Health & Safety

While I've been on my 4 days end of shift rest, a guy on another shift was nearly killed when his head got squashed by machinery. More on that later.

Accident statistics in France are calculated thus:
In your working career you would work for 42 years.
There are 52 weeks in a year, at 5 days a week that gives 260 working days. Allowing for holidays, public holidays & stuff we'll go with 200 working days a year at 8 hours a day which gives us 1600 working hours in a year, thus a career of 67,200 hours.
If we allow for one serious accident in your working career we go with the calulation of 1/67,200 which is a small number so we multiply by a million to get something useful. It comes out at 14.8, say 15.
So if yoy have one serious accident in your working career you've hit an accident frequency level of 15.
In France, the national average is 45. That is, 3 serious accidents in a working career. Now, say the average company has 200 employees. At the national average of 3, there will be 600 serious accidents at that "average" factory during the 42 years the "average" employee is there.
A serious accident is defined as one where you have to have time off to recuperate.
For every 600 serious accidents there will be 60 very serious accidents, ie: loss of a finger/hand/eye or some other kind of handicapping/debiltating accident.
And for every 60 very serious accidents there will be one death.
Remember these are averages. Some factories may have no deaths in 42 years, some may have more than one.
In France, all companies have to declare what their accident frequency level is.
At our factory it is currently below 2. This is very good. It also means that if you are going for a job interview at a factory, ask to see their accident frequency level. If it is over 15, consider not working there, because the chances are, during your career there there will be one death and 60 very serious accidents. And it could be you!
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Back to this numpty that got his head squashed. I can call him a numpty because it looks like he's going to be OK. If he had died my tone might have been more somber.
It seems that at the end of his post, at 3;30 in the morning, he clumbed UNDER a safety barrier on all fours with a broom to start cleaning up, WITHOUT stopping the machinery. While under the machinery, 2 massive steel bars descended to pick up a line of tiles and his head got squashed under the bars.
When he emerged, with blood coming from his ears and mouth he had a broken jaw, a fractured skull, and both cheekbones crushed. He washed the blood from his face and went to the boss's office. The boss called the emergency services immidiately and he was taken to the ER at St Junian where he was x-rayed and them immediately transferred to Limoges for mor x-rays and scans.
Luckily he never lost consciousness and no brain damage sustained. He will start reconstructive surgury on his jaw and cheekbones tomorrow.
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Don't mess with big dangerous hydraulic machinery and never run with scissors!