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Short: 'Like Getting Punched In The Face'

Kevin C. Brown
/
90.5 WESA
Ironworker Bryan McQuaid puts on his boots and gets ready to go to work at a building in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh. He leaves the house at 6 a.m.

A rainy day combined with a moss-covered tree, and Bryan McQuaid ended up with a broken bone in his shoulder. While trimming trees for an electric utility, the spikes on his shoes slipped. McQuaid’s safety harness caught him, but swung him hard into a tree.

“The potential to get injured on the job when you’re doing physical labor [is] always a very, very real thing,” he reflected.

McQuaid is now an apprentice ironworker, where he has faced smaller scrapes, occasionally to the amusement of his co-workers.

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