A Texas construction worker falls while working on the 16th floor.

This job was at a 20-story apartment complex going up that was still under construction.

Up on the 16th floor, a construction worker was on the balcony, leaning over and cleaning the outside of a window. His job was to do the “make ready,” which is to get the place presentable. And there was fall protection available there.

He just wasn’t using it for some reason. He leaned over, lost his balance, and fell.

And the building had the main part of the building. Then I think twelve stories later, it came out like this and then went down for the rest of the building. And he went through the roof of that part that juts out.

That’s what this hole is right here. And this was one that happened in my backyard. Not literally in my backyard, but it was five minutes away. In fact, I timed it. We left our offices, and we were on the job, in the building, and on our way up in the elevator in seven minutes.

Since it was an active construction site, they needed the situation dealt with that evening and overnight, because if they shut down the whole construction site, something like that can cost the company $50,000 a day. We got going and we worked through the night in this shot here. You’ll see that this is looking down in the hole. You can see where he went through there and broke a gas line.

Fortunately, there was no gas in the line at the time because the building was still under construction. You see that he broke a lot of rafters and stuff like that. Then he went through the ceiling in the hallway, then hit the floor, and died. From what I understand, it ripped off an arm and it was just a bad deal all around for the guy. And we had to do the work in a crawl space.

So that was really time-consuming and difficult. We had to make sure we didn’t fall through the ceiling, but we got it dealt with and they were able to open up the next morning. But what a shame. The guy is just trying to put food on the table, just trying to do his job, and he ends up dying because he doesn’t want to take a couple of minutes to put fall protection on. The sad thing about it was the rope that came down for him to attach his fall protection to was just about a foot away.

All he had to do was hook it up and he didn’t do it. That’s the thing that’s surprising in doing this type of work: the simple ways people die. Just one little moment of not paying attention. Just one moment of not noticing something, one moment of being in a hurry and not wanting to take 30 seconds to do something. It’s just, God, people can die so easy.

And they do. They just take a wrong step and there they go. But that’s a really sad situation. And that was a long time ago. That was probably 2003, 2004.

And that family still has to deal with that grief. It’s very likely he was married and had kids and all that. And what a shame. What a shame.