Holy Cow, take a good look at the conditions for that guy watching the clay as the wheel spins around. He's wearing sandals, not work boots. Around machinery. The dust; fine, clay, lung clogging dust, is all around him in this facility, and he doesn't even have a simple mask on his face to protect his airways. He will not live to be an old man working in these conditions.
Be Glad, that you are not going Back to His Old Grind!
I have been lucky. Fifty two years of work and only two weeks unemployed. I worked six years in Forestry in Kentucky and was outdoors much of the time. Indoor work was office time, and I had lots of fire fighting to make life exciting. I worked in the Southern Illinois oilfields for six years, and that was mostly outdoors too. Indoor work was mostly under trucks. The oilfield crashed in '86 and I got a job with Joy Manufacturing at their rebuild facility in Mt. Vernon. The first month (July), I spent in a rubber suit steam cleaning parts of torn down coal mining machinery, then I worked my way up to a mechanic/welder job. There was always welding smoke in the air, blue light from arc welders, lots of steel on steel noise, and the constant talk of big milling machines machining gear cases and other miner parts. It was all very depressing after working outdoors for the previous twelve years. This song by Johny Cash played in my head back then. I was glad to get back into forestry, where I spent much of the next twenty-nine years outdoors again.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
I spent most of my adult like in shipyards, exposed to all sorts of nastiness.
Probably helps explain why I don't breathe so good today.
I noted when I was a kid that most welders were scrawny little guys. I think breathing fumes from welding and hot flux is bad for the body. I never was around a shipyard, but I can imagine it is full of welding fumes, dust from scaling and sandblasting, plus lots of Diesel. The thing that bothered me most at Joy was the way guys seemed to think they could not be crushed. I have seen shuttle cars picked up by overhead cranes and guys go right underneath them to work. The painter in that shop did it on a daily basis, and there was no way to block up the suspended load.
Post a Comment