Articles Posted in Industrial Accidents

This week, a story from the other side of the continent turned a harsh light on an issue of great concern to us here in Oregon: propane explosions and the potential they have, as industrial accidents, to cause great damage.

According to an article from the Pennsylvania newspaper The Intelligencer, republished on the website Phillyburbs.com, the incident took place when a truck carrying a full load of 2000 gallons of propane collided with another vehicle in Tinicum, about 40 miles north of Philadelphia. Quoting local officials, the paper reports that two people were injured in the accident, a major roadway was closed and nearby residents were ordered to evacuate their homes.

“Hundreds of volunteer first responders and police set up a one-mile radius around the… propane truck, which caught fire shortly after the accident,” the paper reports.

A recent article in the Sacramento Bee is a telling reminder of the importance of workplace safety here in Oregon and of the sort of precautions businesses ought to be taking to avoid Oregon industrial accidents.

According to an Associated Press report posted on the newspaper’s website, a 60-year old man’s arm was severed by an industrial lathe while he was working at GE Aviation Systems, a company which manufactures parts for airplanes. Quoting local first responders the news agency reports that “workers were turning a piece of metal and the man’s arm somehow got caught in the lathe.”

The victim was transported to a local hospital “along with his crushed arm. It’s unclear if the arm can be reattached,” according to the report.

Last month I wrote about a criminal trial in New York considering liability for a 2008 industrial accident in Manhattan. Two construction workers died when their crane collapsed. This week, following a 10-week trial, a New York judge dismissed all four charges against the crane’s owner, who was accused of cutting corners on safety in several ways, notably by hiring “an unqualified Chinese company to make repairs to the crane because it offered a low price and quick turnaround,” according to the New York Times.

The newspaper notes that the verdict “underscored the difficulty of proving criminal liability in construction accidents, especially when the city and others are accused of mistakes in oversight and regulation that lead to fatal episodes.”

Families of the victims expressed understandable dismay when the verdict was announced. The Times, however, reports that the case is not over. “The families still have a civil suit pending,” it reports, adding that the acquittal on criminal charges “does not effect the civil case” where, as the plaintiffs attorney noted, there is a lower burden of proof.

The explosion of a mobile home in Damascus, Oregon has raised numerous questions, even as seven families struggle with its aftermath, according to The Oregonian. The newspaper reports that the families are currently being helped by the Red Cross.

Their homes were damaged after a nearby mobile home exploded for reasons that remain unclear. According to the newspaper “the blast damaged a water main that serves about 30 people who live in the mobile home development.” Investigators have ruled out a natural gas leak as the cause of the Oregon explosion, but have few answers beyond that.

“At this point, you can’t rule anything out,” a Clackamas Fire District spokesman told The Oregonian. “There are still all kinds of possibilities – and combinations of possibilities – so we don’t want to speculate.” What is certain is that the damage caused by this catastrophic accident will disrupt many lives for some time to come. The inside of the mobile home that exploded was unoccupied, but a man who was sitting on the unit’s porch was badly burned.

A lengthy piece published this week in the New York Times tells the sad story of a 2008 industrial accident in Manhattan and the chain of events leading up to it. It is a story of corners cut and the fatal consequences that followed: of an American employer desperate to lower costs, a Chinese supplier making inflated claims for its products and due diligence that was never done.

The fatal accident involved a construction crane that collapsed at a building site on New York’s Upper West Side as a result of a faulty weld on the crane’s turntable. As the Times notes, there has been much testimony at the manslaughter trial of the crane’s owner “about the failed weld… and how the Chinese company was unable to satisfactorily perform a vital weld on the turntable. But little has been said about another aspect of the company: its description of itself was largely inflated or simply not true.”

As the newspaper goes on to report, the Chinese company, RTR Bearing Company Limited, claimed to have a 10-year history of high-end industrial work around the globe and to employ 109 people in two factories and a quality control center. In fact, the company was barely six months old when first contacted by the New York firm that eventually bought its crane, and appears to have been little more than a 3rd party marketer of other Chinese manufacturers’ goods. In an affidavit in a related civil suit, the company’s founder acknowledged that RTR actually employs only seven people, none of them engineers, and “has no factory and does no manufacturing,” the paper reports.