Safety First!

As an Occupational Therapist working in the field of work injury management for many years, I have an eye for something amiss when visiting an injured worker's place of employment.  Particularly...I notice if the environment is not safe. With that in mind......Moon and i observed a 5 man crew running a pile driving rig.  Approx. 50 feet tall, roughly 15 by 15 feet square and all steel.  The whole thing sat on two railroad-type rails. The rails were 30 ft long.   Estimated rig weight was 3-4 tons. One pile would be driven every10-12 feet.  When the rig ran out of rail...they jacked the whole thing up with something that looked like a beefed up car jack, then pulled the rails forward by hand.  At that point the rig was lowered back down to the rail. They would then attach a hook to the end of the rail which was attached to the rig and winch the whole thing forward, screeching, over the rails. You might think this is crazy, but we're not there yet.  The five man crew did not use gloves, they didn't wear hard hats, no safety glasses, no protective clothing within 10 miles, and......get this....they were all wearing slippers for God's sake.....hard to beleive.  I can imagine....maybe in a strange alternate universe that these men....before rising each morning to start their day said a short prayer asking their maker for a little pain and suffering....maybe a nasty head injury would be fun or  maybe a grossly amputated foot would be the order of the day.....or couple of fingers crushed flat...haven't done that in a while....or maybe....on their lucky day....the rig would fall over on them all and pin them to the asphalt (a crew that is pinned together, stays together!).  The foreman, dressed in shorts and also sporting slippers,  told us to go away.  I'm thinking he thought it wasn't safe for us to be there....40-50 feet away......go figure.

The whole city planning thing is willy nilly.  I am not sure hat the city fathers had a good idea of that they wanted.  Considering how the whole thing is laid out it looks like it was planned out and developed by either a hoarder or a five year old whose primary experience was with sand castles and/or legos. But then again, it is a very old city whose outgrown it's infrastructure several times over.  It seems to work, albeit maybe not as efficiently as it might.

I'm not sure what all is attached to the telephone poles, but there are sometimes 50-60-70 lines running between poles....bundled together or not.....occasionally, poles look as if they might collapse under their own weight....we take for granted building codes or are not even aware of them or what they do for us.....but i'm glad we have them.  Sometimes this place runs like the Wild West, complete with shoot-at-hip building projects, sometimes those projects look sophisticated, futuristic, and architecturally sound.  All for now.  More later.