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Hmmm, I'm sure there's an element of the Guardian giving Amazon a kick, because it's Amazon but just wondering whether anyones place a work has procedures in place for this?
In this case, it seems the employee died of natural causes whilst at work so not an industrial accident.
I'm guess businesses above a certain size and/or type would not want to shut down for (multiple?) days or hours but what is acceptable?
Loads of folk die at your place of work if you're a nurse...
We did have on-site deaths at my work - natural causes. At least a couple while I was there. Business carries on as normal.
Wot Scotroutes says 🙂 at a guestimate 500 or so 🙂
Amazon can’t be kicked enough.
Mrs Vlad used to work at a cancer hospice, so just about every shift 😔
But outside of healthcare...
A friend started a new job and was being walked round to meet the team.. "and this is bill's office. Good morning Bill. Bill? BILL!". Poor old Bill had croaked after getting to work that morning,sat at his desk.
A friend started a new job and was being walked round to meet the team.. “and this is bill’s office. Good morning Bill. Bill? BILL!”.
Well, that was some foresight by the employee! Or was it something more sinister?
They could have posted him back home rather surround him with boxes. Prime of course - only the best service.
In the 80s I worked at Portsmouth Polytechnic. Someone jumped off the roof of the 9 storey building. Don't think it was an employee though.
Once witnessed a guy asking a lady when she was due to give birth... she wasn't.
I think he hoped he'd died, rather than live with the embarrassment.
That's quite tough. They clearly had to wait for a coroner so couldn't move the body. They absolutely had to hide it from view, that's just decency. The only real question is whether or not they should have shut down the section with workmates but that may not even have been possible without shutting everything down.
If it was natural causes and a huge organisation i would expect things to keep moving. In a small org where everyone knows each other i would expect everything to stop for a while. If not natural causes then it's different
We've had a few 🙁
work in a psych unit, we've had 2x staff have heart attacks, 1 major, he was dead, fortunatley resused, using equipment/trained staff on the ward, literally anywhere else, and he would be dead, other she was just very unwell and it was diagnosed in hospital
We had a passenger die on a long haul flight I was operating once, we were rolling down the runway at the time of the incident, CPR etc was administered but he was long gone. The aircraft continued onto the destination as planned with his wife by his side. That was a long 13 hours.
We had a waggon driver have a heart attack driving past a job we were on. Crashed into the welfare unit. For all accounts he was dead. Our forman jumped into the cap and gave CPR. Saved him...
We had a passenger die on a long haul flight
That's a super tough one but not unheard of i guess. Are there standard procedures as to what to do then?
At an office I used to work in one of the staff murdered a colleague, then bundled her body into his car in the garage where I used to keep my bike. Pretty grim to think about.
That’s quite tough. They clearly had to wait for a coroner so couldn’t move the body. They absolutely had to hide it from view, that’s just decency. The only real question is whether or not they should have shut down the section with workmates but that may not even have been possible without shutting everything down.
A few years ago I was at a Hogmanay/NYD do at a Highland hotel. When we went down for breakfast in the morning, one of the residents had passed away, sitting in the hallway. After trying CPR etc we had to move furniture around the body just to keep it out of sight while we awaited the ambulance, GP and then the undertaker. There's only one undertaker covering the area North of Inverness on NYD so the body was there for quite a while. The hotel had to function as normal while all of this was going on.
That’s pretty grim Newretrotom.
We had a member of staff commit suicide, multi-storey office, the jumper went from the 04th floor onto the atrium floor.
In the military we had one of the guys on guard duty take his own life as well. Shot himself while inside a sangar. Thankfully I wasn’t on duty, really felt for the guys who had to go in and sort the mess out with that one.
Probably not what was being asked, but my company also lost 295 staff in New York on 9/11. We had a floor in the WTC.
Quite a few. Occupational hazard unfortunately, lessons often learned, kit developed/procured to try and reduce the risk.
Sadly some are far more preventable than others, they're the ones that leave mark more than the others.
Quite a few. Occupational hazard unfortunately
I guess that is true unfortunately. Are you given training on how to handle it (emotionally) in advance or is that pretty much impossible?
We had a member of staff commit suicide, multi-storey office, the jumper went from the 04th floor onto the atrium floor.
Bristol by any chance? RIP Bob.
Not technically a place of work but an event I was working on as a Ride Leader - one of the riders was killed by a driver. Stupid overtake, pulled in, clipped her and she went down. We were the second group on the road, passed by and the group who'd been with her had surrounded her, one guy administering CPR.
Nothing I could do but take the group I was with onto the next stop, update the staff there. The first group had already called 999.
The rider passed away in hospital. 😥
Really sobering for the whole ride team and everyone else on the ride - a lot of whom had got held up behind the road closure that had been out in place to deal with the incident.
I guess that is true unfortunately. Are you given training on how to handle it in advance or is that pretty much impossible?
There's a whole host of training for various key appointment/roles, plenty of briefs on operational stress and the like, but no amount of courses lessens the blow of losing someone you may have spent a considerable amount of time living, working, suffering and socialising with.
Oddly there is still a pang of loss when you may not even know them. There's something about the shared profession, probably very similar in other uniformed services no doubt.
But the bond of the team along with the various organic support options help lessen the blow. It becomes a little stickier when it's an accident or suicide.
The thing two things I saw get in the way of helping people overcome the trauma is when individuals decide they know better than the support processes put in place and decide not to support someone who needs it through said process and individuals masking whats going on for them.
The latter is part of the human condition I think. The former is terrible leadership.
loads every day, but I do work in a hospital. quieter now the dept isn't next to the mortuary though
At an office I used to work in one of the staff murdered a colleague, then bundled her body into his car in the garage where I used to keep my bike. Pretty grim to think about.
Was that Suzanne Pilley?
Aren’t they absolutely enormous places and I suspect American ones even bigger. I wonder what the real story is?
Was that Suzanne Pilley?
Yes, it was.
Everyday people die at my work.
over the last couple of years we also had more than one staff member die. Was it the work environment that caused their death or COVID in the community… who knows
Was that Suzanne Pilley?
Just reading about that case. Seems his family are still maintaining his innocence.
Was that Suzanne Pilley?
Yes, it was.
I listened to the Body of Proof podcast when it came out. Interesting and disturbing case - especially as they’ve never found her body. He must be an evil bastard not to let her parents recover her body to bury her.
One of the butchers I worked with in Safeway (A giant guy called Neil, really nice bloke too) fell down some concrete stairs and died of a brain hemorrhage. We dont know though if it was the fall that caused it, or whether he had this hemorrhage and that caused the fall, but results are the same.
He was a nice guy indeed, always a big beaming smile. Damned unfortunate, and he'd have been mid 50's i think.
Every single day. Mostly patients, but there's been a few colleagues and volunteers - one recently on a flight and he was far too young.
There's a team next to me that manage the investigations into preventable deaths and I sometimes review their reports. It's eye opening stuff (npi) just how little we know for certain about human bodies.
One member we call the 'death lady' does the coordination of death certificates and coroner business.
The bike locker and the changing rooms are next to the mortuary at one of the hospitals i work at. So there's often bodies coming and going when i'm getting changed or locking/unlocking my bike.
Sad news at the Nestle factory today when a member of staff was seriously injured when a pallet of chocolate fell more than 50 feet and crushed him underneath...
He tried in vain to attract attention but every time he shouted "The milky bars are on me" everyone cheered
I'm a first aider at a large government office complex. Not had anyone die on me yet, but training and procedures are to clear people out the way for dignity and privacy while we do CPR/defib before the professionals arrive.
We're an open plan office, so we might clear the wing (200 people at most), but the rest of the building would carry on as normal.
Had a colleague suffer a seizure that resulted in severe brain damage - I’d come in briefly on my day off and ended up trapped inside as we were locked down whilst the paramedics spent a long time doing CPR. The sudden loss was akin to them dying as they never recovered/ permanently disabled and pretty distressing for family and friends.
Members of the public on the hill mostly and the occasional soldier on training/selection.
Heart attacks, exposure, lightning strikes, crash landings.
I'll stick below the tree line where it's far safer with chainsaws, winches, cranes and falling trees.
When we went down for breakfast in the morning, one of the residents had passed away
I saw the documentary about this case on TV
A new guy in my team started, a few days later he went home at the end of day, didnt come back the next day. Died of heart attack on the bus in the next morning.
Not as far as I’m aware, but we had a very close call a while back, when we had a late shift; we had a couple of car transporters parked in the arrivals yard, and it was dark. One of the drivers walking around his rig heard an odd noise, so had a look between his rig and the one next to his, and discovered the other driver, partially underneath his trailer. He’d fallen from the middle deck, so roughly six or seven feet! Emergency services were called, the Wiltshire Air Ambulance was dispatched as it’s literally a couple of minutes flight time away and it landed in the car park, after a bunch of cars were quickly cleared out of the way.
It’s fortunate that we had the space at the time to allow it to land on site. AFAIK, the driver didn’t sustain life-threatening injuries, if he’d been on the top deck, it would have been a different story, that’s about twelve feet…
An ex-work colleague died at work at a GP's surgery.
soldier on training/selection.
A little part of me died every time I ended up at Brecon.
MCTD- is that QEH or 1AS..?
One of the (2) Facilities Mgmt staff, more commonly known at the time as Maintenance Mick, he had a fatal cardiac in the gym area attached to the office block; maybe 25 years ago now. So there weren't many people nearby at the critical moment, and he was gone by the time he was found. Classic heart attack case, middle aged, rather overweight, doing some atypical cardiovascular exercise at the time. All handled very respectfully at the time as I recall, and it resulted in 'panic cords' being installed in the gym. Presumably they were linked back to some display on the Reception desk.
A member of staff jumped off the roof of our seven storey office. The poor receptionist was first on the scene.
A colleague had a heart attack and died driving to work. Another mile he would have been at his work with a few acute assessment unit doctors to deal with him.
We had a passenger die on a long haul flight I was operating once, we were rolling down the runway at the time of the incident, CPR etc was administered but he was long gone. The aircraft continued onto the destination as planned with his wife by his side. That was a long 13 hours.
Surely nobody on board was qualified to make that call? Seems at odds with any first aid training I've ever had.
Surely nobody on board was qualified to make that call?
Yeh it seems a strange decision not to flip round, I suppose it gets more complex if it needs to spend two hours getting over the ocean, dumping a load of fuel and then coming back to land.
We've had a few deaths (national company). Only one at my physical place of work (suicide) and his immediate team/colleagues were called in/supported/allowed home. Complicates things if it were a warehouse environment where you can't risk details ending up on social media before next of kin are traced (sounds like it might have taken a while to contact them in the amazon case)
We've also had a drowning, someone killed by a car that left the road onto grass, a fall from height after a structure was hit by a vehicle. I know we've also had electrocution from hv powerlines, not sure how those incidents turned out, was not told it was fatal. I'm sure there are a lot more but we only tend to hear about local ones, those that make the news, and those where safety needs to be reiterated or result in a change of procedure.
We had a teacher who was older (well my age now) taking afternoon sports, cross country, drop dead on the playing field. Kids sent home, next day was pretty much as usual.
That's when the old adage of not sacrificing everything for work as they'll replace you tomorrow without a second thought, hit home.
A few weeks later a diabetic teacher passed out in the process of opening the door. When I got there they were huddled in a corner too afraid to move the "body". It was an undignified shove to open the door. He was fine after a bit of sugar.
I was first-aider on scene when someone got badly injured working with explosives about 20 years ago - not much I could do other than reassure him and spray water over him until the paramedics arrived.
He died in hospital a few days later due to 85% burns.
There have been one or two fatalities at my current company, but none in our department/building.
I've worked for a few 'industrial' processing-type companies, so yes - although I do remember the year we got our 'nobody died in an accident at work this year' bonus, only got it that one year though...
We unfortunately have had a few over the years. Some caused by work some natural causes. Working in a global company of few hundred thousand people its kind of inevitable (the the natural ones).
The silver lining if you can call it that is we have very good death in service benefit (although pretty sure the families would prefer the individuals to a wad of cash).
We had a passenger die on a long haul flight I was operating once, we were rolling down the runway at the time of the incident, CPR etc was administered but he was long gone. The aircraft continued onto the destination as planned with his wife by his side. That was a long 13 hours.
I was on a flight where an air steward seemed to start shouting 'are you all right sir' down the aisle seemingly at me just as we were about to launch - engines were spoiling up but the wheels hadn't started to turn. He by whatever means aborted the take off and it turns out the guy sitting behind me was looking a bit grey and distressed. He apparently suffered from various heart complaints. His wife, who'd decided not to sit next to him, was reassuring the flight crew that 'he's fine this happens all the time' and to just get on with it but the flight crew refused to take off with him on board as once the they take off - as with the example above - once you start heading down the runway theres not really any turning back.
So we sat on the runway while the ambulance and paramedics came and took the guy away.... then sat waited for a new take off slot and then, as it was near midnight by now and beyond the time we would have arrived at our destination, had to wait for a new crew to start as ours were now over their hours
Thankfully nobody's ever died in my actual office, but there's been more than one customer within a gym/sports centre (we run several of those) - but even more have been 'rescued' via CPR/defib though.
The hotel had to function as normal while all of this was going on.
That reminds me of a holiday in Venezuela and the 'normality' that continued when a hotel guest passed away while in line for the all-inclusive dinner buffet. Staff covered the body with a white sheet and most folk continued to get their food, while the body lay covered in the middle of the floor. We decided to go hungry that night.
Surely nobody on board was qualified to make that call? Seems at odds with any first aid training I’ve ever had.
In the air its a legal requirement to administer CPR on an adult for a minimum of 30 minutes once the defibrillator has been attached. If during those 30 minutes the defrib continues to advise that no shock is required then CPR can be ended as the casualty has passed away.
The aircraft was laden with fuel for a 13 hour flight so landing was not an option, the commander of the aircraft and the company have to decided if it would make any difference landing. It would have taken a considerable time to dump enough fuel to get down to a safe landing weight and after 30 minutes no life was detected so the decision was made to continue.
at an old job - one of our (expat) guys in a west africa staff house didnt report for work on a saturday - which happened often after friday night beers so the lads went into the office.
Sunday - no one went in .
Monday - he was still a no show so his door was forced.
Poor fella was found slumped behind the door in his room - Heart attack - potentially since friday night/saturday morning.
Procedures were changed - every day you had to at least answer your door at bus time or it would be forced.
In the air its a legal requirement to administer CPR on an adult for a minimum of 30 minutes once the defibrillator has been attached.
I’d love to see that legislation… it sounds like a company policy or perhaps some IATA guidance that people are renaming “legal requirement”. Which country’s law? Because in general if you are within the physical jurisdiction of a country you are going to be within 30 mins of an emergency landing.
a requirement to administer cpr regardless seems dubious - what if the casualty has a well understood do not cpr request in place (older people and those with long term health issues do fly, and could board an aircraft seemingly well).
What does the law say if there is a doctor on board who decides life is extinct after 15 minutes of cpr?
Does the “law” mean that if the aircraft was awaiting a landing slot it will continue to circle for 30 mins (presumably you can’t do cpr on the final landing approach) delaying the transmission to hospital.
what’s the ”law” for children or babies?
I’m going to suggest (without having seen what this so called “law” says) that it’s much more likely it says something to the effect of “if CPR and no shockable rhythm on an adult for greater than 30 minutes there is no realistic prospect of survival and diverting to make an emergency landing is unlikely to be beneficial” (or words to that effect - doing cpr for 30 minutes just because someone thinks it’s the rules is not a dignified way to die).
Worked in a few places where people died of natural causes. Sad but given the size of the workforces inevitable. Have also worked somewhere where people were killed. That was not an experience I’d care to repeat.
My Dad (a professional musician) used to tour with several orchestras, mainly Royal Philharmonic but a few others too.
On a tour of South America, one of the musicians slit his wrists in the hotel bath. His absence was only discovered the next morning getting on the bus to go to the concert hall for rehearsals and then the hotel maid discovered the guy.
Apparently the arrangements for getting the body and an unaccompanied cello home from Brazil were far from simple...
Have had a few.
One of the guys at my first job used to sleep at his desk at lunchtime, he had a heart attack and no one noticed until lunch finished. Amazingly, that was the first death on site for about 10 years, which is pretty amazing for an industrial chemical factory.
One of my friends from way back had a spate, 5 or 6 guys over the space of about 18 months, all died in the same toilet/shower block, all over 60 years old, he was shift lead in one of the manufacturing areas at the time, and found all but one of them. Ended up taking a leave of absence after the last one and getting his MSc, so now he isn't a shift lead, and doesn't deal with people often.
At the current place i had an older colleague had a stroke while sitting about 10 m from me in the office. He died in hospital a few days later, same place a guy walking down the stairs had a massive heart attack. Was dead before the first aiders got to him.
We've had some people die doing stupid things, it's (unfortunately) the nature of certain people to think that because they are driving a fast car, they should drive fast. And we have a lot of fast cars here.
Having witnessed the clean up of a 120 mph impact between a car and some nature (no human deaths though), i leave it to fenced test tracks, comprehensive risk assessments and lots of controls.
Previous job work colleague was squashed dead in Africa by a forklift and a large machinery packing case that slid off the forks.
Current job - contractor fell off extraction system and bounced off a steel walkway, died in hospital.
Happy thread.
it sounds like a company policy or perhaps some IATA guidance that people are renaming “legal requirement”.
It's an IATA guideline
Because in general if you are within the physical jurisdiction of a country you are going to be within 30 mins of an emergency landing.
Jurisdiction is a tricky word when it comes to aeroplanes, pilots-in-command etc.
Because in general if you are within the physical jurisdiction of a country you are going to be within 30 mins of an emergency landing.
While we were within about 10 minutes of a runway the aircraft was unable to land.
what’s the ”law” for children or babies?
60 minutes.
Had a colleague collapse at work with liver failure due to excess alcohol consumption - he wore dark glasses all the time to hide his yellow eyes and reknown for his long, liquid lunches. Anyway, put on strict doctors orders regarding zero drink consumption. Signed himself out and flew out to Spain for a holiday with mates where he died of liver failure. Insurance refused to pay for his repatriation. He was a knob.
Fatal incident where someone was doing some maintenance on a large sheet metal press and hadn’t locked-out the interlocks properly and someone came along and pressed the button…
My father used to work in a steelworks and hot strip mill - deaths were almost a weekly occurrence - memorable one was a crane driver taking a piss off a high gantry and hitting a 440V supply.
Fall from height is the most common cause of work-related fatality https://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/fatals.htm . The LD50 for falls from height is 48 feet (four stories) and the LD90 is 84 feet (LD is lethal dose). Contrast that with, say, cycling, using v = sqrt(gh) gives a LD50 velocity of 12 m/sec or 26.6 mph. Come to a dead stop at that speed and it can be very serious (my dead stop was at 20 mph).
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00068-017-0799-1 makes for sober reading.
When I was young, I worked in a small factory, about 50 employees. One old guy had a heart attack and died on the job, he was a forklift operator so it happened outside. The factory kept running, an ambulance came and hauled him away. There was no point in shutting down the factory. The company shut down the factory and gave everyone a paid afternoon off to attend the funeral, small site so everyone knew everyone else. I don't think anybody thought they should have shut down the factory at the time, but shutting it down for the funeral was the only decent thing to de. Besides which, he was a popular guy so it was either close for the afternoon or have everybody just take the whole day off anyway.
As far as Amazon goes, I think they should have given the worker's closest colleagues the day off. Those warehouses are huge, I don't think there's much more that the managers could do other than partition off the section where the body was and keep the rest running. Shutting down the entire site is pretty unrealistic.
Had a couple die at the surgery, but it's not common.
I set up a community based glaucoma surgery unit in Wakefield in about 2014, we were open 2 weeks when this v old chap came in (he was in his early 90s) chatted to the nurses, full of beans, and very much looking forward to restored sight. Operation went well, and I was walking him back to the recovery room when he just keeled over. Turned out he'd had an MI that more or less did for him on the spot. As we're at a local GP/walk in centre we had enough staff and equipment and knowledge, but he was gone, poor chap.
I'm self-employed and work from home.
If I've died I've not been copied in on the memo.
BITD whilst working on site a few guys have fallen from scaffolding or from roofs..... Either chippies or scaffies.
No site shutdown.
Big office in the early 90's.
One bloke used to buy multipacks of chocolate bars and sell them from his desk. Died of a heart attack, no one noticed 'till someone went to buy a KitKat from him.
Used to be a care worker specialising in end of life home care for cancer patients.
Managed about 18 months before I had to quit.
It takes it out of you eventually.
MCTD- is that QEH or 1AS..?
Neither, 1US.🤣
This happened at another plant to the one i worked at, i can remember going to an induction there, and the foreman said going round and speaking to relatives is a really $h___y job. Something he never wants to do again.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/nov/10/wales
considering the size of our office (pre covid) I think we've just had the one fatal heart attack, not on my watch thankfully (im a first aider).
we run a large building in manchester with a huge open atrium that open as high as the 10th floor, i'm not looking forward to the day we get a jumper 🙁
i have worked at 2 places where people died whilst i worked ther.
in the 80's i worked at a big engineering place. we made rolling stock, sprinter trains, huge railway liquid tankers and nuclear flask containers for BNFL.
1 day, 2 blokes were working on a tanker, grinding some damaged welds out and patching em up.
theory was that the oxy pipe was leaking, and when they started grinding after lunch, the thing ignited, like a contained bomb. burned the both alive.
then in the early 90's i worked in a steel stockyard, driving cranes. was working in the next bay to a mate offloading some very large steel beams. there was a technique use for get a gap at the headboard end of a wagon, to get the chains on. crane drive was at other end. wagon drive put chains on beams, but not far enough.
he then jumped down on the inside of the wagon.
when the crane drive lifted the beams. the chain slipped off and the beams tipped over and fell on the wagon driver at side of wagon.
2 horrible incidents.
On theme of dead people on planes
https://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/dead-passengers-british-airways-flights-3630744
No-one at work, but we had an old lady collapse right outside the entrance; me and another first aider were called and tried CPR but it seemed pretty obvious she'd just dropped down dead (there was a doctor's surgery just up the road who were quickly called and a doctor was on the scene before the ambulance and he told us to stop fairly soon after)
the foreman said going round and speaking to relatives is a really $h___y job
I've had to do this once for a colleague - still not sure exactly what had happened but I think the boss was giving him a proper bollocking when he went grey and slumped in his chair. The boss then called first aid and once off to hospital then told me to call his wife, as he didn't feel up to it (guilt probably!)
That was a horrible phone call; "Mrs B, nothing to worry about but Dave's been taken ill, he's on his way to the hospital, can you meet us there". Especially as he was a travelling salesman visiting the main office and his wife was 200 miles away. Whenever I talk H&S to my team, I always think of that day and ask them to never give me reason to make that sort of call again.
We used to work in a big open three floor office with a central atrium. Poor guy keeled over with a heart attack in the atrium.
The beeping of the defibrillator running for so long trying to resuscitate him was sad and grim especially as we couldn't really move everyone out of their desks.
Some of the Death in Service benefits can be quite good for some .