car full of 2x4 studs and about a thousand of them tipped over and buried him. His face was crooked and full of titanium.
The trickiest maneuver we had to do was loading and unloading 60' laminated beams. They're packed flat, not on edge, so they sag. A lot. You'd have to get the middle - once you found it - at least 15' off the ground before the ends were off the ground. And then you had to maneuver through aisles that were only 20-30' wide. So you drove down one aisle, and the ends of the beams were traveling down the aisles on either side. And this is over unpaved ground, which was often snowy or muddy and always uneven. There were only a few of us who could do it consistently. Nobody else ever wanted to even try it. And if you dumped a pack of those, have fun wrestling 20 or 30 beams that are 60' long and weigh around 3-400 pounds each. Not for the faint of heart.
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Similar experiences at a former employer. I was the Purchasing Supervisor and when the guy that worked in the tool crib was out of the office I would have to step in and unload trucks or containers. When we received flat carbon stock it was the same ordeal. Twenty foot sticks that had to be lifted from the center going inside a building with a 15' wide door. Forks way up, material sagging on both ends, then backing up the lift next to the building and carefully angling yourself inside with maybe 2" to spare. God I hated unloading the steel shipments. I was fortunate that I never hit or dropped anything. I had seen plenty of guys who are better forklift operators than I am, drop those loads.
I did watch one of our guys knock over a pallet that had 2 - 55 gallon drums of used hydraulic oil in the back of a box truck that belonged to our oil vendor. Even better, the guys that worked in the press department that pumped the oil into the drums failed to secure the lids. It was a fantastic mess.