I worked at a chemical plant for a while for Brown & Root, being young and impatient I was often frustrated at how the Instrument techs would stop doing something and call the electrician, although the small job was easy to do.
I came to see that all those little procedures, and the personal lockouts, etc were important, that if you stop doing them eventually a step would be skipped and explosions or death could happen.
There were little reminders of safety, such as the plant across the street having a fire they couldn’t put out and us having to dodge car-sized debris when a 10-story silo blew up at our plant, or me kneeling on dry concrete to take an instrument reading and then noticing the skin on my knee disappearing like in a horror movie.
It was scary things like that that really made you mindful of safety. A moment’s lapse or shortcut could get you killed. Being young and somewhat stupid, you didn’t think that much about it at the time.
I was starting up a new power plant at the Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Base hospital. An electrician was working at the other end of the boiler building on an open motor control center panel and shorted his fishtape across a 480 volt bus to ground. FLASH!! The whole place lit up with an electric blue light and his fishtape vaporized like a burned-out light bulb filament. I figured I’d find a burning corpse, but somehow he survived without any injury. I still can see the flash and smell the ozone almost 50 years later.
“me kneeling on dry concrete to take an instrument reading and then noticing the skin on my knee disappearing”
Why did that happen?