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A commercial fishing skipper’s decision to make a mayday call moments before the boat sank probably saved the lives of his crew, but also may have cost him his own life. Reports say that Captain Robert Royer suffered a fatal head injury while leaving the 75-foot Northern Belle earlier this month just before it foundered on the Gulf of Alaska 50 miles south of Montague Island. Reportedly, the vessel’s Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon did not activate, so Royer, stayed…

As he walked behind a truck, a an oil and gas “swamper” tripped as the truck was backing up with a load and was killed when the vehicle drove over him, reports say. The workplace accident occurred in June when a drilling rig was being moved to another site. With approximately ten loads remaining to transport off the site, a pole truck driver and his helper – or swamper — were relocating a grated landing. A sling had been secured…

A crew member of a Qatargas time-chartered vessel died from injuries he sustained while boarding a service launch from the ship on which he had been working.  The worker, who had just completed his tour of duty and was leaving the ship to return home, was moving from the ship to a launch to take him ashore. The ship’s gangway was rigged so that the crew would have to jump from the gangway to the second ship’s deck, a distance…

A worker at a stone fabrication shop was killed after being crushed by a 700-pound slab of granite while moving the stone to a storage rack. The accident occurred on a recent Saturday afternoon, while the victim and a co-worker were moving stone slabs into the warehouse from an outdoor storage area. The 49-year-old victim acted as a spotter while the co-worker operated a forklift. The accident occurred when the special lifting device called a jib-boom, which pushed against the…

After a cloud of toxic gas escaped from a factory, a worker who came in contact with the gas died, reports say. The worker, Paul Doyley, from Immingham, near London, was fatally injured when titanium tetrachloride fumes escaped from the Cristal Global site earlier this year. Although he received treatment for chemical burns and inhalation of toxic fumes in a specialist burns unit at Pinderfields General Hospital in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, Doyley, who was 48 and had been with the…