Road Building Fatality

[Tillaway]

Some of you may know that we had quite a bit of rain here locally around 11/6.  A result was that many of our roads on the forest were severely damaged by slides and debris flows, we even lost a bridge.  One of the slides heavily damaged one of our haul routes out of a timber sale.  The loggers equipment was stranded and log hauling was stopped.  One of the road building contractors working here was given a contract to repair the road.  The contractor moved a medium sized excavator and a couple of dump trucks in started to work the day after Thanksgiving.  Our department had cleared enough of the slide so that pickup traffic could pass but it was a bit hairy for anything wider.  The excavator operator decided to start on the far side of the slide for some reason and walked the machine across, in doing so the road gave way sending the machine about 400' into the bottom of the canyon.  The operator had his door open and not belted in so he was thrown from the machine.  It took quite a while for rescuers to locate his body.  The excavator had the bucket, boom, and counter-weight broken off as it tumbled into the creek. 

It kind of hit us hard at the office, not to mention the victims family.

[sawguy21]

That is sad. I wonder if he planned to jump if anything went wrong. I recently talked to an excavator operator who lost his nerve and quit. He was working on loose shale,blasting debris, and the machine started to slide toward a long drop into the ocean.

[Tillaway]

I heard his door was on the down hill side, I would think that that would not be ideal.

One of our loggers lost his yarder engineer a couple of months ago.  His nerve gave out too.  He was in two back to back yarder wrecks, one time some bolts sheared holding up the tower and the whole mess went over the hill, the next time the tower buckled and with the same result.  It took an hour or two to cut him out of the last one... fortunately he was unharmed.  Since then he has been hesitant to really pull with one so he finally gave it up.