A Rather Long Intro

I want to tell my story. I want people to know my story. There will be pictures, I wont spare on the

details. I want people to know everything I’ve experienced and gone through. There is so much to

this story that people do not know, and I feel when people see how I am now, or how I have been

along the way, the severity of my accident is lost on them. You see, I’ve always been a positive person. I have always seen the positive in a negative situation or known there is light at the end of the tunnel. And if there is no light, well, you haven’t reached the end of the tunnel yet.

October 2017 I was electrocuted on a construction site in Perth. A crane I was working on made

contact with high voltage overhead powerlines, sending 132,000v through a metal pole, and then

through me, leaving me with burns to 38% of my body. How the f*&k am I alive? This is a question I

have asked myself many times.

In my first year of recovery I came up with many different ideas. Maybe I am dead, and I’m living a

6th Sense type of thing where one day Ill realise that I’ve been dead this whole time. Or, the electrocution did kill me, but I am now in an alternate reality where I survived, and in the original reality I am dead. Neither of these are real of course (or are they?)

As one of the doctors bluntly said to my wife – “nope he’s just lucky. He should be dead”

Let’s back track a little and set the scene for how this accident came to happen.

My whole life I wanted to be like my dad. To me he was always the epitome of what it meant to be a

man, and a father. I’ve always compared my life to his, and the things he had achieved by certain

ages. He was an officer in the army, he was a fitness instructor, he ran his own business, he was a

carpenter by trade, he made great sacrifices for his family, and is just an all-round good cunt. (this, is

the highest grading of being a great person here in Aus incase you didn’t know). He was great at his

job and for as long as I can remember I have been learning from him. This of course is why I became

a carpenter. I had the privilege of working on the same job as him a few times and it really brought

us close and gave us so much quality time together. Time I would have otherwise not gotten, given that most of the jobs were FIFO roles where we were away for 4 weeks at a time. These are memories I will cherish forever. I had the privilege of working on many large-scale oil and gas projects through the height of WA’s mining boom. And because of this, a high standard of safety was drilled into me. After a while you learn to respect the industry in a different manner. Plus, I feel I have always had good foresight, especially when you start to understand how accidents can happen. Some of the jobs I hated. I only hated them because of management on the job. Management can make or break a job in construction. It can mean you love your job or hate it. I have worked with many great supervisors, but I have also worked with almost as many f^*kwits. Ive been bullied, pushed around, given shit jobs, and isolated. But I kept my head down and worked my ass off. Ive

never let anyone of those assholes make me do anything unsafe. I have no problem standing my

ground or sticking up for my fellow man (something else I learned from my Dad, and my brother).

On the job I was working on at the time of my accident, I started to notice there was a few of these

supervisors around. The Job was split into 4 locations around Perth. The first of these locations is

where I encountered one such supervisor. For the most part he seemed fine, but there were certain

characteristics I found all too familiar. I asked to leave site half an hour early one day so I could

collect my daughter from daycare. My wife was a flight attendant and wasn’t in the state at the

time. Well fk me was that an issue. This guy has no idea about family. Later in the week I had to leave early for the same reason. His response was: “For fk sake Quinny I thought you said that was a once off” My response: “well its not going to be a once off mate because I still have a daughter”.

I knew I was going to butt heads with this guy over and over while I worked here. For this reason, as

on most jobs, I kept my head down and worked as hard as I could to prove my worth.Before I left that part of the job, to go to one of the other sites, I had a different kind of argument with him. This one really highlighted the level of respect for safety my superiors were holding. We were working 2-3 storeys below ground in an open pit. There was cantilever scaffold as the entrance and exit into the pit, with a lean to ladder as the last part of the scaffold. Our job at the time was to high pressure blast concrete out of the ferrules and other cast in objects. As you can imagine there would have been debris flying all over the place. As workers, we were well covered up with wet gear and double eye protection. I stopped to look around and there was other workers and supervisors, surveyors, engineers etc walking around the work area with regular safety glasses on. Often taking them off to wipe dirt from them. No big deal right? Except there was no first aid box down in the pit, no eyewash station either. Now, if someone gets a projectile in their eye, it’s pretty important to flush it out straight away.So I called my supervisor and explained the situation from him, and requested we have a first aid kit and eyewash station put down in the pit. His response was “There’s one at the top of the access”.

This baffled me. At the top of the access? You mean up 8 flights of cantilevered scaffold? So you’re

telling me If someone gets something shot into their eye from this high pressure blasting, they need

to blindly find their way to the lean-to ladder, climb it, then climb 8 flights of cantilevered scaffold, get to the top, try find the first aid kit and eye wash station, all with closed vision? Again the response was pathetic: “Quinny I’m not sending a first aid kit and eyewash station down there for people to take shit out of it whenever they want” So you’re telling me you are going to put everyone at risk, for the cost of a few Band-Aids and a $10eyewash bottle? I couldn’t believe it. Especially after all of the safety talk we endured in our inductions. I thought this site was going to be the safest in Perth. Turns out it was the most dangerous. Even after speaking to my safety rep the response was useless. “Yeah good luck with

that” he responded. How the fk these people get their jobs is beyond me. Well you can imagine my excitement when I was told I would be heading to one of the other sites on the project. What a difference! I was now working with a great team of blokes. Management was friendly and approachable. We had a laugh, worked well together and got the job done. Even with all of this though, there were still a few holes starting to appear. Just small things, but that’s where the snowball starts. We had to wait weeks for the correct ladders to arrive, but still we worked as safe as we could to keep the job going. Everyone here seemed to be on the same page when it came to safety. I was loving my job again.

Fast forward a few weeks and the worked had really stared to ramp up on site. Organisation was starting to slip. One Saturday we were trenching along one of the access roads. As the digger was removing the spoil, I noticed it was dumping it onto the access road. I couldn’t understand why there was no truck taking the contaminated soil away. We were trenching 3 m deep, and the spoil on the road was now 3m high. From where I was in the trench, there was 6 m of unstable soil waiting to cave in at any point. I asked over the radio if there was a truck coming to take this shit away, and bring clean fill in, for when we had laid the conduit. No was the answer, followed by a phone call telling me not to announce we were putting the contaminated soil back into the trench. I went home about half an hour after this. Part of the pile caved in, and although it only buried me up to my knees, I wasn’t interested in getting buried on a Saturday morning.

Onto another trenching incident. A digger driver and I stopped work to discuss how unsafe the bank

was getting. The soil here was very sandy and extremely un-cohesive. We decided to drop back and

start benching it out to eliminate any collapse. If you don’t know what benching is, basically it looks

like this:

This stops the walls from caving in. Management came down and asked what was taking us so long,

so naturally we explained the situation. They instructed the workers to carry on hand digging and laying the conduit as there wasn’t that much more to do. Basically, they wanted to do it the quick way, and didn’t care enough to listen to our concerns. Long story short, the bank collapsed and one of my workmates was sent to hospital with a suspected concussion after a pole came down with the bank and hit him in the head. Here’s the before and after shot of that:

The following day we had a meeting in the morning, where I stood up and voiced my concerns on behalf of the workers to management. I have been a construction supervisor before, so I have no problem voicing my opinion in a professional manner. I told them if they continued with the current safety culture, they would kill someone. Little did I know that a month later, that someone would almost be me. I feel like that adequately paints the picture for how things were going on site. There are many other examples I could give but let’s move on and start delving into how my life changed forever.