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Former co-worker stories:
In 2002 I worked as a machine operator in a lumber processing facility. My shift started at 3:30 and I always arrived early to take inventory of the material that I would be processing that evening. Shortly after getting on the production floor I hear a blood curdling scream and see almost everyone running in the direction of the scream. All the machines stopped and the banshee-like screams continued. A woman wearing a loosely fitting t-shirt had reached over a rotating shaft to dislodge a boards being carried by a conveyor chain. The area that she reached over is where a sprocket was located. The sleeve of her shirt become entangled between the sprocket and chain. There was no e-stop located at this area. As the shirt was ripped off of her she was unable to get her arm out of it as it twisted around her eventually wrapping her entire right arm around the 8" diameter shaft up to her shoulder before someone could stop the machine. It literally shattered and forced every broken bone out of her skin as it rolled her arm into an 8" roll of what I can only describe as what the end of a tube of tooth paste looks like when you roll it to squeeze out the last the tooth paste. The rest of the evening at work was very quiet and somber. I still get chills thinking about seeing it. Needless to say, there was no saving her arm.
After starting a new position at a company that I worked for in 2010, one of the guys that I had become friends with over the first few months comes into my office one morning to wish me well and explains that he is retiring that very second. The story he explained was the he and his wife went on a motorcycle ride and on the way home stopped at a store to get a couple of bottles of water. After they got home he was emptying his saddle bags and found his bottle of water that he did not drink so he opened it chugged half the bottle. Two days later he awoke in the hospital. Apparently the bottling company, let's just say think of the largest soft drink company known to man, used a clear chemical to clean their tanks in their facility and somehow bottled quite a few bottles; this is what he drank. He explained that the same day that he "woke up" a rep from the company visited him in the hospital to make arrangements to settle out of court and to keep this as quiet as possible. He did not go as far as to mention the dollar amount that was offered but he did say that his house was paid off, they were buying a vacation home, his kids college was taken care of and he would never have to work again.
A different co-worker, at the same company mentioned above, went to lunch on his motorcycle. As he approached a busy intersection a motorist turned left in front of him as he traversed straight ahead. He explained that he had no time to react and knew he was going to hit the guy. Quickly thinking he jumped straight up off his bike during impact and managed to jump completely over the hood of the car, landed on his feet and ran out of the impact. His bike was demolished, the right fender of the car ate his bike and he walked away without a scratch. He did say that his heels hurt from the impact of the landing but literally jumped over the accident and ran it out unscathed.
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