Near Misses

In the professional safety industry, we have a thing called "Near Misses"

A near miss is...

A near miss is an unplanned, uninjured event with the potential to cause harm or damage, representing a "close call". As defined by OSHA, these incidents occur when a slight shift in time or position could have resulted in injury or property damage. Tracking these is crucial because roughly 300 near misses occur for every serious injury or fatality.  

In my job, we encourage people to report near misses in order to have an opportunity to potentially correct an existing hazard before someone is injured.

At home, near misses can happen as well. I, like anyone else, have had moments where something had happened and I considered myself to be lucky to have avoided disaster.

Do you have a story about a near miss? Would you be willing to share?

A story that comes to mind isn't necessarily unique to me but could of ended horrifically.

I was out, cutting down a box elder on a slope, with my chainsaw and putting in a lot of work. I was still 'new' at felling trees and thought I had done everything right but ended up pinching my bar as the tree was coming down. In the moment I really should of left the chainsaw and let the tree fall but I was standing there yanking on the thing as the tree started tipping.

All of the sudden, a loud crack sounded and I felt a breeze go by the left side of my face. The tree had splintered and part of the trunk kicked upward JUST missing my face.

After I nearly soiled myself and got a breather, I had a new appreciation for my self preservation when it comes to felling trees.

I was in the woods cutting a tree in MN, and I went to the ground. Something  had hit me in the back.  I looked around for a “widow maker” … there was none.  The next day, in a small local restaurant, I commented about the experience to a gentleman well into his 70s.   He asked me to stand up, he lifted up the back of my shirt and had another older man look.   Then he commented, “You were hit by a spent bullet.”

My veggie garden is situated on top of rock - so breeze block wall surrounds it on three sides, rock bank completes the rectangle.  Soil almost to the top of the three courses. Being lazy I opted to fork over a portion close to the edge without climbing the steps. . . 1 foot on the ground, 1 'operating' the fork, and A over T I went.  Ground foot was on a patch of damp leaves... I did bang my head, but after a few curses, it was OK.   Note: haven't done that since, so I did learn something.

I once was hacking a path through a thicket of roses and dogwood. I was cutting upward, when the large heavy knife flew out of my grasp and up into the air. I ran forward as far as I could in the thicket, not knowing where the knife would land; after a few seconds it came down a few feet behind me. Yay!

I have not cut upward like that since.

I didn't grow up in a family that worked on cars. My folks put gas and water and oil in and employed handier neighbors or professional mechanics for everything else.

As a young adult, I decided to learn some stuff and had done so, but I had this '82 Civic (roughly ten years later) and I unscrewed the center nut on what I think is called the strut tower. It was under a whole lot of pressure and when I finally got the last bit of thread detached it fired straight up into my cheek bone about an inch southwest of my eye, then hit the underside of the hood, then hit the garage door and then vanished. I had a huge purple bruise on my cheek for a couple of weeks, but I call it a near miss because I got to keep my eye!

I kind of stopped playing mechanic at that point.

i am ashamed to admit they are good reminders that come when I need them. Knife that needs sharpening hits my fingernail instead of chopping off my fingertip, machete aaaaalmost nails me in the toe, reminding me to pay attention and also use boots. It happens every so often.

With the car, it is always hair-raising. One time I was going too fast on a dirt road, fishtailed, and came THIS CLOSE to hitting a pole (close enough to touch it out my open window). Entirely my fault. Another time, I was stopped at a traffic light in suburban Rhode Island alongside another car, letting traffic come off an interstate highway and cross in front of us to continue in the opposite direction. A car came off the ramp fast and slammed head-on into the car next to me, apparently misjudging where they were supposed to go.

Some version of this seems to happen to me a lot at work, and this exact exchange happened Monday:

I’m terminating wire in a live panel, and sort of narrating aloud to my boss who’s standing behind me: “I’m going slow here because I’m being careful not to touch the exposed copper or lugs on that next circuit up.”

And then he goes “Okay, but in doing so you came within a half inch of touching that bus bar.”

I have had a LOT!

At the moment I am living with the ongoing consequences of having broken my neck when I was 15.  C6.  I did it while high-jumping.  But I didn't know it was broken.  No-one told me.  I was walking around for six weeks with no collar, no halo.

My college buddy broke his C6 and he is paralyzed from his shoulders down.


I am damn lucky!


Eric

Haha, the very first thing I thought about was felling a tree, too. Normally I would do that alone but this particular tree was difficult, so I have hired an experienced person to do that.
What supposed to be a quick half an hour job turned out to be four hours struggle, with a few near miss situations. We have managed to finish it in the end, but despite of frosty day we had sweat in out boots lol

Tereza Okava wrote:i am ashamed to admit they are good reminders that come when I need them. Knife that needs sharpening hits my fingernail instead of chopping off my fingertip, machete aaaaalmost nails me in the toe, reminding me to pay attention and also use boots. It happens every so often.

These are my most frequent ones, as well. Though there was one time when I was putting up a cattle panel fence, John said something that really pissed me off. I didn't say anything back to him, but, I continued what I was doing, without stopping to calm my shit. I ended up smacking myself in the eye with the bent side of the tip of the 42" long, cork-screw style hinge/ connection leaving the white of my eye aching and blood-red for nearly a week. Yup, I was injured, but if it had hit the other side that was only an inch or so in the opposite direction - the raw, bare end - I would have lost that eye. Just because I was working with a crappy attitude, that made me careless.

There were some really wet winters in the central California coastal areas in the 1980s. We lived in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains east of Freedom CA, which were covered with Monterey pines and eucalyptus trees all 75 ft. and more tall.

The pines have really shallow roots, and during one particular storm we could see the ground moving as the trunks of the huge trees swayed in the wind. Our horses were freaked out. I went out to calm down one of our Arabian stallions, and was standing next to him in his pen when suddenly a two-foot diameter tree trunk was laying on top of the metal fence panel inches from my shoulder. The tree had fallen so silently that we had no warning. The stallion and I simply stood there, trying to comprehend what had just happened. To this day I have no memory of any sound but the wind, though the top rail of the fence panel was deeply bent!

That was a near miss, for sure, but we put off taking down the pines that were too close to structures until one fell down on a single-wide mobile home during another storm. Luckily no one was hurt in that incident either. Lesson learned: clear the land of trees near structures, no matter how much you think you need shade on your roof.

(Kudos to Powder River for their equine fence panels that we hauled all the way to New Mexico when we moved, because they were too good to leave behind).

Many of my near misses come with injuries much less severe than they could have been, rather than no injury at all.  

An upstairs window screen was being very difficult to re-install from the inside, so one morning I put the extension ladder up against the house to reach it from outside.  On my way down the ladder, I mis-stepped and fell a few feet, not just to the ground but into the metal whole-house generator housing that was right where I had to put the foot of the ladder to reach both sides of that narrow window.  I twisted my ankle, and it was the day before I was to attend a large event that required a lot of walking with an old friend I hadn't seen in years.  So I borrowed my mom's walker, got my guy to drive me to an herb shop where I purchased some comfrey oil, and then to a pharmacy where I bought a pair of crutches.  It was a lot harder going up and down stairs with crutches in my 60s than it was in my 30s the last time I had to use them!  I was exhausted by the end of the event!  

Another time I was putting some screws into the ceiling of a shed to hang a brooder lamp from for some new chicks due a few days later.  I was using a small two-step stool since the shed was smallish, and of course since I'm short, I was on the top step.  I had one more screw to finish, but I was just a liiiiitle bit too far away to reach easily with the screw gun.  I stretched over instead of getting down and moving the stool.  I overbalanced and fell, and my shin hit hard on the edge of the metal trough I was using as a brooder.  It hurt like crazy, but somehow miraculously was not broken.  I was able to put my full weight on it without extra pain.  Within a couple days my entire lower leg was bruised from just above my knee down into my toes, and over half way around!  Arnica cream helped the bruising heal.  Now I overcome my tendency to laziness and move the darn ladder or step stool if I need to.    

I'm not sure whether I get these minor injuries more easily now due to age, or due to the extra weight I now carry.  Perhaps it's both, so I'm making an effort to drop the excess weight in case "the bigger they are, the harder they fall" is a literal statement as well as a figurative one.