City maintenance worker showered with blood....animal AND human...

[MnFats]

what a horror movie!


ummm....city a little lax in its permits? I'd say it's lawsuit time..

www.wcco.com


A Minneapolis city worker is worried about blood in the sewer system because he said, while he was cleaning the system, blood sprayed out of a hole and got all over him.

"We could tell it was blood, I mean large amount of blood," said Minneapolis Sewer Maintenance Worker Ron Huebner.

It happened about two weeks ago in Northeast Minneapolis near a lab that does medical testing and dumps blood into the sewer. It is allowed but the city is now making changes to help protect workers in the future.

"Blood just all over my face, in my mouth, I could taste it. It was terrible. I had it in my mouth and I kept spitting and I couldn't get rid of it," said Huebner.

Huebner said he hasn't been sleeping much. He's worried about the blood that he swallowed when he was operating a jet machine to clean out the sewer.

The Met Council said it was a mix of human and animal blood used in medical testing at this nearby lab.

In fact, the company, R & D Systems, does have a permit to dump blood in the sewer system.

[Donnachaidh]

1. I'm NOT trying to downplay this -- but I have to ask

WHY wasn't this guy wearing SOME sort of face protection?

Forget the blood -- err, does he regularly go without protection when he's cleaning out human waste? That can be just as dangerous as blood, I would think. :crazy:

[porphyrian]

2. When OSHA isn't around, people seldom use safety gear, even against common sense.

You should see what happens on most construction sites. It's a miracle there aren't more deaths and mutilations than there are now.

[hedgehog]

3. For some reason, government workers seem to have a very blase

attitude toward safety. I personally know of workers from 3 different jurisdictions (county, city and state university) who failed to properly reinforce ditches they were digging. In one case, a man was buried up to the waist when the ditch collapsed. He's OK, but in another case, the fellow who was buried was pushed against a live steam pipe and ended up dying from his burns. The incident where the fellow dies happened 10 miles away and two weeks before the incident with the city workers!

Industrial workers tend to be a little bit more safety aware because large corporations are very aware of worker's comp costs and OSHA fines, so they take the effort to train their people. Construction companies don't generally put their people through the same training. Farmers are the worst - they're usually working for themselves with older equipment lacking modern safeguards.

[loudsue]

4. There have been a lot of deaths & mutilations, but the news doesn't report it.

It's just part & parcel of all the atrocities that are going on in our country right now that the robber baron media moguls don't want us little "worker units" to know about.

:kick::kick:

[rasputin1952]

5. Correct, when the Safety Coordinator isn't around people rarely

adhere to Safety Regulations. OSHA generally comes around after an accident or they let you know ahead of time they are going to be around for an inspection. Serious complaints can bring OSHA in unannounced, but the guy who wasn't wearing the gear wasn't going to be the one calling OSHA.

I know one thing, w/all of the tings that are in a sewer, I highly doubt I'd be down there w/o full protective gear, other than the usual stuff one would expect to find in a sewer, there are needles, rats, stuff being blasted off the walls that could contain cholera, TB, tetanus, E. coli and a host of other little nasties....even the occasional alligator has been found, but that tends to keep the rat population down.

I'm sure OSHA has been there since the incident, but I doubt they visited the site before an incident occurred.