odanny
Diamond Member
There are lots of places like this in America, meatpacking plants especially, staffed primarily by migrants doing all the dirty work, where you risk your fingers or other injuries daily, but apparently this place is the worst for injuries. I don't know if that is true, they are a small plant, there are bigger ones in the heartland with over a thousand workers where injuries are common but easier to hide amongst a larger workforce. Being a union shop means employers will take safety far more seriously than a non-union shop, mainly because of their responsibility in the event someone is hurt.
With Trump in charge now, Federal regulators will be called off. It's open season for employers.
The police lieutenant sounded unnerved as he stepped inside the old lumber mill. The power was off. The giant saws were quiet. But the smell of fresh sawdust still hung in the humid summer air. In the darkened factory, sunlight streamed through jagged holes in the rusted metal walls as Lt. Marc Cutt walked across a machine that turned logs into lumber.
“Has it been rendered safe?” Cutt asked another police officer as his body camera recorded the scene.
“Safe is a relative term in this place,” the officer responded.
The police knew this place well. So did federal safety inspectors.
At Phenix Lumber Co., workers had lost fingers, broken bones and been mangled by machines — at least 28 employees had reported injuries since 2010, at a company with only about 50 people on the payroll at a time. Three had died. A medical examiner’s report detailed how just 23 pounds of one employee was recovered after he was caught in a machine. It had reached the point, some former workers said, that they would pray before the start of their $9-an-hour shifts.
Phenix Lumber was the deadliest workplace in America over the past five years. No other office or factory posted a higher rate of work-related fatal incidents per worker, according to a Washington Post analysis of Occupational Safety and Health Administration fatality reports since 2019. The analysis examined deaths by workplace location, rather than by company, using OSHA data on fatalities investigated by the agency, which generally does not cover small farms or federal workers.
OSHA is tasked with ensuring that American work environments are safe. “There’s no way to characterize the history at this workplace as acceptable,” the agency said in a statement.
The story of Phenix Lumber — drawn from thousands of previously undisclosed documents and recordings obtained by The Post, along with interviews with officials and former workers and managers — shows the limits of OSHA’s powers. It cannot shut down companies even after years of repeated violations and penalties, even when workers die. It even lacks the power to ask a judge to do so.
It can request a shutdown from the court only in rare cases of “imminent danger,” such as a looming roof collapse. Causing the death of a worker by willfully violating safety rules is a misdemeanor under federal law. The maximum sentence is six months in prison, less than the penalty for killing an endangered animal. In the past five years, OSHA sent fewer than 50 cases to the Justice Department for a criminal review, records show, and it’s unclear how many of those were prosecuted.
The agency tried “to use all of the resources we have, all the tools we have” in its pursuit of the lumber mill, said Jim Frederick, who was the No. 2 official at OSHA and a deputy assistant secretary at the Labor Department until January.
Since at least 2003, federal safety inspectors have fined the company nearly $5.3 million. They issued more than 180 citations for health and safety violations, accusing the company of knowingly ignoring workers’ safety “for monetary gain.” A quarter of the violations were deemed “willful,” the most severe category. Phenix Lumber workers told inspectors that they were routinely instructed to put their hands into the jaws of stuck machines to clear jams — without first cutting the power, a clear hazard. And the machines were in such bad shape that they regularly broke down.
OSHA twice forced the company into a program for what regulators deemed “the worst of the worst employers.”
“This must stop,” they repeatedly warned the mill’s owners — one of the wealthiest families in eastern Alabama.
But nothing ever seemed to stop Phenix Lumber. It kept churning out millions of board feet of southern yellow pine for the construction industry from its sawdust-covered valley on the edge of town.
Now, in August 2023, the two police officers reached a red tarp covering a doorway, according to body-cam footage. One of them pulled the tarp aside and pointed. Just below a small balcony stood an auger — a giant metal corkscrew set in an open-faced chute to move wood chips. An hour earlier, James Streetman, a 67-year-old maintenance supervisor, had fallen in while the auger was spinning. Or the auger had unexpectedly kicked on as he stepped across it. No one yet knew. Streetman’s spine was shredded, liver ejected, heart never found, according to an autopsy.
WaPo
With Trump in charge now, Federal regulators will be called off. It's open season for employers.
The police lieutenant sounded unnerved as he stepped inside the old lumber mill. The power was off. The giant saws were quiet. But the smell of fresh sawdust still hung in the humid summer air. In the darkened factory, sunlight streamed through jagged holes in the rusted metal walls as Lt. Marc Cutt walked across a machine that turned logs into lumber.
“Has it been rendered safe?” Cutt asked another police officer as his body camera recorded the scene.
“Safe is a relative term in this place,” the officer responded.
The police knew this place well. So did federal safety inspectors.
At Phenix Lumber Co., workers had lost fingers, broken bones and been mangled by machines — at least 28 employees had reported injuries since 2010, at a company with only about 50 people on the payroll at a time. Three had died. A medical examiner’s report detailed how just 23 pounds of one employee was recovered after he was caught in a machine. It had reached the point, some former workers said, that they would pray before the start of their $9-an-hour shifts.
Phenix Lumber was the deadliest workplace in America over the past five years. No other office or factory posted a higher rate of work-related fatal incidents per worker, according to a Washington Post analysis of Occupational Safety and Health Administration fatality reports since 2019. The analysis examined deaths by workplace location, rather than by company, using OSHA data on fatalities investigated by the agency, which generally does not cover small farms or federal workers.
OSHA is tasked with ensuring that American work environments are safe. “There’s no way to characterize the history at this workplace as acceptable,” the agency said in a statement.
The story of Phenix Lumber — drawn from thousands of previously undisclosed documents and recordings obtained by The Post, along with interviews with officials and former workers and managers — shows the limits of OSHA’s powers. It cannot shut down companies even after years of repeated violations and penalties, even when workers die. It even lacks the power to ask a judge to do so.
It can request a shutdown from the court only in rare cases of “imminent danger,” such as a looming roof collapse. Causing the death of a worker by willfully violating safety rules is a misdemeanor under federal law. The maximum sentence is six months in prison, less than the penalty for killing an endangered animal. In the past five years, OSHA sent fewer than 50 cases to the Justice Department for a criminal review, records show, and it’s unclear how many of those were prosecuted.
The agency tried “to use all of the resources we have, all the tools we have” in its pursuit of the lumber mill, said Jim Frederick, who was the No. 2 official at OSHA and a deputy assistant secretary at the Labor Department until January.
Since at least 2003, federal safety inspectors have fined the company nearly $5.3 million. They issued more than 180 citations for health and safety violations, accusing the company of knowingly ignoring workers’ safety “for monetary gain.” A quarter of the violations were deemed “willful,” the most severe category. Phenix Lumber workers told inspectors that they were routinely instructed to put their hands into the jaws of stuck machines to clear jams — without first cutting the power, a clear hazard. And the machines were in such bad shape that they regularly broke down.
OSHA twice forced the company into a program for what regulators deemed “the worst of the worst employers.”
“This must stop,” they repeatedly warned the mill’s owners — one of the wealthiest families in eastern Alabama.
But nothing ever seemed to stop Phenix Lumber. It kept churning out millions of board feet of southern yellow pine for the construction industry from its sawdust-covered valley on the edge of town.
Now, in August 2023, the two police officers reached a red tarp covering a doorway, according to body-cam footage. One of them pulled the tarp aside and pointed. Just below a small balcony stood an auger — a giant metal corkscrew set in an open-faced chute to move wood chips. An hour earlier, James Streetman, a 67-year-old maintenance supervisor, had fallen in while the auger was spinning. Or the auger had unexpectedly kicked on as he stepped across it. No one yet knew. Streetman’s spine was shredded, liver ejected, heart never found, according to an autopsy.
WaPo
