About 40 feet away from where I was working, a good 40 or 60 tons of rock came crashing down off the highwall. The pipe I was working on kicked a bit from the impact. My helper and I jumped but if we had been just down the road a bit all they would have found would have been our boots, sticking out from under a boulder.
I called my foreman to tell him the job was unsafe and that I was done. But he didn't answer and I had time to kind of cool down a bit. I looked at the wall above where we were working and it wasn't that bad. I had already cut the pipe and inserted the first of two huggers to repair it, so there was no point in leaving the job undone, the pit was slowly flooding and I wasn't about to leave it to the nightshift guy to do it. So anyways we finished the job (I commandeered the grader operator to watch the wall for us) and went home. Just another day in mining.
Earlier in the day, I was caught by my foreman and his boss hauling a flexible suction hose in a manner they deemed unsafe- I had hauled it up over the cab of my truck and chained it down so it wouldn't move. I didn't want to drag it on the ground for 10 kms so I thought this was a way better way to do it. The bosses disagreed and decided that it was better to do things the right way than the easy way. Fair enough, they even helped me rig it up differently.
A while later the big boss returned and we had an earnest heart to heart about safety. It was a lecture, but a gentle one. I didn't even mind, I am all about safety too. But then a few hours later I'm under the highwall doing my job. Boom! And I could have refused to finish that job, nobody would have blinked at that. Nonstop rain for so many days makes highwalls unstable. But I did it. I guess that makes me an unsafe worker. That's weird, eh? Last thing I want to do is get hurt, and definitely don't want to be squished by a boulder. But risk is part of the job, no matter how safety conscious you are. I don't see any way around that.