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I work in propane and have since late 2015. Used to work in the yard refilling, re-valving, painting, etc. these cylinders and tanks.
One of those things I did was empty (purge) the tanks before I pulled the valves out. Normally you do this by hooking them to a burn tower that pulls the fuel out and burns it away like 15 feet above everyone's head. My company didn't have permission from the city for they do we set up a tower anyway and just let the fuel pour out of it. You can imagine how... Fucking stupid that was?
Many times (I literally cannot count) people walked out with lit cigarettes and I was ready to die.
There's also the time my safety manager lit his flip flop on fire and kicked it over the propane dispenser WHILE IT WAS ON FIRE
Also: never swap your propane tanks at one of these cage services. Many of them will aim to give you a close to, or fully out of date tank so you cannot get them filled at a normal fill spot. They're also insanely expensive. If the swap out is $25 for a 5-gallon tank then you'd need to be spending $5/gallon at the dispenser for it to be even close in price, and if your propane dispenser is selling it to you for that or more then you're being fucked
Holy
Fucking
Shit
That's a wild story it just kept getting worse
Oh there's more like it, too, lol. Like the time a tank WASNT actually empty and I popped the valve off (I had done everything to bleed it off, the bleeder was stuck full of bug gunk I'd later find out). I was deaf for 5 minutes, the valve landed 1 building over, luckily didn't hit anyone/anything.
Then there's the time the cigarette guy climbed up the back of a fuel truck and popped the tank and looked in. He had a cig in his mouth, lit, and thought it was a diesel truck. It was a gas one. Had it been more empty (this fumes) he'd likely have blown his stupid ass up. Instead, he jumped off and twisted his ankle. I unironically hate that man with a passion for many, many reasons.
Or the time my co-worker was doing knife work and just stabbed himself in the gut. That one's a classic: overconfidence in cutting TOWARDS one's self.
Ooh, ooh, a good one: trimming trees with a chainsaw while on a pallet on a forklift 20ft in the air, held on by a rope tied around your WAIST. That was also the safety manager lol
Let me be clear: I've worked for chickenshit outfits like this before, where safety was an afterthought, so I can appreciate and relate to these stories.
That said, these all take the cake. Like I have seen and done some really sketchy shit, and these all top most of my stories.
I used to work 16+ hour days, stand in a dump trailer (confined space sort of), in the dark, and have a tractor lift 1 tonne bags of pellets into the trailer, open them (working under a suspended load), and dump the contents at my feet. The bags sometimes ripped from their hooks on the tractor and would come down fast.
Holy shit dude... the flip flop of fire story. How did that nutcase become a manager? Let alone a safety manager?
Funny enough he really was the safest and smartest guy on the team, the burning flip flop was someone else's fault lol
They'd poured some unknown diesel on the ground and held a lighter to it (testing if it was tainted with gasoline, it'll burn if so) and apparently it was VERY gasoline mixed. Idiot grabs a WATER HOSE to spray it so safety manager, who's on lunch and pulling into the yard jumps out of his truck and stomps on the fire to put it out. Just as the first guy sprays the water.
The fire skitters and lights the flip flop on fire, which safety manager kicks off without a thought because it was ON FUCKING FIRE, he just happened to arc it perfectly over the 500g dispenser tank. Another coworker ran over from "off camera" and doused it like 5 seconds after that, it was truly a comedy.
If safety manager was around then all of us yardies were in our steel toes, Anti-Flame gear, and wearing a mask and glasses if the work called for it. He was in the office 90% of the time dealing with bullshit though so we 3 idiots and an actually autistic guy that was so bad he needed supervision just to live (yeah they let him work around EXPLOSIVES) regularly did shit that would have gotten us shut the fuck down, and rightfully so. Gotta eat, though, so...