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For those of you, who are still unaware of the ALS ice bucket challenge let us first know what ALS actually is?

ALS stands for Amyotrophic Lateral sclerosis. It is neurological degenerative disease that progresses gradually, affecting the nerve cells of the brain and the spinal cord. There are motor neurons that run from our brain to our spinal cord and from the spinal cord to the rest of our body, and they help us to be able to control various movements. When due to this disease the motor neurons die our brain’s ability to commence muscle control is lost. Due to the loss of voluntary muscle action progressively lost with time, most patients in the later stages of the disease get completely paralyzed.

The recently popularized activity that has gone viral over the internet with videos of various actors, sports person and other celebrities and prominent people doing the ALS ice bucket challenge, has seen much media attention and has now spread throughout the world.

The ice bucket challenge simply refers to the activity of dumping a bucketful of icy cold water on a person’s head to promote awareness for the aforementioned disease, and to encourage people to donate for its research and treatment. It reached peak popularity or went viral as is popularly said these days, over the internet through various social media such as YouTube, Facebook, twitter etc. during July to August of 2014.

Do heavy equipment and the ALS ice bucket challenge mix well?

As we have seen a number of videos throughout the web, the ice bucket challenge does not mix well when done with heavy equipment. As it is sites with extensive usage of heavy equipment demand full attention of the users as well as they have to take various safety measures that are stated by the OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) departments.

Various rumors have spread throughout the internet claiming that a teenager might have lost his life while attempting to do the ice bucket challenge accompanied by heavy machinery. While allegedly some of these videos have been proven to be faked as a practical joke by various twitter and other social media users, some of them stand to be true.

We can find a number of videos involving iced water put in cranes and diggers that are being used by various people to get extra attention to their ice bucket challenge videos. But as we can see later on in those videos that some of have failed horribly and can be seen to be heavily injured. Although not all of them have been proved to be true, it is a possibility that some of the disastrous events that take place in them might actually happen. All types of heavy equipment and construction machinery need to be treated with utmost carefulness and should not be used to pull out such videos.

Needless to say a huge heavy construction machine full of ice water dumped on a person could lead to hypothermia or shock after being exposed to such low temperature water. It was reported in July that a man in Germany was crushed under construction site heavy equipment leading to his untimely death and also led to injuries of others around him.

Thus, it is safe to conclude that heavy equipment should not be mixed with the ALS ice bucket challenge as it poses to a huge threat to the lives of the people doing so.