The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is a regulatory agency of the United States Department of Labor that strives to ensure the well-being of workers across various industries, such as construction, agriculture, and so on.
However, since OSHA has jurisdiction overapproximately 7 million worksites, the agency’s employees regularly encounter a very diverse array of situations. So when Reddit userVesper4255asked them tosharethe craziest and most memorable stories, there were plenty to go around.
This post may includeaffiliate links.
This one time there was a deadly pandemic that killed millions worldwide, we had refrigerated body trucks in the streets, hospital was chronically collapse-level overwhelmed. The personal protective equipment they gave us for infection control? Plastic garbage bags to wear over our scrubs. Face masks designed for 30 minutes of effective use were worn for days. 115,000 of us died.
Not an inspector, but i work in the food industry and there are these big packaging robots in our factory. These things have gates that close of every part of the machine so that no one can access anything while it’s active and it shuts down as soon as a gate is opened.Well here’s the thing. It takes a while to reboot the machine when it shuts down and the operators don’t like that. So in some MacGyver way they managed to rig the sensor in not noticing that the door is opened if they need to fix something or get some cardboard unstuck.Last year a guy climbed into that machine to fix something and while he thought he was safe asked the new guy to press the start button on the machine to test if the fix had worked. The machine however didn’t shut down because the gate had opened and just immediately restarted. The guy inside only had his ribs crushed because the new guy luckily had the reaction speed to press the emergency shutdown button in time.Safe to say we’ve been in safety meetings and giving safety training for over a year now…
My old boss fell into an open pit while showing the inspectors around. Good times.
I started work in a little factory. It’s been operating for almost 30 years. The day I started, I noticed there were zero fire extinguishers anywhere. None. Anywhere. In the entire building. Upon further inspection, there were no smoke detectors or fire alarms. I started asking around, and the employees told me they hadn’t ever had a fire drill. Ever. There wasn’t even a plan. The welders told me there’s fires in the building all the time, and they just scramble to put them out with whatever is on hand. For some reason, no one thought twice about it. They didn’t think about it ever. It was just cool.I asked the safety guy. Like the manager dude that has “health and safety” on his badge. He lied to me and said that the plant was “grandfathered in to not having fire measures.”Needless to say I quit. I had a conversation with a friend who works with an OSHA compliance agency, and he alerted whatever authority could take action. My friend’s employer actually ended up gaining a big contract from that factory to bring them up to code. The factory was ordered to do so under penalty.
Non American OSHA:You people know that meme about the forklift carrying its younglings so they can reach the top of the shelf?Exactly that but IRL with a 6ton and a 1.5 ton forklift in a building with 1t/m2 floor carrying capacity and about 1 ton of flammable s**t as cargo.I’m no longer a safety inspector to keep my own health and sanity
We had a volunteer (non profit business) with 20 years experience in building trades and another 5 as a volunteer, fire a nail gun through his hand while demonstrating to our clients how a nail gun has a mechanism to stop it from firing unless it was pressed up against something….
I’m not an OSHA inspector, but if my workplace had an inspection, it would go down badly.Guy working a large drillpress at high feed with barely enough emulsion and no ventilation in a 4×4m box. Those fumes fry ur lungs and brain.India styled cable management hanging atop and from a single pole hangar crane with a max lifting load of 1t, lifting 3t while bending about 10%.Rod polishing on lathes with hands in gloves and long sleeve hoodies.Hydraulic oil everywhere, usually collected if not spilled in large barells, then burned during winter in a shady oil furnace that catches fire once a week.Chemicals in used water bottles with no labeling all around the place.Everything that you touch zaps you most of the time, especially tap water while washing hands. We once took a tester and turned out everything in that place, even the hangar itself, had 35v running through at all times. Every single thing. Even the tap water.Tens of unreported accidents a year. There was an employee who blew himself up a few years back. He was doing DIY pyrotechnics and smoked next to a powder mill. Explosives squad was called in, and they found 200kg of explosoves in his closet at work.
I’ll share late, because I have a good one. I used to work in a factory that was insanely breaking the rules to “speed up the process” of making the materials they sell. Here’s a couple:1: Acid line running through the inside of the building from source to vats dripped in a doorway when running.2: a catwalk above gigantic vats of hot nitric acid with no railing that workers went on to dump reagents into the vats, better just wear your respirator! (They never did)3: the chemical procedure causes a nox gas to spew out and if something goes wrong the entire building can fill with this hazardous gas and you can even see it in the office area spewing across the ceiling; a thick orange/red cloud. No one except me ever left the building.Someone was fired for smoking pot on the job (almost half of them did) and they notified OSHA of all the violations they could think of. OSHA came in and left without talking to anyone except higher up office staff. A couple days later we had to “sign” a change agreement to “be up to code.” The sheet literally had 8 things written on it with a title at the top and crew name signature lists at the bottom. None of it included the most dangerous issues and that was the last I heard of any of it. I left that job shortly after.
Not OSHA but UK equivalent surveying pressure equipment under PSSR and HSE.This was at an older factory that we’d just taken the insurance contract over. The stupidest thing I’ve seen was on a steam boiler that had recently had the burner swapped out for a newer model. Said newer model hadn’t been set up correctly in relation to the operating pressure and kept lifting the safety valves. The boiler was rated to 14barg, operated at around 10.5barg, and the valves lifted around 11barg.Any normal engineer would think to tune the burner properly or get the original unit refitted. What they decided to do, in their infinite wisdom, was to blank off the safety valve outlets, meaning they couldn’t discharge to atmosphere. Effectively, they had created a massive bomb.I only found it after seeing it go through a burn cycle, and watching the pressure shoot past the safety valve opening pressure and hit the SWL (even after the burner had stopped firing) without hearing the thunder and racketing of the safeties lifting. That was a fun phone call to our technical superintendent, and one of the longer reports I’d written (though not the longest).
I’m not an OSHA inspector but I am a lawyer that works for a very large company. We had a department team building playing laser tag on company premises and 4(!) separate attorneys ended up tripping over decor that had been put up and spraining their ankles. A week later the company president came to meet with the general counsel and saw a bunch of attorneys with matching boots on and freaked out.
Not an inspector, but at my previous job we’d had a bad accident in the factory (someone died) so OSHA came through for an inspection. The bosses had taken us all and said hey make sure you follow all the rules to the letter and be smart about this. I was walking the factory floor when the inspector showed up. He held up his clipboard and clicked a pen and said “ok let’s see what we have here”, and looked immediately to his left where a guy was pouring paint thinner into a 55 gallon drum from a 5 gallon bucket while having a lit cigarette in his mouth. I knew it was going to be good when the OSHA inspector had a wtf look on his face 5 seconds into the inspection.
I worked as an art fabricator. A client wanted us to spray oil paint with automotive sprayguns. The paint pigments are full of cadmium, cobalt, titanium, etc and it literally said “do not spray” on the side of the paint tubes.The safety “precautions”? My boss gave us dust masks and stuck a fan in the window.I was in my early 20s and just thankful to be out of food service. But the client showed up and flipped out when he saw how little protection we were given. Thankfully he made sure we all had proper respirators, tyvek suits, and colossal automotive down-draft air cleaners….3 months into the project.Anyway…be nice to your wait staff bc heavy metal poisoning was preferable to getting screamed at over a burger.
Not OSHA cause not USA, but internal company safety inspector:Guy broke a few bones after doing unsafe stuff without proper equipment.Guy and his buddies knew the guy would get treated at the plant but would get a written warning for not following protocol (enought of those result in termination). So they hid the guy in a shipping container until end of shift (something like 3 hours) and carried him to the free hospital afterwards.
See Also on Bored Panda
2m deep trench with no shoringWorking at heights and on construction sites wearing flipflopsWorking on live electrical wires with no electric insulationUsed condoms in the middle of the factoryAnd so on and so forth
Guys working in a 25 foot deep trench with oil contamination all around them with no ventilation and shoring that didn’t reach the top of grade.
I work in underground mining in Western Australia, some of the s**t I have seen is unreal.My favourite is a guy stripping off his hard hat, overalls, gumboots and safety glasses to jump into a 1000L IBC full of the saltiest water known to mankind to cool himself down. This was a severely overweight guy as well.I’m confident he no longer has a job in mining after the incident.
Not as an OSHA inspector but I’ll share my story.At the time I was working for a testing laboratory tat tested products for safety in potentially explosive atmospheres where flammable gas mixtures might be present. This customer was relatively new and a bit over their head so they had a number of non conformances. Which required repeat testing.The proper way to test products like this is to build a representative circuit and run the 2 ends of that circuit into a small chamber that is filled with an explosive gas mixture. There are rotating disks inside the chamber with small filaments that simulate the opening and closing of a switch over and over again. If the circuit has enough energy you get an explosion that is vented outside.This one customer was attempting to replicate the failure I advised them of and then work on a solution. The customer called me and said he couldn’t replicate the failure. I asked him how he was testing it and he said his other engineer was out in the parking lot and had a large trash bag with the product inside of the bag and they were pumping hydrogen inside the bag while the engineer was reaching into the bag activating the stitches. I told my customer to immediately go outside and tell his engineer to stop as he had created a hydrogen bomb that could explode. He protested a bit not believing me and wanted me to explain why what he was doing was dangerous.
Summer Student, 1984, Mississauga Stamping Plant, Electric Arc Welders. My partner inserted the part into the welder, added 3 metal plates, pushed 2 buttons and “ZAP” 8 Electrodes welded the pieces together. Repeat, 1000 parts per day.The problem was that the plumbing hoses providing water to cool the Electrodes were leaking everywhere. Water was running all over the welder. My partner Nick was standing in a puddle of water 2 inches deep, on a concrete floor operating and Electric Arc Welder. Sparks were flying everywhere.I repeatedly tried to get Nick to stop working and contact the supervisor. I told him that “When He Got Electrocuted” I would refuse to perform Mouth to Mouth Resuscitation. Finally he stopped work and contacted maintenance.
Health and safety inspector here.There are so many good stories. A septic tank made out of metal Amaco signs (metal in earth = corrosion). The septic guy was jumping on the top of the signs, and they started crumbling… so he got a poop bath.Owner of a company crawling inside a 90 foot long oven to look at grease build up, in front of the whole crew, immediately after a safety meeting with said owner and crew discussing how this is a confined space and it cannot be safely entered without safeguard in place.Finger pie when we had an amputation and a temp lost their ring finger dye to an irising hopper… we got to the pie before it made it to the oven.What else… forklift undocking where the truck left with our operator and forklift still inside. Got 1/2 mile before the forklift and operator fell out the back onto the city road.Guy who got covered in hypochlorite, ph 14 stuff, all in his eyes and face and all over his body, and miraculously escaped with a 2x2 inch patch of discoloration instead of having his eyes melted out of his head.So many fun stories.
I worked at an onion warehouse place in 2017, a guy came methed out to work, everyone knew he’d do it often but no one said anything cuz he still did his job. That’s until we were all at lunch and came back him running literally on the onion belt on full speed like a treadmill and just running without a care as if he was working out at home. We slowed it down, turned it off & fired his a*s. Then we had to sanitize the whole belt for HOURS. By we, i mean my sister and I cuz the sanitation crew was apparently also high.
Does food standards count? Cos you have all the general mankiness, infestations and whopping hygiene breaches. But the ones that really stick out to me in the year and a half I was tangentially involved were the ones where they just carried on as if nothing was wrong for something that normal folks just stared open mouthed at. Two ones I particularly recall:1) a mince mixing machine that had black machine oil dripping down in directly into the mixing bowl.2) the shelf with bottles that went: mayo, barbecue sauce, bleach, ketchup…
Oh hey, a question that actually applies to me! Too bad I got here a bit late.The worst thing i’ve seen on this job is someone who was digging a trench, with completely unsecured shoring, about 10 feet deep, with wall width of approximately 4 feet, part of it being UNDER concrete. Trenching is one of the #1 causes of workplace fatalities. If we get a call of trenching with no shoring, we get sent out IMMEDIATELY, one of 4 things that get us sent out like that.The old guy that’s been in the office 15 some years looked at it, said it was the worst trenching he’s ever seen. and he very often does trenching. it was to the point he was surprised it didn’t collapse.That and one time a dude actually was in a trench collapse. He was buried up to his neck, and while he was trying to be rescued, his wife cam and told him that she was pregnant! Luckily the dude survived. News put it as a real heartwarming moment, but the whole situations was super easily avoidable.Remember folks, OSHA has very few inspectors. We likely won’t go to a place unless we receive a complaint, but if we receive a valid formal online complaint from a current employee and they request an inspection, we’re required to go out on it.
I’m a safety guy for a construction company, craziest thing I saw was a guy dislocated both his shoulders while pushing a mobile scaffold. It had too much momentum, and when he tried stopping it, both arms popped out of the socket. We are talking about hundreds of pounds of steel going a few inches further than he wanted.The funniest thing I saw was a guy walking right into a beam. Somehow, I was the only person to see him do it. Everyone else just saw him getting up off the floor after I lost my s**t laughing.
Mandatory not inspector, but I’ve spent some time the last few months reading safety regulations. So having just familarised with the regulations on working at heights I see on my way home two guys on the roof of the building they’re constructing next door assembling a non sufficient railing along the edge of the roof without any additional safety measures.Only half the building had a roof on at the time and they were standing at the end of the part that had a roof. So in one direction they had the insufficient railing they were assembling, which may or may not have stopped a fall, and in the other they had a 7-8m drop without anything to protect them (where they hadn’t placed the roof yet). It wasn’t a flat roof either, some rain and it would have been really, really dangerous.It was just interesting walking home, seeing this and thinking “I just read about this, that is definitely not allowed”.
Not an inspector, but if you are have a look at basically any tree work site (Ive worked for several arborist gigs and 100% of them have had something).I’ve seen things as simple as refusing to wear seatbelts or not quite up to code equipment, or working in very rapidly fading light. All the way to “non-safety” around high voltage lines (one of which caused damage shall we say to more than one person luckily no deaths), outright refusal to wear critical safety gear, or extremely lucky “I can’t believe nobody’s dead” instances.There are times when the entire month/year is just one long OSHA violation. Granted “not all tree work companies” and I have seen safe ones, I’m just not lucky enough to have worked at one that is willing to slow down for .000002 seconds in the name of profits. In fact I’ve been yelled at on numerous occasions to just hurry up and do “X” because we have 3 more jobs to do.
I was inspecting a salad bar and saw rat st at the bottom. I then went to the back room where and saw something horrific.A guy sitting at his desk doing payrole nude. As I leaned in to tell him about the rat st salad toppings, I almost had a heart attack at the sight before my virgin eyes that no human should ever whitness…..In the back ground, I noticed he was NOT SEEDING HIS TORRENTS!
Modal closeAdd Your Answer!Not your original work?Add sourcePublish
Modal close
Add Your Answer!Not your original work?Add sourcePublish
Not your original work?Add sourcePublish
Not your original work?Add source
Modal closeModal closeOoops! Your image is too large, maximum file size is 8 MB.UploadUploadError occurred when generating embed. Please check link and try again.TwitterRender conversationUse html versionGenerate not embedded versionAdd watermarkInstagramShow Image OnlyHide CaptionCropAdd watermarkFacebookShow Image OnlyAdd watermarkChangeSourceTitleUpdateAdd Image
Modal closeOoops! Your image is too large, maximum file size is 8 MB.UploadUploadError occurred when generating embed. Please check link and try again.TwitterRender conversationUse html versionGenerate not embedded versionAdd watermarkInstagramShow Image OnlyHide CaptionCropAdd watermarkFacebookShow Image OnlyAdd watermarkChangeSourceTitleUpdateAdd Image
Ooops! Your image is too large, maximum file size is 8 MB.
Upload
UploadError occurred when generating embed. Please check link and try again.TwitterRender conversationUse html versionGenerate not embedded versionAdd watermarkInstagramShow Image OnlyHide CaptionCropAdd watermarkFacebookShow Image OnlyAdd watermark
Error occurred when generating embed. Please check link and try again.
TwitterRender conversationUse html versionGenerate not embedded versionAdd watermark
InstagramShow Image OnlyHide CaptionCropAdd watermark
FacebookShow Image OnlyAdd watermark
ChangeSourceTitle
You May Like21 Historical Professions That Were Incredibly Popular In The Past But Have Died Out By NowDenis Krotovas“He’s Blind Now”: 30 Times People Played With Fire And Got BurnedGabija Palšytė“What’s Something That’s Hot In Books But Repulsive In Real Life?” (40 Answers)Ilona Baliūnaitė
Denis Krotovas
Gabija Palšytė
Ilona Baliūnaitė
Curiosities
