I think heavy equipment can always be dangerous no matter what you're doing. Two cases in point. Case #1, I was simply pushing some brush into a pile. One large tree in the middle of the brush pile was laying with cuttoff trunk end toward the dozer blade with top of tree straight away from me. As I pushed I was apparently spring loading all the branches of the tree. All of a sudden the butt end of the trunk (12 inch diameter) popped out of the pile and shot like and arrow rearward over the top of my blade and right over my shoulder as I ducked. It hit the gas tank behind the seat hard enough to cave it in. We're talking a dozer gas tank made of 1/4 inch thick steel. Case #2, I was pushing small dirt piles around on level ground. I didn't know there was an old barbed wire fence mixed in with everything. All of a sudden felt something pulling on my leg. A piece of barbed wire had gotten wrapped up in the track and the end managed to find it's way through a small opening into the cab where it had wrapped around my leg. Fortunately I stopped right away cause as you know a dozer will keep right on going if you don't purposely stop. Worse yet is that it wrapped around my left leg and pulled it rearward making it impossible for me to reach the clutch. If I hadn't had a reverser that was hand operated I wouldn't have been able to stop other than turning off the key. These are only two stories of how I could have been hurt bad just trying to save a few bucks while not doing anything that looked dangerous. I pray for safety every time before I get on that machine.
