Well that isn't a lockout tag so no one is working downstream with the line open. It might be there because a process is being run and that valve need to stay in whatever position is is tagged in.
One wears protective gear. This was Union Work and you can be sure they had the most practical safety gear possible. It's like being a welder, I get burned all the time by things that get past the protection but if I did not have any protection I would have become unable to work in my first month of school 35 years ago. They would not have survived a pour engulf them but safety gear would prevent most burns and limit the damage on big splashes.
Several thousand years ago when smelting copper south & east of what became Jerusalem they used the earth as a mold. Over time pouring the molten metal out on the ground and guiding it to molds developed into this. Well that]s my theory.
When I was a steamfitter apprentice I was walking into the paper mill we were working a shutdown on. We all had to walk this same path into a door through a 10ft wide corridor full of pipes above and on each side. One day walking back in with whatever I had been sent out to get a steam line blew out 3 feet in front of me it took me another step to stop. Turns out an elbow has blown.
The degradation of pipe under the conditions it is used are known factors quantified down to the millimeter. As is fairly normal in industry the mill never replaced pipe when the calculations for use dictated they should be and waited for a failure to occur before doing the absolute minimal repair.
Anyway I did not get hurt but I shook for a couple of hours.
I've decided it must have been the Thomas Edison documentary that just ran on PBS again that makes me think I just saw this. In part of it he opens an iron ore mine in NJ and build from scratch a whole new process for separating the ore. He ground the ore to dust and ran it through magnets to separate the iron ore from the rock it was embedded in leaving him with ore that had less by product in it.
There is probably a chain fall hoist above that tank for use to remove the top for maintenance. At a guess because of the size of the chain links its an electrically operated one.
For me it was all the lies and deceptions and manipulations and beratings for not getting the stupid cruel jokes being played on me that started to turn me off on Christmas. I eventually separated that crap and the people who perpetrated it from the holiday itself. Religious or not its a good idea to do that at the end of December.
I don't hate Christmas I hate the scum who destroyed Capitalism and created this sick mess posing as Capitalism while constantly telling us how good it is.