Most expensive mistake at work

My Engineering boss, on a Friday afternoon, told me to close a valve in 3 hours time (before I went home).
I forgot and caused a waterfall to cascade down a 1800 ft deep coal mine shaft for an entire weekend that had taken 80 years to dry out.
The water at the bottom level was higher than waist deep (so the miners told me in the CIU Club later)
 
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After a breakdown in communication between me and my colleague he sent around 500 document boxes from a national house builders for shredding instead of transferring them to another of our branches. Material cost of the paper wasn't much, but it was records of their house sales, invoices for purchased materials, pay records etc :oops:

Another time we sent some boxes for shredding which broke a shredding machine which cost (according the company who operated it) tens of thousands of pounds after giving them archive boxes which unknown to us had big bits of metal in them. They came after us to recover costs but they didn't bother to check the contents before they tipped them into the shredder, so kind of their fault.
 
humbug said:
not really my mistake but i was tipping a tanker of waste down sheffield way. this stuff was particularly nasty and always went into the same tank to be processed once it was sampled. for some reason the boffins decided to tip it into a different storage tank. i queried it as did the lads who were the operators on site but we were all told it was ok. halfway through tipping the site alarms went off and we were evacuated. the product had reacted with the stuff in the different tank and had set the temperature alarms off. the fire brigade arrived and spent a good few hours cooling the storage tank down.
not sure how much it cost but it would've been a fair bit.
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Something similar happened at our Memphis plant (not my mistake I might add) offloaded a tanker of Phosphoric acid (which we used in one plant) into a Sulphuric Acid Tank (which we used in another) - the site team realised once they had offloaded the tank and had a mixture of the two acids in the tank, they asked me and another bloke what to do and we said blend it down slowly with fresh sulphuric acid to keep the Phosphoric Acid levels in the feed low ; they of course totally ignored this and fed it all through immediately and detsryoed the waste heat boiler, contaminated 1000 te of another acid which had to go off site for reprocessing and wrecked their furnace - cost maybe 5,000,000 USD all told. The bloke who connected the tanker up wrong got sacked as it turned out the tanker driver asked him about three times if it was the right system as he though it looked wrong compared to previous offloads.
 
Apprentice spark......my journeyman told me to remove all fire alarm call points as the zone 'was inbibited', first one I took off....fire alarm goes off....full building evacuated and three fire engines turned up....he called me an idiot and I got all the blame
 
leyburnrunner said:
I insured a boat for £800k or thereabouts and a few months later it sank. In a moment of pure Capt Hindsight, my boss told me that I'd messed up and we should never have taken the thing on so pretty much blaming me for the £800k loss. In an informal internal meeting I defended my actions and was exonerated. Pretty dull stuff.
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That’s insurance for you.

Had a £1.5m fire on a building site I had put on cover.

There was no comeback even though the bosses were sweating at first.

Everything had been done how it should and ultimately you can’t legislate for scrotes setting things on fire after they have made sure the security guard has gone round the other side of the site.
 

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