OSHA Inspectors Share 40 Moments From The Job That Left Them Flabbergasted

This one time there was a deadly pandemic that killed millions worldwide, we had refrigerated body trucks in the streets, hospital was chronically collapse-level overwhelmed. The personal protective equipment they gave us for infection control? Plastic garbage bags to wear over our scrubs. Face masks designed for 30 minutes of effective use were worn for days. 115,000 of us died.

Not an OSHA inspector, but related, and I regularly do inspections together with them.

One of the factories that a related, but not quite subsidiary company, runs received a formal complaint which triggered an OSHA inspection.

The complaint mentioned something along the lines of machines not being properly barricaded, resulting in someone losing two fingers and could result in a big lawsuit. My company wasn't happy as although they weren't in the direct line of fire, there was reputational damage involved.

We got there, foreman pointed us to the machine. We got them to break it open to see the damage. Out pops not two, but SIX little blobs.

Two of them were definitely fingers, bloody gristly and all that Jazz. In my mind, I was going, "Great, incident verified. The dimwit running the place was gonna get slapped with a stupid fine, time to wrap up and go home."

Then the inspector started poking at the other four shrivelled grey blobs, because those were rats right? Dead rats? But why don't they have any skulls?

He poked one of them until it crumbled open and voila, those weren't rats. Those were dessicated, f*****g fingers. There SIX f*****g fingers in one machine.

After the two of us spent some time hurling chunks in a pot nearby, we got to hear some even better news.

This machine with the s****y safety s**t and six fingers in it? There were seven more machines just like that one in the factory. And the foreman admitted that the factory owner has been firing all the foreign workers operating the machine if anyone ever spoke about past incidents and suppressing all the incidents until someone finally had enough and reported him.

It was at that point where this stopped being an inspection and turned into a full blown criminal investigation and my company dropped the factory like a hot potato, but not before we sued the pants off the sick S.O.B naturally.

Last I heard, they had found close to 40 fingers and an actual goddamn ARM in the other machines and the dude was facing life in prison. My country is pretty s**t about workers rights, especially foreign workers, so I was honestly quite surprised they even managed to drag him to court in the first place.

Not an inspector, but i work in the food industry and there are these big packaging robots in our factory. These things have gates that close of every part of the machine so that no one can access anything while it's active and it shuts down as soon as a gate is opened.

Well here's the thing. It takes a while to reboot the machine when it shuts down and the operators don't like that. So in some MacGyver way they managed to rig the sensor in not noticing that the door is opened if they need to fix something or get some cardboard unstuck.

Last year a guy climbed into that machine to fix something and while he thought he was safe asked the new guy to press the start button on the machine to test if the fix had worked. The machine however didn't shut down because the gate had opened and just immediately restarted. The guy inside only had his ribs crushed because the new guy luckily had the reaction speed to press the emergency shutdown button in time.

Safe to say we've been in safety meetings and giving safety training for over a year now...

My old boss fell into an open pit while showing the inspectors around. Good times.

A man crushed under a piece of marble. He was already meeting his maker and his mortal remains are seared into my memory. The owner hadn’t checked on him in a few days and he probably had been conscious for a while, evidenced by the lack of nails, the scratch marks in the dirt, on the block and the lack of gas in the forklift. My first successful prosecution, go me!

I started work in a little factory. It’s been operating for almost 30 years. The day I started, I noticed there were zero fire extinguishers anywhere. None. Anywhere. In the entire building. Upon further inspection, there were no smoke detectors or fire alarms. I started asking around, and the employees told me they hadn’t ever had a fire drill. Ever. There wasn’t even a plan. The welders told me *there’s fires in the building all the time,* and they just scramble to put them out with whatever is on hand. For some reason, no one thought twice about it. They didn’t think about it ever. It was just cool.

I asked the safety guy. Like the manager dude that has “health and safety” on his badge. He lied to me and said that the plant was “grandfathered in to not having fire measures.”

Needless to say I quit. I had a conversation with a friend who works with an OSHA compliance agency, and he alerted whatever authority could take action. My friend’s employer actually ended up gaining a big contract from that factory to bring them up to code. The factory was ordered to do so under penalty.

Non American OSHA:

You people know that meme about the forklift carrying its younglings so they can reach the top of the shelf?
Exactly that but IRL with a 6ton and a 1.5 ton forklift in a building with 1t/m2 floor carrying capacity and about 1 ton of flammable s**t as cargo.

I'm no longer a safety inspector to keep my own health and sanity

Once saw a makeshift welding station shielded by beach umbrellas and duct tape. The worker was wearing sunglasses instead of a welding mask. Said it gave him a 'summer vibe'. I was speechless!

Not an OSHA inspector but as an electrician in the elevator industry one of our supervisors walked in to a 7 or 8 story lift shaft to find one worker in a makeshift harness made by combining and tying slings together being lifted up the shaft by a co worker using an electric winch hanging on the top of the shaft... They were both Chinese nationals the boss had bought over to work and were Actually very good Liftys but had absolute NO CONCEPT of safety and clearly no regard for their own lives

We had a volunteer (non profit business) with 20 years experience in building trades and another 5 as a volunteer, fire a nail gun through his hand while demonstrating to our clients how a nail gun has a mechanism to stop it from firing unless it was pressed up against something....

Former hospital safety inspector here. We acquired a surgeon’s private practice and when I went in to inspect the first time, there were soiled instruments with blood on them in the sink of the employee break room next to the used coffee cups. Biohazard waste receptacle and autoclave in there too. No separation of clean and soiled. I’m a firm believer in doctor’s offices being owned and run by hospitals because the standards are higher.

I'm not an OSHA inspector, but if my workplace had an inspection, it would go down badly.

Guy working a large drillpress at high feed with barely enough emulsion and no ventilation in a 4×4m box. Those fumes fry ur lungs and brain.

India styled cable management hanging atop and from a single pole hangar crane with a max lifting load of 1t, lifting 3t while bending about 10%.

Rod polishing on lathes with hands in gloves and long sleeve hoodies.

Hydraulic oil everywhere, usually collected if not spilled in large barells, then burned during winter in a shady oil furnace that catches fire once a week.

Chemicals in used water bottles with no labeling all around the place.

Everything that you touch zaps you most of the time, especially tap water while washing hands. We once took a tester and turned out everything in that place, even the hangar itself, had 35v running through at all times. Every single thing. Even the tap water.

Tens of unreported accidents a year. There was an employee who blew himself up a few years back. He was doing DIY pyrotechnics and smoked next to a powder mill. Explosives squad was called in, and they found 200kg of explosoves in his closet at work.

I'll share late, because I have a good one. I used to work in a factory that was insanely breaking the rules to "speed up the process" of making the materials they sell. Here's a couple:

1: Acid line running through the inside of the building from source to vats dripped in a doorway when running.

2: a catwalk above gigantic vats of hot nitric acid with no railing that workers went on to dump reagents into the vats, better just wear your respirator! (They never did)

3: the chemical procedure causes a nox gas to spew out and if something goes wrong the entire building can fill with this hazardous gas and you can even see it in the office area spewing across the ceiling; a thick orange/red cloud. No one except me ever left the building.

Someone was fired for smoking pot on the job (almost half of them did) and they notified OSHA of all the violations they could think of. OSHA came in and left without talking to anyone except higher up office staff. A couple days later we had to "sign" a change agreement to "be up to code." The sheet literally had 8 things written on it with a title at the top and crew name signature lists at the bottom. None of it included the most dangerous issues and that was the last I heard of any of it. I left that job shortly after.

Not OSHA but UK equivalent surveying pressure equipment under PSSR and HSE.

This was at an older factory that we'd just taken the insurance contract over. The stupidest thing I've seen was on a steam boiler that had recently had the burner swapped out for a newer model. Said newer model hadn't been set up correctly in relation to the operating pressure and kept lifting the safety valves. The boiler was rated to 14barg, operated at around 10.5barg, and the valves lifted around 11barg.

Any normal engineer would think to tune the burner properly or get the original unit refitted. What they decided to do, in their infinite wisdom, was to blank off the safety valve outlets, meaning they couldn't discharge to atmosphere. Effectively, they had created a massive bomb.

I only found it after seeing it go through a burn cycle, and watching the pressure shoot past the safety valve opening pressure and hit the SWL (even after the burner had stopped firing) without hearing the thunder and racketing of the safeties lifting. That was a fun phone call to our technical superintendent, and one of the longer reports I'd written (though not the longest).

Not an inspector, but was working on a job where some ceiling installer was on a scissor lift, bunch of guys underneath him, some working with water. Guy had a spotter who wasn't paying attention, as the lift operator was raising the platform, it caught onto a spider box cable (large electrical line) and was about to pull way too much tension. I ran over and yelled to get the operators attention, then was forced to hit the E shut off switch on the ground. He yelled at me, the spotter yelled at me, everyone looked at me wondering what I was doing. I pointed at the cable and asked him what he thought of it, operator saw the cable, and turned white as a ghost as he realized he almost cooked himself and others.

Bonus: I watched from the 5th floor as some gate installers almost killed themselves. They were installed a huge side slider gate to a concrete wall, gate popped loose and hit the ground, then fell over and nearly missed a guy by literal inches, the guy body slammed a porta potty to get out of the way.

I’m not an OSHA inspector but I am a lawyer that works for a very large company. We had a department team building playing laser tag on company premises and 4(!) separate attorneys ended up tripping over decor that had been put up and spraining their ankles. A week later the company president came to meet with the general counsel and saw a bunch of attorneys with matching boots on and freaked out.

I was the UK equivalent (Health and Safety Executive Inspector). I was inspecting and oil and gas production facility owned by one of the super majors.

In one of the pump rooms there was an eye wash station. On top of the eye wash station someone had left a bottle of acid.

It still makes me laugh (as no one was hurt) imagining a scenario like that from a third rate comedy movie where some poor soul got something in their eye, stumbles blindly to the eye wash station, and proceeds to squeeze a load of acid into their face.

Not an inspector, but at my previous job we'd had a bad accident in the factory (someone died) so OSHA came through for an inspection. The bosses had taken us all and said hey make sure you follow all the rules to the letter and be smart about this. I was walking the factory floor when the inspector showed up. He held up his clipboard and clicked a pen and said "ok let's see what we have here", and looked immediately to his left where a guy was pouring paint thinner into a 55 gallon drum from a 5 gallon bucket while having a lit cigarette in his mouth. I knew it was going to be good when the OSHA inspector had a wtf look on his face 5 seconds into the inspection.

I worked as an art fabricator. A client wanted us to spray oil paint with automotive sprayguns. The paint pigments are full of cadmium, cobalt, titanium, etc and it literally said "do not spray" on the side of the paint tubes.

The safety "precautions"? My boss gave us dust masks and stuck a fan in the window.

I was in my early 20s and just thankful to be out of food service. But the client showed up and flipped out when he saw how little protection we were given. Thankfully he made sure we all had proper respirators, tyvek suits, and colossal automotive down-draft air cleaners....3 months into the project.

Anyway...be nice to your wait staff bc heavy metal poisoning was preferable to getting screamed at over a burger.

Not OSHA cause not USA, but internal company safety inspector:

Guy broke a few bones after doing unsafe stuff without proper equipment.

Guy and his buddies knew the guy would get treated at the plant but would get a written warning for not following protocol (enought of those result in termination). So they hid the guy in a shipping container until end of shift (something like 3 hours) and carried him to the free hospital afterwards.