This guy I worked with fell off the edge of the building when he was leaning over to strip concrete forms. He fell into a 55 gallon drum below and got wedged inside.
Another guy was working 12 stories up on the building being built across the street. He went to bend down, and his hammer was hanging from his tool belt and it acted like a leverage bar and catapulted him off the building to his death.
On the this coal burning power plant my cousin worked on a couple of guys were eating their lunch near a hopper and they noticed red splatters dripping by them, as they ate. Someone went up to check it out and found that some guy fell into the hopper from way up and broke his neck or something and died. What makes this story more strange is that it was the son of one of the guys eating his lunch below.
One Friday the 13th, I was thinking about how it was Friday the 13th, and I fell off a wall. It wasn't very high up though.
On an apt. complex framing job I was working on south of Houston, the whole crew showed up for work Monday only to find 1/2 the complex burned to the ground. Two story buildings reduced to about 2 feet high with metal pipes only sticking up higher. The aluminum framed sliding glass doors just melted. Nobody heard that this complex burned, including the boss. Quite the shock. And here the Friday before I was so neatly sweeping up the sawdust pile I made.
The cause of the fire was from a couple of guys smoking marijuana who started this small sawdust fire to get off on the flames, and it supposedly got away from them. The complex was in the rough framing stage but it was a framed and roofed.
Another accident that happened on this job was that someone put an entire pallet of shingles on the roof over this porch and when we were wrecking out the 2nd floor porch from the fire damage, even though we supported it, it broke the support and collapsed on us and cold-cocked us all...but we were all okay. None of us knew that there was a pallet of shingles up there.
On this other job, someone layed out the concrete and steel reinforced columns off about a foot and *I* got the job of jack hammering them apart.
On a nuclear power plant I worked on, they working working around the clock. Someone on the day shift undid heavy steel maxiforms and had them set for the crane to fly them away. But the quitting time whistle blew and the guy left the work half done. The guy on the night crew climbed the maxiform and it fell back on him and squashed him to death.
