Hello everyone, here's another one that everybody should likely pay attention to. About 20 years ago, while I was working structural steel, I experienced an incident that altered the way that I did a lot of things in the shop. Started out like any other shift, picked up the prints, located materials, thought about how I was going to go about setting up for a day's fabrications. After doing some initial setup of saw horses and other items, I proceeded to make my way over to the stack of tubing that was going to become a number of columns for the next job that was slated for fabrication. There were 16- 40' long 8"x8"x1/4" wall tubes that were banded together making a large square package and setting on some dunnage or blocking, however you like to describe it. The tubing was held together by 3 or 4 pieces of banding, I could see that the tubes were up off of the shop floor and made the ASSUMPTION that they were supported all the way across the bottom of all the tubes. To get to the point, as I cut the last band I was suddenly pushed to the side as part of the stack fell out and proceeded to fall on my foot, crushing it rather badly(got lucky, no broken bones but my foot was completely black and blue from the tips of my toes to over my ankle joint), couldn't walk for a week.
     What happened went something like this, the blocking was only under about 3 1/4 of the tubes in both places where it was blocked, as I cut the last band off it tipped to the side and then proceeded to allow those 4 tubes to come crashing to the floor, my foot being there for them to land on. I was lucky that the tubes basically pushed my foot away and likely at the same time as the tubes bounced after landing on my foot I was either able to yank my foot out of the way, or as I said, it was pushed out of the way. After that happened I paid a considerable bit more attention to how things were stacked, stored, and placed, and when I was considering moving, unstacking, and handling them I looked them over very carefully. So I guess the point of this story has to do with checking your surroundings and the manner in which materials are stacked, stored, or otherwise, before you end putting yourself in the pinch. A few extra moments can mean the difference between life, death, being crippled or hurt, or continuing on with an uneventful day and living to enjoy another one. Best regards, Allan