December 6th, 2006 at 8:06 A.M. My world changed forever. I had been working at a manufacturing company in the Milwaukee area as a forklift operator. I had gotten married the year before and had added a son and wife to my life. Shortly after the wedding a new little girl was also added. June 17th 2006 My father had a massive heart attack and was even in a medically induced coma for 2 or 3 weeks. Life was looking up I had a good job my father was slowly getting better and I had a young daughter who had just turned a year old.
Then the day arrived that changed me as a person totally. It was December the 6th. I showed up to work a little later than I usually did but still in plenty of time. I couldn't park in my usual spot so I parked a bit farther away from the locker room. I walked in grabbed my morning cup of coffee and headed to my group leaders office to find out what exactly I was going to be doing for the day. I had been cross training to be a dispatcher in the company and trained as a back up for every department so I would be a greater asset to the company. My group leader told me I would be working in shop 4 for the day because the person usually running the south end of shop 4 was cross training for shop 1.
So I grabbed my big ugly yellow forklift and headed over there to settle in for the day. I got into the office and entered my tickets for the day on the computer and started figuring out what I had to do for the day. I moved all of the finished work to the transfer corner and set the guys up with a few short jobs for the morning. After that was said and done it was close to the 8:20 break time so I was going to take some unused housings back to the annex for storage. The first skid I left on the transfer corner and I grabbed the second one. At this point I realized I hadn't tagged the first one with a destination so I went back to grab my stapler. I tagged the skid and was taking the other one to the annex when I heard the loudest boom I have ever heard.
The lights flashed just a split second before the explosion and when I looked up that's when the glass started falling. To avoid getting glass in my eye I looked back toward ground level to see a man fall to the ground after I think being hit by falling debris. My forklift was struck with the overhead door that had been almost 20 feet from me before.
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