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is archaeology that dangerous-big bad developers machine about to hurt me, must save the babies. To my mind its the slow attrition on pension, knees, lungs and skin where all the taking fellow archaeologists/curators to court should be. I think we would find out how common our inadequacies were.
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kevin wooldridge Wrote:If someone is incapable of conceiving safety as an integral part of their job, they are clearly incapable of being on site and as supervisor you need to take responsibility for getting them out of the danger zone. Don't see what's so difficult about that or even what there is to get fed up with. Its just part of the job....
I would suggest you talk to your trade union and the company safety committee and the management about implementing a scheme where only safety competent staff are allowed on site.....that's just day to day trade union and saftey committee business after all.
Speaking from non-archaeological experience, there is often no way until the muppetry is incipient or already in progress to see if the person in question is incapable of common sense. My brother-in-law has two weeks in Bermuda, a twice-yearly trip to Hawaii and various other holidays, all paid for by the stupidity of people. He's an engineer and expert witness of the 'No, the machine is within the approved parameters, and would not have ripped that man's arms off if he hadn't bypassed the safety guard to retrieve his eyeglasses from the cooling fan' sort of thing. It is impossible to look at someone and know that they are total idiots until they prove it to you in a way that you could never, ever forsee. Ever.
Prime practitioner of headology, with a side order of melting glass with a stern glare.
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Part of the problem is that a (hopefully small) proportion of people who do archaeology at Uni and then wind up in the merry world of motorway/pipeline/skyscraper construction only did that course in the first place through some sort of strange romantic view of the past (or because they couldn't think of anything else and thought it would be an easy course) - hence they're sadly suited to an environment similar to that which they would have arrived in if they'd just left school at 16 and gone straight to the nearest building firm...sad but true, there are always going to be a selection of space cadets and people only really suited to the cloistered realms of academia hiding under all that muddy PPE, and they do tend to be the ones who get run over and hit by machine buckets, often because they don't seem to have understood the consequences, people wind up looking like road-kill very similar (but larger and with high-vis yellow bits) to that hedgehog you flattened on the way to work this morning [have some inside knowledge here, having managed to stick my arm in a conveyor belt years back :face-crying:]
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BAJR Moderators know everything
You muppet!
Serious point though is responsibility...
Management has a responsibility to provide the correct training...
Employee has a responsibility to listen
Management has a responsibility to monitor the situations
Employee also has that responsibility
Management should have a responsibility to ensure that employee continues to remember the training and is given further training if new dangers appear or if a refresher talk is appropriate
Employee has a responsibility to listen and act accordingly...
ANY breakdown in that chain results in arm ripping or perhaps a spade through a cable or a pickaxe in the helmet of a workmate or a collapsed section or... etc and the responsibility chain will be followed back to see where it failed. WE have all been guilty - tis human nature, the trick is to pass the ball of blame on backwards and forwards... stay alert and sharp, after all if it is you fault and your responsibility then you are the one who will wind up in court or have to live with the results
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The BAJR is wise beyond his years (that's pretty durn wise!).
A sense of personal responsibility goes a long way, either as a supervisor or as an employee.
Prime practitioner of headology, with a side order of melting glass with a stern glare.
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7th July 2010, 12:35 PM
(This post was last modified: 7th July 2010, 12:36 PM by Dinosaur.)
The problem with some people seems to be getting them to realise that the big yellow thing with tracks or 8 foot high wheels will, in fact cause them significant harm without slowing down or being inconvenienced in the slightest......I'm not sure induction videos are graphic enough, in the same way that most motorists seem to be blithely unaware that decapitation is, in fact, quite a common outcome of RTAs, just euphamistically described as 'serious head injuries' on the local news....
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dino
I know of one twit who was hit by a bucket, knocked out but lived to tell the tale, but thats it on the personal experience of how dangerous this archaeology game in 25 years and apart from there must be some attrition from outside manual work that has never been quantified for archaeologists and should be. 40000 women die from breast cancer a year, about 3000 people die on the roads. i have been to a few archaeologist funerals but they mostly died after coming out of the pub and were at about 5 score and a bit. Yes archaeologists have died but i recon that the vast majority are still alive and there really needs to be a cull.
Whats possibly more interesting is that the muppets don?t get annihilated. What we need is a study. I think they should be blindfolded, tied together and made to walk across a firing range gunned by nationalist curators.
thinking about it that would be too easy for the muppets.
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brilliant!! Nice 1 unit
[INDENT]Shiny assed county mounty, office lurker, coffee junkie and facebook scanner[/INDENT]
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Looks like we're doing our job then. Next time you're in the offices of e.g. a big quarry company try reading all the 'fatal accident' notices they tend to send round and pin up on their notice boards, then you'll get some idea how many people die (often under fairly extreme circumstances) in places like quarries and construction sites....strange, seems to be that most archaeologists spend a lot of their time in places like that....was slightly inconvenienced one day in 1999 by a machine managing to drop a 9m sheet piling on someone's head right outside my portacabin door....amazingly not one of my crew, a passing construction guy instead, although I had to give some of my crew the rest of the day off, all the blood and screaming seems to affect some people that way, and then the police turned up and taped off the cabin anyway so we couldn't get any tools out. Land archaeology in this country has had amazingly few fatalities over the years (and long may it continue), but thats more by luck than design methinks....
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Dino's right. I'm agreeing with all sorts of people who I don't normally. What's wrong with me? Should I go home for a lie down in a dark room?