SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the ever-decreasing-state-of-workplace-safety dept.
The World Socialist Web Site reports
On Thursday [July 29], two workers at an electrical plant near Tampa, Florida were killed horrifically when a tank spilled molten slag onto them. Four others were hospitalized with life-threatening injuries. The plant is operated by Tampa Electric Company (TECO), the Tampa Bay area's largest electrical utility service. The company was purchased exactly one year ago to the day by Canadian energy company Emera Inc.
Christopher Irvin, 40, and Michael McCory, 60, were both killed, while Gary Marine Jr., 32, Antonio Navarrete, 21, Frank Lee Jones, 55, and Armando J. Perez, 56, all sustained life-threatening injuries. Only one of the men was a TECO employee while the other five were employees of Gaffin Industrial Services who were contracted to work at the plant.
[...] A TECO spokesperson reported that at the time of the incident workers were performing routine maintenance on a slag tank--a container which houses coal waste after it has been burned. Slag is a glass-like substance that forms when hot coal mixes with water; the slag tank catches leftover by-product that drips down from a coal-fired furnace into water.
The crystallized slag is still molten hot when it forms, and it was slag spillover that killed and injured the workers in question. An expert compared the gushing slag to "what comes out of a volcano".
Workers were reportedly trying to unplug a hole in the slag tank when the material spilled out. A spokesperson from TECO stated that slag filled a large part of the floor in the plant, "6 inches deep and 40 feet in diameter".
[...] An OSHA spokesperson stated in response to the incident, "It's the employer's responsibility to provide a safe and healthful workplace." Apparently, OSHA was already investigating a chemical exposure that happened at the same plant on May 24. This incident involved the release of anhydrous ammonia that caused four employees to be hospitalized.
TECO has a long history of similar incidents.
[...] [A statement from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 108] notes that the incident was entirely avoidable. "It's time to listen to the employees", it reads. "It's time to stop using contractors to do 'routine maintenance' when the safety of this maintenance has been questioned by employees. It's time to stop putting profit before safety. It's time to truly put safety first."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by mcgrew on Tuesday July 04 2017, @05:21PM (6 children)
Industrial accidents kill people all the time, often horribly and usually due to management policies and mismanagement. My grandfather went four stories down a doorless elevator shaft. My dad witnessed an electrocution shortly before his retirement. When I worked at a copper factory for a few months in the '70s a man fell into a vat of molten copper.
Headline: "Two cars crash in alberta, two killed and two wounded." This is not even statewide news, let alone national news. But we DO need better safety regs and when someone dies from management not following the law, someone should be jailed for manslaughter.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 04 2017, @05:48PM (2 children)
The worst I've heard of was in my own area of San Diego a few years ago. A guy was up in a tree trimming branches when he fell... straight into the wood chipper. He was working alone but a bystander heard the chipper noise change and when he looked the guy was pretty much distributed all over the back of the truck.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Tuesday July 04 2017, @07:40PM (1 child)
Here in San Diego at a shipyard I was working at there was a navy vessel (don't recall if it was a DDG or a bigger fucker like an LSD or LHD) that had been lifted from the water on dry-dock to have work done on the screws (propellers) and around the keel.
A welder welding a bolt on its screw didn't use the proper precautions with the alloy in a hollow air-filled assembly and caused the bolt to explode into shrapnel. Guy survived but the shrapnel took out his knee for good. Now that was a valuable learning experience -- I learned never to volunteer for grinding while wearing short sleeves and almost had my arm ripped from its socket when a BFG-like drill hammer snagged inside a thick piece of steel. Seeing those big fucking loads swinging from cranes overhead is also kinda unnerving.
(Score: 4, Informative) by turgid on Tuesday July 04 2017, @07:55PM
I worked at a nuclear power station. During its entire life there was never a fatal accident. I never had an accident in all the years I was there. They had a "total safety culture" and it worked very well. A few years later I worked at a much smaller company making network storage hardware and I got two electric shocks (I was unharmed). They had a far more old-fashioned attitude to things. They liked to blame the staff for everything that went wrong, including getting electric shocks off of their low-budget hardware. I got out as soon as I could and a while later they went bust.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 04 2017, @10:09PM
A single death is a tragedy; two deaths is a statistic.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 05 2017, @07:17AM (1 child)
Two people dying is certainly uninteresting but as you yourself point out the policies and liabilities related to such incidents are interesting and should be debated and probably changed.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday July 05 2017, @07:26PM
All that paperwork for a mere two deaths? Government overreach commie yacht-killer scum!