Morbidity

This past week two children have died in equipment related accidents in Lancaster County. A six year-old was run over by a skid loader. And a three year-old Amish boy suffocated in a fertilizer spreader.
We work with equipment a lot at work. Skid loaders, tractors, dump trucks and stuff like that are all part of the daily routine. As spring wears on we have become even busier than normal. Organization and maintenance get left behind. This Thursday it caught up with us and I watched as our equipment destroyed a young life innocently standing his front lawn.
The trailer was parked on a hill in a development. It’s a peaceful development, the kind where children play in the yard and parents walk their dogs and chat with neighbors. I hitched the trailer up with-out giving it much thought: crack the jack, latch the ball, add the safety chains and attach the break-away brake. As my boss pulled away up the hill the hitch bounced off of the ball. Apparently I had failed to fasten it correctly. But that’s what safety chains are for: catching my mistake. The big moment for the safety chains came and their hooks bent without slowing the trailer at all. The break-away brake that should have locked all four of the trailers wheels didn’t trigger.
I ran along side trying to block the wheels with 6”x 6” blocks, but 22 feet of run away steel will do whatever it wants. In this case it wanted to go down hill through a development as fast as it could. The first thing it hit was the set of skid loader forks we had left on the shoulder of the road. They spun around and redirected the trailer a few degrees: on a bearing through a yard. As I sprinted in vain I realized that things were about to get worse.
He really didn’t deserve to get maimed. But sometimes you are in the wrong spot at the wrong time. And he was in the wrong spot and this was the wrong time. He had stood there and watched us work for most of the day. He never said anything: just watched. But that wasn’t unusual, that kind of thing happens in developments all the time.
I guess what happened to him was a lot like getting hit by a truck: a lot of metal hitting really fast. When the trailer stopped he was laying in the grass. We didn’t really know what to do. I had never been in this situation before. We pulled the trailer off of him and loaded him into the truck.
It took several hours but he was resuscitated. I had to find a pressure treated post and some stain, but I was generally able to reconstruct him. His little red flag still worked and I managed to reuse his numbers. We dug a new hole the next day and he stood there and watched us finish the job.