The scene inside the cab was bloody — literally, as the deep laceration in Mr D’Augello’s scalp bled on to the cab roof, which was now below him.
Truck driver Craig Thomas, better known as ‘Turtle’, was the one to call the ambulance.
“Thank god Turtle was there,” Mr D’Augello said.
The incident happened on January 29 — a wet and muggy day — at a recently decommissioned dairy farm on Ryan Rd, Lancaster.
In order to escape the excavator, Mr D'Augello had to bash open the machine's trap door with a window cleaner very similar to the ones seen sitting in buckets at every petrol station.
Carted off to hospital in a neck brace, Mr D’Augello was kept in the trauma ward for 24 hours and received seven stitches across the top of his head before being released.
“I’ll be the first to put my hand up and say I was stupid, and I’m letting everyone know so they don’t make the same mistake,” the Kyabram fodder farmer and compost business owner said.
Mr D’Augello said the mistakes started with the wet metal.
When he swung the cab around on the rainy day to face the ramp the momentum slid the machine’s tracks off-centre.
“By the time I realised I hadn't corrected it enough I was already starting down the ramp and going over. I could just see Turtle raising his hands,” he said.
Mr D’Augello was also not wearing the machine's simple lap belt.
“A part of me thinks it wouldn’t have made any difference anyway,” he said.
He is now looking at swapping the lap belt for a racing car-style harness and adding a non-slip coating to the trailer.
Mr D'Augello discovered what it was that cut so deeply into his scalp two weeks later when the excavator was lifted upright by a pair of cranes.
Two of the three metal bars which protect the right-side window now carried noticeable dents.
“That would be why I’ve got this huge ugly bruise on my shoulder as well,” Mr D’Augello said while looking at where the fall slammed his body into the round bars.
WorkSafe encouraged Mr D'Augello to talk to the media about his scrape, pointing out a similar story, which ran in Country News, of a vet whose leg was broken by a bull.
“He was also around my age, which is 51,” Mr D'Augello said of the vet.
“Apparently our age group think we're invincible or something.”
Agricultural workers make up only two per cent of Victoria’s workforce, but make up 30 per cent of the state’s workplace fatalities.
The 50-plus age group’s long-time experience makes complacency rampant and their age means they don’t bounce back from injuries.
Mr D’Augello has been driving earth-moving machinery for 15 years and heavy machinery since he was “practically five years old”.
But he vows to finish the job he came to do — which was composting the old effluent pond on the farm.
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