Attitudes towards occupational hazards in railroading and elsewhere

When you consider all the hazards in the world that all of us are exposed to daily...well heck we had all better stay in a bubble.  Yes the hazards are out there..everywhere...now about all we can do is live life and take the best precautions we can.

Chris

Another perspective to this discussion are the enormous gains made in railroad safety beginning with the elimination of link and pin couplers, the adding of air brakes, Centralised Traffic Control, Crossing Protection, Radio communications, GPS etc, etc. Then I think of my wife's grandfather who died of black lung disease from the years of mining coal up in Pennsylvania. My father died of brain cancer brought on by the fumes of cleaners used in the printing industry decades ago, yet his mother, my grandmother out lived him by nearly two decades, and my own son died at 21 from an missed diagnosis of having an enlarged heart. Life is a gift, and we all know how the story ends, for some sooner and for some later.Knowing what a unnecessary risk is and not knowing you are taking one is a part of having the common sense and concern for family even if you don't give a fig.

And there is plenty of grey areas around today in our more synthetic environment. 

Taking care of your health is no sign of weakness nor is being concerned for others and writing all this off with we are all gonna die anyway... that is one of the dumbest things I have ever read here. Otherwise we'd still be spraying DDT, using lead paint, having mercury fillngs etc, etc. We cannot reverse the irreversible but sitting on our hands and writing it all off  as if speaking for others because life is too short anyway is no commonsense solution either. At least to me it isn't. Life is too precious to say "I'm gonna die anyway".  

 What about the Engineers and breathing all that silicon sand YUCK !

TWA is TIME Weighted average.

Well, actually it's aging, which starts the second AFTER you're born.   

During the 70s and 80s, I was in and around the MU Yard at South Amboy quite frequently, not to mention the various types of electric equipment with their transformers containing PCBs. After the yard was taken out of service and closed years back, it was fenced off as a contaminated area. It's been about 30 years and I'm not glowing in the dark, at least not yet.

Nowadays, I think the group most at risk in railroading may be the three railers breathing in all of that MTH and Lionel smoke. Yuck.

Bob     

Interesting that someone would mention DDT; it's my understanding that no human ever died as a result of exposure to it; most of the problem was making the shells of eggs of some birds more fragile.  But how many millions have died of malaria in the third world since Rachel Carson got DDT banned?  Now my church wants to send them mosquito netting to use at night; I said I'd contribute to however much DDT that ten bucks would buy, but I was looked at like a maniac that I would suggest such a thing.  DDT was far more effective than all the netting in the world, but effectiveness doesn't matter as long as you're politically correct . . .

Someone said that you could design and build an automobile in which you could survive any crash at any speed.  The trouble is that it would be so expensive that you couldn't afford to buy it, and it would be so heavy that you couldn't afford to run it if you did buy it.

Everything's a trade-off.  If you want to move to the middle of the safest room in the house when there's a lightning storm, by all means do so. 

As I said in an earlier post, I've inhaled my share of hazardous railroad stuff as well as 28 years worth of satisfying carcinogens from tobacco products.

If I had chosen to avoid all that stuff, I might live longer but I wouldn't have had near as much fun. 

And, as I also said, I've known a lot of people to die from various causes, not all accidental on the railroad, that I'd have rather seen live longer.  I sympathize with those of you who share such bereavements.  But hashing them over doesn't accomplish a whole lot, IMHO, except in many cases to reopen old wounds.

EdKing

first let me say I read every post in this thread before replying...

Ace - I am sorry to hear about your friends stricken with such problems.

Two years ago my father jogged a marathon.  Two weeks yesterday ago he went to walk the dog in the morning and never made it back to the house.  Dad was dealing with a rapidly onsetting Parkinson's.  He had tremors in his hand and arms.  He couldn't play cards any more, which he loved.  A lifelong accountant, he was the student accounts manager at a nearby liberal arts college.  The weekend before he and mom had made the decision that instead of waiting to the end of the school year he was going to give two weeks notice for his retirement that day.  Sometimes he could walk right - he would just shuffle. 

  Turns out that inspite of a decade worth of clean cardio-vascular records dad hed big blood clots around his lungs.  One of them broke away and sent my father's heart into some wild arithmea that took from us faster than you can blink.

God I miss my Dad.............

Any way who knows what brings some of these things on.  My Dad was 67.  My Grandfather lived to 98 and that included working in aircraft factories during WWII.

I do industrial work.  I used to run a steam loco in tourist service.  Last time I had to list on the chemicals I been exposed to I needed another piece of paper.  Supposedly my health is fine. 

As to the large amounts of metal dust.. any inhalition of solid particles is bad for you, some worse than others. Metal from grinding can be particularly bad because the odd shape solid particles get lodged inthe lungs and there is no way for the body to reject them.  However there is also no known mechanism for the body to break done these solid particules that would allow an elements contained in them to get into the blood stream.   My dad was an office guy.  He was exposed to primarly to flourescent lights and bad coffee.  Yet Parkinsons was forcing him to retire before something else took him away. 

I haven't observed the big clouds of dust your talking about but I have seen rails worn to the web.  Also I know several tourist railroads still use cast shoes because composite ones have their one emissions - they stink. 

Oh heck I forget the question.  I just miss my Dad.