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ballsonthewall t1_ireap7x wrote

hence why people need to stop driving like insane people in construction zones. lives are at stake

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westinghousesghost t1_ireazm9 wrote

The bucket truck parked in the closed left lane had the boom extended over the open right lane. Semis don't stop on a dime no matter the speed, and it was likely poorly lit. While I agree with your point, it sounds like this was not purely a case of reckless driving in a construction zone.

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[deleted] OP t1_iree4pz wrote

[deleted]

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AnnoyedHippo t1_ireehwc wrote

It's unclear how many were on site, however every person there has what's called "Stop work authority". There's not a construction site or safety briefing in this country that doesn't cover that if you see something unsafe you have the authority to put a stop to it.

Everyone on that site is responsible.

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Wouldwoodchuck t1_irez7fq wrote

That is all good on paper but the reality may have been different. It often comes down to culture and if the workers truly believe that if they use their stop work authority, there won’t be negative repercussions.

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BannedSvenhoek86 t1_irf5voo wrote

Ya at my company they stress repeatedly that if you issue a stop work there will never be a negative consequence if you don't use it excessively. They beat it into us so we know even the apprentices have the ability to do it if they think it's unsafe.

On the other hand I've worked for some who never even mention a stop work authority and you just knew if you did it you were getting screamed at.

I'm guessing this company was one of the latter ones.

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Wouldwoodchuck t1_irf65p8 wrote

Yup, hopefully the old ways are fading… just not fast enough for this guy unfortunately. Glad you are at a better spot these days. Cheers

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bellatrix_gamma t1_irf1q1a wrote

Do we know what company this employee worked for?

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[deleted] OP t1_irff24l wrote

[deleted]

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GargantuanWitch t1_irfge8d wrote

Because it costs less to bid out work than it does to have it done by your own people?

I mean, this isn't anything new. Every municipality does this. It's written in the bylaws of practically every town in the area that this is how infra improvements/capital purchases are made.

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[deleted] OP t1_irfgnr2 wrote

[deleted]

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tinypauline t1_irgcukl wrote

Maybe you mean well, but you have no idea what you’re talking about. Public sector projects in PA are required to pay workers prevailing wages, which are based on union rates. Capital construction projects need concentrations of specific trades for each phase of the project: equipment operators for excavation and earthwork, laborers for site cleanup, cement finishers & ironworkers for foundations, more ironworkers for steel erecting, painters, and so forth. A public agency can’t keep those workers busy full time, all year long. That’s why they hire contractors. This man’s death is a terrible tragedy, don’t use it for uninformed virtue signaling.

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GargantuanWitch t1_irfi7tq wrote

No, it has everything to do with "The people who live and pay taxes in the municipality get to choose where their money is spent, and not allow Mr. and Mrs. Councilperson to tell their nephew, who runs Townsville Public Works, to pave the road because he plows the snow in the wintertime, too."

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>I'm thinking it has more to do with allowing a company to hire people for less than the value of their labor, then skim the "extra" money for profits.

There isn't a conspiracy hidden in plain sight for every misconception you have about the way the world works. Stop looking for one.

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>All government contracts should be cancelled and all government functions completed in-house.

And all kids should have their homework done before they watch cartoons.

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gullible_guy t1_irh1lqc wrote

The problem here is, people continue to talk about things they know nothing about because they sit on this site daily and read things people know nothing about and have zero real world experience in any of this.

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tesla3by3 t1_irg1pea wrote

Governments issue contracts to private businesses to handle things that would not make sense to do in house.

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gullible_guy t1_irh1h5z wrote

God damn it you are not smart. Please stick to bagging groceries.

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gullible_guy t1_irh1fj6 wrote

You clearly have no idea how inefficient that actually would be.

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westinghousesghost t1_ireegsk wrote

It's also quite possible the bucket worker made the move himself. I absolutely don't want to sound like I'm blaming him here, please don't take it that way, but the reality is workers often knowingly cut corners and cause accidents independently of anyone else and despite training.

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Cryptic_Skies t1_irepo5q wrote

as someone who once spent a summer in a bucket truck, this is unfortunately true.

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westinghousesghost t1_ireqibc wrote

I used to supervise a warehouse...the lack of give-a-shit among the associates (for work ethic, safety, quality, anything) was astounding. I quit that job after 2 guys committed a huge safety violation (which they had been trained numerous times over 2 years of work to avoid) and the regional manager blocked my efforts to fire them for it.

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SendAstronomy t1_iret0bp wrote

The unwritten rule at a lot of jobs. You have to do things the safe way, but management will look the other way so the job can be done fast/cheap.

Same thing in information technology. Companies will outright ignore security to do it fast/cheap. Occasionally they will sacrifice an employee to take the blame when they get hacked.

And the bigger the company the less likely they will get held to account. Look at how many credit card breaches happen every year.

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westinghousesghost t1_ireyfed wrote

>The unwritten rule at a lot of jobs. You have to do things the safe way, but management will look the other way so the job can be done fast/cheap.

Ain't that the truth. My current job involves occasionally using a boom lift. I have experience with them and use appropriate safety gear, but I'm not technically certified. For my own safety and liability, I make sure I stay well within my limited range of skills with it. But there's one area I need to use it that I don't feel safe using it (on a grade, enough to set the grade alarm off). People, and my boss, keep telling me ways to do it, and I'm just like "nope, pay someone who knows what they're doing to do it, not worth it to me." Don't make employees do things they don't feel safe doing.

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Cryptic_Skies t1_irerkuz wrote

i spent a summer in a warehouse as part of a contracted team. i completely agree with you. my team was fired because two of our members refused to follow basic safety protocols and caused $5k worth of damage.

as for the bucket truck...while i never did anything that would endanger my life, there were several situations where safety could no longer be first, only because the task could otherwise not be completed.

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BigHugeTime t1_irgksuy wrote

Bro wouldn’t have fell 80 feet if he was harnessed in the way he should have been.

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deVriesse t1_irh0yrs wrote

It always blows my mind how much I have to yell at people for endangering themselves just to make their employer more money faster.

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o_c_d t1_iref3pe wrote

We learned nothing then from the fiu collapse. Working over traffic. Smh

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ballsonthewall t1_irecerc wrote

... I think I misinterpreted what happened when I first read the article. Consider that first comment a general PSA unrelated to the incident then.

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heili t1_ireo7l6 wrote

Also from the article it says that he was ejected and fell. Was he wearing a fall protection kit? Was it even possible for the semi to see the bucket in time to stop? Why was the boom extended over a live traffic lane? This sounds like a lot of safety corners were cut.

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evward t1_irf0gy0 wrote

I’m confused about how the semi hit the bucket and caused him to fall from the overpass. The overpass is like 75 feet up. So if the bucket is low enough to be hit then it is nowhere near the overpass.

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heili t1_irf1odj wrote

So best I can tell is that he was here: https://goo.gl/maps/esGatTESg1on76St5

He had his bucket truck in the left lane with his bucket extended over the right lane and was low enough that the truck hit the bucket, which knocked him out of the bucket and off of the elevated portion of 376 onto the ground near or on Second Ave here: https://goo.gl/maps/Lav49NNK5SKx2oZVA

A fall like that would only be possible if he was not wearing safety restraints.

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evward t1_irf2s79 wrote

Thank you for clarifying. I reread the article and I had missed the part where his bucket truck was in the left lane of outbound 376

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heili t1_irf8d0n wrote

That article was as clear as the Pittsburgh sky.

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mvps412 t1_irfexk4 wrote

Yeah I had to read it a couple times and I’m still not sure what it meant, now I get it thanks to Reddit.

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steelcitykid t1_irfhpyo wrote

Man I hope he died on impact. Can you imagine getting hit, perhaps not even seeing it coming, and you're just suddenly and violently thrown airborne flipping about and falling 70+ feet? And all this at 3AM where if the driver didn't know they hit anything, and/or the bucket operator was working alone, you're just waiting to expire until someone finds you smeared on the street below.

Rough way to go, hope the job site operators catch hell for that.

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Bolmac t1_irf5fh5 wrote

Was there any evidence to suggest that the truck driver was driving inappropriately, or that they were in any way at fault for this? I didn't see anything to suggest this.

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Red_Scare867 t1_ireroiq wrote

Drivers will not stop driving like maniacs until road design forces them to. People routinely drive 20-30 mph over on 376 because the road design allows them to.

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CARLEtheCamry t1_irfslih wrote

> People routinely drive 20-30 mph over on 376 because the road design allows them to.

What do you want them to do, put a roundabout in the middle of 376?

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Red_Scare867 t1_irga5vf wrote

Roundabouts are far from the only way to limit speeding. Plenty of countries in Europe have figured this out, but I guess in the US we just have to continue to play dumb as car related deaths continue to skyrocket.

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covertchipmunk t1_irfqxs6 wrote

No idea why this is downvoted. Speed limit signs mean jack to most drivers.

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Bolmac t1_irfycvz wrote

Maybe it's because there is nothing here to indicate that speeding or "driving like maniacs" had anything to do with this incident, and that people suggesting otherwise are just jumping to unsupported conclusions because they came into this with an axe to grind.

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Red_Scare867 t1_irgabps wrote

The comment I responded to explicitly mentioned driving like “insane people in construction zones”. The context is important. I didn’t leave this as a top level comment.

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CARLEtheCamry t1_irfsws4 wrote

If you have a flat stretch of highway, what practical way would you have to prevent speeding other than police enforcement?

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burritoace t1_irgei98 wrote

>If you have a flat stretch of highway,

We don't have that around here

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CARLEtheCamry t1_irgj9ax wrote

So I know you're exaggerating but the interstate highway system was literally created to address the inadequacy of existing highways in the event of war to evacuate citizens and move nukes around. There are certain standards they have to adhere to - for example the S-bends on I-79 between Robinson and Neville Island have a lower speed limit and rollover warning because they exceed those tolerances due to having to snake through the hills. And trucks regularly flip there, still.

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Red_Scare867 t1_irgalwb wrote

Narrow the lanes for starters. The US had absurdly wide lanes already. They do this successfully in plenty of countries in Europe. Why do we have to be stuck in 1950? There are plenty of real world examples of road diets that work, but US traffic engineers value the travel times of drivers above all else. That includes the lives of the drivers and the ones around them.

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CARLEtheCamry t1_irgjezn wrote

> Narrow the lanes for starters. The US had absurdly wide lanes already. They do this successfully in plenty of countries in Europe.

Narrowing lanes is another city/urban traffic calming strategy (which I am in favor of). I can't find it being applied on any highways. If you can link me a source I'll stand corrected.

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Red_Scare867 t1_irgjy67 wrote

Highway lanes in the US are 12 feet wide. Highway lanes in the Netherlands and Japan are 3.25 meters which is more than a foot more narrow than our lanes in the US.

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CARLEtheCamry t1_irgol2s wrote

OK, but was that done as a function of improving safety, or just the standard they adopted?

The Federal Highway has this to say on the subject (emphasis mine) :

> Speed is a primary consideration when evaluating potential adverse impacts of lane width on safety. On high-speed, rural two-lane highways, an increased risk of cross-centerline head-on or cross-centerline sideswipe crashes is a concern because drivers may have more difficulty staying within the travel lane. On any high-speed roadway, the primary safety concerns with reductions in lane width are crash types related to lane departure, including run-off-road crashes. The mitigation strategies for lane width presented in Chapter 4 focus on reducing the probability of these crashes.

> In a reduced-speed urban environment, the effects of reduced lane width are different. On such facilities, the risk of lane-departure crashes is less. The design objective is often how to best distribute limited cross-sectional width to maximize safety for a wide variety of roadway users. Narrower lane widths may be chosen to manage or reduce speed and shorten crossing distances for pedestrians

So I interpret that as narrower highways are more dangerous, and they have standards to reduce speed to account for that. To go back to my original point - even if you narrowed the lanes and reduced the speed limit to say 45 instead of 55 - people are still going to speed. And they're going to get into more accidents if the lanes are narrower. They already drop the speed limit on most of I-376 to 55 as opposed to the "normal" 70mph, to less than desirable effect.

The only place I see people regularly not speeding on 376 is the business loop around the airport, because International Drive is or has been the #1 speed trap in the state. I pass it daily on my commute. It actually drops down to 40mph as you approach University Blvd and they enforce it. Otherwise, to paraphrase R Kelly, speed limit ain't nothin but a number.

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