When a tragedy occurs in your life, you are forced to make to make the decision to either let this situation destroy your life or to take the opportunity to learn from that experience to better the world around you. My tragedy happened on a hot, sunny summer day in July 2000. My husband, Brian, a pump operator, was sent to a job site in rural Northeastern Colorado. It was 10:30 in the morning; the sun was bright in the cloudless sky, shining in his face. Suddenly, his boom made contact with the power lines to the east of his setup. Sparks flew and his cabled remote control box, strapped to his chest, made a direct electrical short to his body. Around noon, I was notified that he was killed, mostly likely instantly as 7600 volts ran through his body. At the morgue, his body was almost unrecognizable due to the massive electrical burns.

In one short moment, my husband, my partner, my soul mate was taken from me. My daughters no longer had their father, their friend, their mentor. My grandson (born 15 days later) would never know the man his grandfather was. Yes, our family was devastated. The grief at times was unbearable. But because of the love & compassion given to us by my company and the pumping industry, we were able to put together the pieces of our lives and begin healing.

My daughters and I have decided to take this tragic event to make a difference in the concrete pumping industry. We have adopted every operator as a part of our family to provide for them what we could not do for Brian. Operator safety has become our mission is life; not just electrical safety, but every safety issue out there. We are dedicating ourselves to working with operators, owners, management, and manufacturers to achieve this goal. Working together, we all will be able to decrease the incidence of injuries (non-fatal and fatal), lower insurance costs, increase productivity/profitability, as well as providing a safer place to work. We are very excited to be a part of concretepumping.com, using the technology of the Internet, to reach more operators, giving them all the information and support we possibly can.

We invite operators and their families to contact us here any time and feel free to use the other experts contributing to this extraordinary website.

May God bless. Theresa Nara & Christine Clement

"Be safe - the life you save may be your own"

Written By Theresa Nara & Christine Clement

Published by ConcretePumping.com