New hire. Guy was there for only 5 days.

Not if you're a pallbearer

I believe that was a contractor that was working there, fell through a hole in the floor - not into the crucible

 Hadn't even received his first paycheck.

He should have watched this training video:

There are some pretty badass uses for cremains:
http://www.myholysmoke.com

I’m curious about the ingots though. Surely they aren’t human sized.

I am not going to make any crass jokes about a poor man dying who was just trying to earn a living and provide for his family.

That plant is probably going to get lit up now, they seem to have a poor history of accidents.  Hopefully his family is able to get compensated if the foundry had a poor safety culture.

I was thinking brick sized, not the full Han Solo.

Safety rep passed bybthe body shop yesterday and said that there's a Osha safety related death every 13 seconds

Said this past March was really bad



But this one


Holy shutbi feel bad for the guys children

Yes, it was not as instant as people would hope.

The issue is the Leidenfrost effect, which is what you're describing (boiling off making a layer.)

In case anyone doubts, physicist Jearl Walker does a demonstration of the effect by sticking his hand in a vat of molten lead:

He forgot to say, "Hold my beer.  Watch this shit."

That's what I was thinking. Not instant enough

I would imagine not. I assume something around 200 lbs...

I know one place that cast an ingot for the burial, then dumped the rest of the heat and buried it on their property. Where they dumped it's sorta like a cemetery area that nobody goes in now.

CAT has lawyers and lobbyists.  I doubt there will be a meaningful fine.

I was a safety engineer in a foundry once upon a time.   This very thing kept me awake at night more than once.   It wasn't so much the ladles as the furnaces themselves that were something you could literally fall into.    It is nightmare fuel.

With a furnace not only would you be burned to a crisp pretty quickly, although not quickly enough probably, you are basically a bag of water, and a submerged bag of water in a motel bath = explosion.   So everyone around you gets to die slower and more horrifically.

We never killed anyone in my time there, but we burned some guys pretty good and bridged a furnace a time or two, and lost a liner, setting the furnace on fire, we recharged some pretty oily slitter stock and cleaned all the dust off the rafters a couple times. Then there was the usual runouts and ladle burn through stuff.

They were the best dudes to work with though, weird how the dangerous work tends to attract good people.  

Attached File



OSHA going to go hard, dry and deep.


RIP. God bless his little girls. Nobody should ever go to work and not come home.

That's molten lead, not steel.

Molten steel is unimaginably hot, if you've never been in a steel works. He was vaporized very fast. I won't say instantly, but nearly. That shit is so hot, I'm surprised he got close enough to even fall in. My dad was a cinder snapper. Stood next to the little river of molten steel as it poured out of an open hearth and busted the slag off the top to keep it flowing. The gear they wore was impressive and it was something like 15 minutes on and 30 off, because ambient air temp was so high and that's under the insulated area.

Instead of just the water on the surface of your hand turning to steam as in your video, the whole item turns to steam. See about :40 in this video. The explosion comes from the bottle of water turning to steam. IF there is enough mass differential (steel to body), nothing is going to cool down the steel enough to not instantly vaporize the body.

I had opportunity to tour such a foundry here in the USA and I saw how dangerous a place it can be. Looking down into giant caldrons of molten metal is awe inspiring towards being careful.

Sounds like a furnace deck thing.   You sample a heat for the lab before you pour it into a ladle. Sometimes again before your pour the castings, depending on alloy.

I can completely see that happening.  All geared up in aluminized kevlar, tinted face shield, hard to see anything but the furnace opening, our furnaces were AC induction and they tipped hydraulically to pour into a ladle.  So there were seams in the diamond plate decking around the furnace crucible where it would articulate.   Nothing around but a smoke ring, usually on the far side of the pot from where you're sampling. Nothing to catch yourself with.   Usually a sampler is just a cup on the end of a long pole.  Getting close to the bath at 3k degrees is not pleasant, it's like walking up to the front door of a house that's fully engulfed in flames.

God help me I can see it happening.   That's awful.

No coffee or drug wakes you up quite as well as big wet charge in 100ton+ EAF

I've seen some breakouts and accidents, plenty on run-out at continuous casters...  I saw someone pull gates off a tundish too early and squirt about 2000 SQ ft of molten stainless onto concrete and refractory in seconds I can't remember how much the skull weighed, but it wasn't small.

That guy burned up his foot pretty bad, but thankfully he was quick enough to get away.

I've seen (well heard, then saw) about a 10 ft long 18x24" bloom fall 5+ stories down an elevator shaft sorta thing. It welded 1" steel plate together and smashed parts of it as thin as paper.

It's dangerous AF, but walking into a melt shop/foundry never gets old. It's still always awesomely scary and neat looking

Might explain why my dad always drank a ton of hot coffee. Even when it was 100 out.

Bad thing is, all that safety gear would make it worse because you'd last a little longer.

Some places have a piece of plate with a hole, welded to railing and covered in gunmix that the lab guys stick their spoodle things through to get samples.

Some places a guy just walks up to the edge.

Tapping a clogged ladle with a torch is probably the scariest job in a modern mill (IMHO). They don't use cutting torches; it's big, like 6 ft long disposable cardboard things, but still there's nothing like TRYING to get molten metal to pour out next to you lol.

You'd probably be ash and maybe some bones and charred fibers from your greens/FR clothing on top of the crucible or whatever held the hot metal.  Not much to recover.   Less if they dumped the crucible or ladle on the floor.     It sure if that was ever done
Guys used to fall into ingot molds way back when that's how most steel was made.   Sometimes people would intentionally jump.  
Now most steel  is continuous cast and the ladle and tundish are a lot more closed off to keep junk (and people) from falling in, and for some gas shielding to keep oxygen and nitrogen from getting into the molten steel.
What happened to those ingots that had remains in them were described in the book Homestead
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0679748172?tag=arfcom00-20

The author said those ingots (they were pretty big, maybe 30,000# of steel or sometimes even more) would be set off in some corner of the plant property where they stored old equipment and such, maybe were painted with some mark.  Eventually after several years, they would gather up those ingots and either dump them into the furnaces as scrap to remelt, or maybe have to roll it down int a plate or structural shapes.  
I guess there would be a chance that some things like teeth might survive at least in small burned up fragments, which would be inclusions in the steel, but they all probably knew it contained the remains of a man if not who it was, when it finally did get used or recycled.    
Calcium treated steel I guess (cal-sil treated steel was a thing.  Not sure if it still is with modern steel melt shop equipment like AODs and degassers)
I recommend the book.  But a lot of the local people, especially union and the communist agitators, you will have no pity for after reading it.  


So it would kind of be like the legend of steel making giant Joe Magarac

It's not always the company at fault either.   Sometimes people just become complacent.  Take a shortcut, and it proves fatal.  When I was at USS Mon Valley, there were a couple of fatalities in the melt shop.   One was a guy close to retiring.   He just got careless and climbed up on a train car with ingot molds without telling anyone.   Well the locomotive started to push the cars and one of the molds toppled back, the one he was standing right next to.  He was momentarily pinned at the chest by that huge iron mold that fell over, probably 20,000# itself, between it and another mold, maybe a space of 8-10" .  He took a shortcut and it cost him his life.   I know he was not killed instantly but it took some time for him to expire at the hospital.  Hours maybe a day.
It's not possible to make these sorts of jobs danger free.   It's minimizing the risk as much as possible, and people have to be thinking out there, and know where your coworkers are.
OSHA probably does know this, but they will and have to investigate to make sure there are no systemic problems or policy things that caused the fatality.  It's how Industry safety programs have been made.  By the blood of others most often.

Is this just a Cat thing or do all steel mills do this? What is the purpose of the ingot - a memorial of sorts?

I've always been fascinated by steel mills and would love to know more.

What is going on in the front row?

Terminator endoskeletons were made of Coltan.

How was that incident even a option of falling into the drink?

Seems fishy.

Sometimes I think you can't die quick enough.

6600 people a day?

Maybe in the entire world. No fucking way it's even a hundredth of that in the USA.

On an episode of myth busters they showed that a human wouldn't sink into lava if thrown into it because of the water content in our bodies. We would basically skid across the top as we cook like bacon in a frying pan. I'm guessing this was similar. Hopefully he went quick or was knocked out on the way down. Horrible way to go.

Idk anything about cat except I swore timken was selling them a lot of steel a few years back.
The ingot is something to put in the casket that has the remains in it.
Like I said before, I think one of the things they always test for is phosphorus (or some element) that can only be in there from organic material. If it shows up in a heat, I suspect they do a headcount.

Like the other poster above kinda said, it's not common, but it's not uncommon either and I only know of the one "graveyard" at a mill where they dumped an entire heat, but obviously there are others.

I've heard the ingot thing for the family from many places. It's certainly not a difficult thing to do; there's brick and ram, etc...laying around everywhere, and steelworkers in general are mostly always good guys, to a fault. They'd make a mold real quick if needed. I imagine it was different up til the 70's or so when BOFs and less automation required more staff, but it's a very dangerous job with maybe only a few dozen guys working a shift at a time in some places, and they don't suffer fools who might get them killed.

I'd bet it wasn't instant. Poor freaking guy.

I thought I saw an episode of Dirty Jobs where Mike Rowe is using a ladle to scoop stuff out.  Had big doors that would open on either side like saloon doors with a big hole in the middle.

Tripped while collecting a sample.  How has that task not been mechanized by now?

Would think going into shock would lessen the pain momentairly before he expired.

I’d rather die that way than the woman who fell in the processing plant meat grinder.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6953183/amp/Woman-35-dies-falling-meat-grinder-Pennsylvania-plant.html

What if the guy wasn't wearing his safety glasses?

That’s the wurst.

Most steel is 2300F+, and even higher for stainless.
Anything you throw in there burns up almost instantly. Even if it was horrible pain, it would only last a few seconds at most.

If it were a vessel covered in a huge amount of slag, or if you fell in a caster full of mold powder, it could definitely be worse, but an open electric furnace would burn anything  right up in seconds.

I used to have to reline tundishes (like a big vessel they pour ladles into to control the flow of strands on a continuous caster) when our employees would call off.

Walking around overtop of a glowing red, but cooling tub full of molten steel with flames still shooting out of it, and knowing if I slipped into one of the holes on the covers that I would probably suffer immensely, surely die, and there was absolutely nothing anyone could do to help me, was not my favorite way to spend a Friday night

We'd put ceramic fiber blanket insulation under our boots and sorta shuffle around to hook up parts to the crane, otherwise your boot soles would melt in moments lol.

There are 2.4 million safety related deaths a year?

That protects from conduction,  not radiation.  Radiative heat transfer goes with the fourth power of temperature.

So most places have a sign that states number of days since an injury, that place needs one for number of days since a death

My dad used to work at a foundry. One day he’s getting ready for a shift when everyone in the locker room hears a massive explosion. They open the door to the foundry and a massive cloud of dust comes rushing in. Couldn’t see 5ft into the foundry because of the dust. They figure there had been some sort of explosion or maybe water had gotten into a pot of molten steel. Everyone ripped the reusable towels off the rolls, wetted them, wrapped them around their faces, and headed into the foundry to assess the damage and help out anyone who was injured. Well, they didn’t find anybody who was injured, but they did find a couple guys laughing their asses off standing around the slag pit. Apparently they thought it was funny to drop some water into the ultra hot pit. The expansion caused all the dust on the walls and ceiling to become airborne.