Bellagio 
2003 Reader Submission
Pending Acceptance
While this story probably doesn't have a place, or even qualifies for anything, it was still an interesting chain of events.
All of this happened within the last ten days before my lay-off from the Bellagio Casino while it was still under construction in late May/early June 1998. One of the events even made the local evening news:
In one day, 2 sprinkler fitters were injured, one seriously, when the platform scissors lift they were on (fully extended to maximum height) fell forward as they were moving it. Seems they tried to run it down a small incline ramp to further their sprinkler run. The sudden stop failed to keep the top-heavy lift from continuing it's forward momentum, and where these lifts usually fall over sideways, this was an end-o crash. Very messy. The apprentice was injured slightly, whereas the Journeyman, who should have known better, was in serious shape.
Later that day, an electrician was struck by a 20' long stick of 2" sprinkler pipe (yes, the same outfit, just two diffrent guys) when they left it unsecured on the top rail of their FULLY EXTENDED scissors lift. It rolled off the rail, fell about 25 feet to the floor, glancing off the hard hat brim (the electrician was wearing his hard hat backwards, which probably saved his life), flipping the hard hat one way and pushing the electrician the other way. He was lucky to walk away alive.
A couple of days later, an ironworker stepped backwards off of the deck and fell one floor to the ground below, doing a 180 sumersault and landing on his head, with hard hat still on, next to the steel column and wedged between several pieces of rebar. He stood up, yanked his hard hat out from the steel and climbed back up the column to continue laying out the deck he'd stepped off of. I was about 15' away when that one happened. Iron heads are nuts anyway...
It wasn't but a few days after that, that a section of tower crane they were removing fell from the 34th floor level (the Bellagio is 36 floors), and crashed into the ground below me. I was about 25' from the edge of the deck and one floor above, when I saw a shadow from the corner of my eye and heard a huge boom, then dust floating up. Seems the MonoKote guy had just checked his pumper truck and had stepped out of the area seconds before.
A day later, two poor Mexican guys were discovered hanging from the south side of the south tower. The hanging scaffold they were painting from snapped a rope or fitting and they were left suspended for OVER TWO HOURS, until some one discovered the wrong color paint on a lower section of the building. Only after some one looked UP, did they see why the ecru' didn't match the gold trim....
And last but not least; when you hire Mexican laborers, please make sure they know all of the proper words that will help them get home alive...like HOLE. An industrious laborer was busy cleaning up debris, when he lifted up a piece of plywood and promtly stepped into a well. He fell 30' and broke both legs. Even though it happened while I was still there that day, I watched a successful rescue that night on the local Vegas station. Maybe he thought HOLE was MOLE' misspelled or something......
I realize that not all construction workers are the brightest bulbs in the box, but in my 12 years in the trade (I'm an electrician), I've seen some pretty stooooopid stuff. The general public doesn't know the half of it. They only hear when there is a fatality, or when the accident is big enough there's no getting around the publicity.
If a building can get an award for trying to eliminate Darwin candidates; my vote is for the Bellagio. I took a lay-off and got the hell out! Submitted on 10/29/2002
Submitted by:
Jaki Osborn
Reference:
Las Vegas, Nevada 1998
Copyright © 2002 DarwinAwards.com
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