Construction Accident

Monday was another beautiful fall day, with plenty of smoke in the air to keep the eyes watering. It was three in the afternoon and I was restless and decided to take my camera and head to a construction site to get some pictures. While I was there I noticed something that struck fear in my heart; a piece of rolling concrete was headed toward some men. Let’s back up to the beginning and set the scene.

The accident was going to happen over where they were moving soil up to the truck. The small backhoe was digging square spaces and doing clean up. The backhoe in the middle was moving the soil up to the one farther up who was loading the truck. The soil presented no problem, but it was those round pieces of concrete that had to be moved up along with the soil that presented a threat to the four men below.

The four men who are trimming the sides of the bank are working their way over to a point where they will be working together, directly under the person moving the concrete cylinders up to the person above.

“Ok, you are next.” The operator gets the cylinder in his bucket and places it up the slope as far as he can reach and dumps it and swings around to get another. As he works on the next, the first one begins to slide and then starts to roll down the bank, directly above the four men. They had no idea what was going to roll over the top of the wall they were working on and drop on top of them. One man was looking up as the cylinder rolled over the top and dropped, hitting him on the top of the head and rolling down his back, knocking him down. If he had been just six inches farther out from the bank it would have crushed him.

They helped the worker up, but he was clearly having trouble walking on his own.

While the drama unfolds below the backhoe operator, apparently unaware of what has happened, keeps moving concrete cylinders up the bank.

There is the broken ladder and the cylinder that rolled down from above. Notice his hat lying on the ground by the wall.

“You sure are heavy, but we will get you out of here.”

About this time they called the backhoe operator up and sent him out to the street. When I left a little later I found him out on the street, just a short distance from the ambulance, yelling into his cell phone. I have a feeling he won’t be back to work at this location.

I left with a strange feeling, because I knew they knew I had filmed the accident.