Shake Hands With Danger (1980)

This is your focus leader. Adjust the focus until the picture is sharp. Now adjust the sound to a normal volume. I can check that gear in a minute. So don't touch anything. Okay. [Music] Hey, get down from there now. Hey, turn it over. What if it bumped that control by accident? You'd be mincemeat by now. What have I told you? You don't work on equipment when the engine's running. Well, I told him not to touch anything. All right. I guess I wasn't thinking. You weren't thinking. You mean you'll work on engines and machinery and not think of your own personal safety? Here. Shake hands with danger. Shake hands with danger. Need a guy who ought to know. I used to laugh at safety. Now they call me three-finger Joe. Shake hands with danger. Find it anywhere you choose. Be careless for a moment and spend a lifetime with the blues. Earth moving machines are designed for safety, but they're big enough to hide a man. Just about dead. You could have killed me. This mechanic is lucky he's able to complain. He should have protected himself by removing the key and putting a do not operate tag on the controls. Anytime you pick up a wrench, reach for a control, use a grease gun, grab a welding torch, or work on any machine while forgetting safety, you're shaking hands with danger. All right. Okay. Okay. All right. Now, you take the loader up behind the hill where they're working. Now, I'll drive up on the road and I'll meet you at the top. All right. Okay. Uh, but you know, Cliff, I never operated this model before. All right. All I have to do is back it up and then let it down nice and easy like you. You want me to do it? No. I I can handle there's no sweat there. We can we can take care of it. Okay. All right. I'll see you later. [Music] [Music] What this man didn't know was that the operator had left the lift lever in the raised position so the arms would rise automatically when the engine started. You all right? Yeah. Yeah, I'm all right. Sure. A qualified operator would have known better. The man shouldn't have tried to perform as an operator when he wasn't one. All right. Well, you were kid when you said you didn't know how to run that thing. Chuck Hamlin is no beginner. Before he begins changing an O-ring on an excavator boom, he checks. Oil temperature down, engine off, bucket grounded, hydraulic lock engaged. Okay, he'll have that O-ring installed in minutes. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Laughter] Shake hands with danger. Take a chance that you won't fall. You'll save yourself a minute, but you may damn well lose it all. [Music] Wherever possible, the stick should be extended and the boom lowered so the work can be done at ground level. Finding that impossible, the next man used the service truck as a safe work platform. Climbing with tools can create a hazard. Use the steps and the grab irons. Keep at least three points of contact, two feet and one hand unencumbered. any shortcuts and you're inviting injury. In fact, taking shortcuts is often a quick road to trouble. For example, consider what happened to Harry Sanders. Harry has come to work with a problem. His son is having a football injured knee operated on this morning. Harry wants to finish this job and take a couple hours off to visit his son. The operator has complained that the scraper is shifting too slow and the controls are sluggish. In a hurry, Harry pulls only one axle. The service manual says to pull both axles and disconnect steering, but Harry knows with one axle removed and the differential unlocked, the machine shouldn't move. He's taken this shortcut before. While waiting for the operator to return, Harry starts the machine in order to judge the problem. While he waits for the engine to warm, Harry's thoughts drift to worries about his son. The accelerator feels stiff. So then he checks the feel of the service brakes. His attention is divided. While thinking about his son, his hands and feet go through motions he believes have become automatic. In this absent-minded state, he unconsciously starts to steer, jams his foot on the differential lock, and the machine takes off. Lucky for the stunned operator, the machine stops itself. Harry is only bruised, but in a crowded area, he could have killed someone because he ignored safe procedure to save a few minutes worth. Now, most people have days when they come to work with worries, hangovers, or distractions. Those are times for being doubly cautious. When the body is on the job, but the mind is elsewhere, it's danger time. Glenn Greenwood was victim of another kind of mental hazard. Ego. How you doing, hot shot? It's stuck in there tight. Did you get that pen driver? No, but I got this drift. Just give it a whack. Glenn knows the risk of striking hard against badly chipped metal, but he's wearing safety glasses and there's a macho thing involved here. Glenn doesn't want his friend to sneer at him for being overly cautious. So Glenn shakes hands with danger. [Music] Maybe his friend would have laughed if Glenn had insisted upon playing it safe, but he sure as hell isn't laughing now. With tools, the time to make sure you have a safe ending is before you start using them. They should be the right tools for the job and in safe condition. If Glenn's friend had ground off that mushroomed face, taken care of the tools he uses, he could have prevented that accident. Some oldtimers think accidents happen only to greenhorns. Hey Ed, I got a bracket on. You want to come take a look at it? Let them learn the hard way, they say. I'll let him learn the hard way can be an attitude that results in serious injury. Sorry about that. One word of caution from the old-timer would have saved a lot of pain and lost work time. And even the oldtimer can lapse into carelessness. The safety gap is correct when he starts, but he doesn't think about how much he's grinding down the wheel. He gets by with it on that longer piece. Shake hands with danger. Step right up and say hello. Grinding wheels and metal are what made Three-Finger Joe. Fingers aren't the only things to think about when working with track. So, we don't want to mess around with it. A near miss due to the mechanic's failure to restrain the track before he un loosened it at a high point. Here they're about to push a high sprocketed machine from an old set of tracks onto a new set. With both tracks removed, the machine is free to roll. On a slight grade, it may just take off. If they'd had an operator in the machine, he could have stopped it by dropping the ripper or blade. They should have planned proper blocking and restraint. But better still, they should change one track at a time. Then there can't be a roll away. Have we got going here? Huh? Hurry and failure to heed safety warnings can also endanger those doing routine maintenance. Despite constant warnings about hot oil and pressure systems, some optimist always thinks he can get his hand away in time. Oh god. Oh jeez. Hot. Oh dear. God, somebody help me. Needn't have happened. The temperature gauges, pressure gauges, and the safety caps on cooling systems are there to prevent accidents from occurring. The people who shake hands with danger are those who don't learn beforehand what they're getting into. Like the owner whose brake rotor chamber has been losing air pressure. Hey, Sam. There you go. I got the brake chamber off the loader. I got to run into the dealers to get some repair parts. While I'm gone, will you take it apart to save us some time? Okay, Bill. At this point, the service manuals called for the insertion of a threaded tool to hold the spring force. Sam hasn't read the manual. He doesn't know he's releasing a force that might be as high as 1750 lb. Whether you're working on anything from nitrogen accumulators to inflated tires, it pays to know the kind of power you're dealing with beforehand. [Music] The warnings about gasoline are as old as use of the fuel. Yet somewhere, somebody is always deciding it won't hurt to use it as a cleaning fluid just this one time. Oh, he'll empty the pan very carefully just as soon as he finds a rag to wipe off the carburetor. Meanwhile, the fuel keeps vaporizing. I've only got about another hour to go on this thing. I got to get that thing washed over there. It'll be done in a [Music] minute. It's possible to become overconfident about handling dangerous materials. A good reason why safety instructions should be repeated at frequent intervals. Oddly enough, it isn't lack of familiarity with a job that causes most accidents. Often, it's the routinness of the work that makes a person overconfident. Now, Bill Meyers is changing buckets, a job he's done at least a hundred times. If he were new at it, Bill would be watching and thinking about every step. Now, it's so routine that caution has been dulled. The hole is dry. The pin won't slide in. There's no stick or swab in the grease can, but he could surely find one if he took the time to search around. This is the moment, that split second when a man decides between being safe or shaking hands with danger. together. If he couldn't find a stick or a swab, Bill could have had the linking members moved apart and greased them separately. It would have been a nuisance, but Bill Meyers would give anything to be able to go back and do it the right way. Hey, Ernie. Yeah. I got this hose off of the dozer blade here. Why don't you put this bolt in that end of it? I'm going to take this into the shop. All right, I'll get it done. [Music] [Music] He should have blocked both push arms and he should never have relied upon anything as unstable or crushable as building blocks. Improper blocking and failure to block are major causes of crushing accidents. Hey, come on down out of there. We're dealing with enormous weight and we should never depend upon hydraulics alone to hold it up. I show you something back here. Ted, the position this truck bed was in without these locking pins in and you're working underneath the truck bed and it had failed, you'd have had it. So, these pins should be in place as such. Now, it's always important to look out for the other guy. Safety is always in the hands of people on the job. The warnings and cautions are there for those who heed them. [Music] Safety procedures are spelled out and illustrated in lubrication and maintenance guides, operators guides, and service manuals. The protection is there in machine design and safety devices. [Music] Well, you might as well get used to them because you're going to be wearing them for a while. Excuse me. Safety instruction emphasizing knowledge and awareness prevents accidents by encouraging safety consciousness and protective clothing helps shield the body from the unexpected. The human element remains. It can lend itself to safety or turn a routine situation into a dangerous one. Hey, Bob. I got to get this machine out of here. That engine's not running. I don't care if it's wrong or not. You see them trucks? Them trucks got to come through here. I want this out of here right now. And we all know that the serviceman doesn't always work under ideal conditions. Mechanic Bob Murray has an excavator with a dead engine. It won't start, which means the brakes are locked, which means it's going to sit right here until Bob disconnects the final drives. Then he'll have a machine he can move. [Music] What he should also have but doesn't is a second vehicle to provide [Music] braking. Shake hands with danger. Hurry up and get it done. It takes two men to move this thing, but I'll make do with one. [Music] What's the matter up there? Get this machine out of there. Now, Bob isn't dumb. He wouldn't try towing it all the way to the shop without help, but he just wants to drag it a 100 yards or so and get that foreman off his back. Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Bob Murray will never again tow a freewheeling machine without having control over the breaking. Now Bob was lucky. Others were not. Shake hands with danger. Shake hands with danger. Shake hands with danger. Shake hands with danger. Shake hands with danger. and friends I used to know. Compared to them, I'm lucky to be just three finger Joe. [Music]