This happened while I was on vacation. There was a graduation party for my niece and nephew which was large enough to justify renting a big pavilion at a local park. The weather was not entirely cooperative so this led to needing to hang tarps around the side to block the stiff winds. I was part of the set up team for that and I handled ladder safety. I got a bit of ribbing from family members about my insistence for practicing good ladder safety, but I didn't entirely trust my brother's ladder, either. Regardless, setup went without incident.
Takedown is when the problem happened. As I had one of the cars, I was assigned to coordinate packing up gear, coolers, leftovers and so forth. So I was not watching the removal of the tarps. Instead of using the ladder to untie the tarps, my father was using a picnic table. When attempting to come down his shoe slipped due to being wet from poorly discarded ice from one of the coolers. He fell rather awkwardly.
I was only able to see where he ended up. The table was like the one above and one leg ended up between the table and the bench. He strained a shoulder trying to catch the edge of the table. He ended up mostly on his side on the ground and fortunately did not hit his head on anything. My sister-in-law is a nurse so she was the best person to administer first aid (and beyond). Fortunately, we had plenty of ice with which to start treatment. He had bad bruises on both legs from hitting the bench on the way down. The shoulder strain limited motion in his left arm but fortunately that was the extent of it.
The two big failures were:
1) Improper disposal of cooler ice creating a slipping hazard
2) Not using the correct tool to reach the necessary height
My father is one known for wanting to get things done. The ladder was in use elsewhere, and there was only the one ladder. However the incident resulted in things taking much longer than they otherwise would have which is one of the more fundamental aspects we talk about with safety.
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