A confined space, an emerging fire/explosion hazard, carbon monoxide and even tax fraud played a role in what OSHA calls some of its “most interesting” cases.
The agency’s fourth consecutive presentation took place in September at the NSC Safety Congress & Expo in Denver. Four agency representatives discussed the cases that stood out to them:
- Robert Bryer, investigator in Wilkes-Barre, PA
- Robert Carbone, lead investigator with the Boston Region’s criminal investigations team
- Bill McDonald, area director in St. Louis
- Peter Vo, regional supervisory investigator in the agency’s Houston South office
Each presented lessons learned from the investigation of each case to help employers and workers avoid making similar mistakes.
Here’s what they shared:
- Multiple hazards uncovered at manufacturing facility
- Massive fire at lithium-ion battery recycling facility
- Worker dies while cleaning a bulk liquid waste tank
- Worker’s death leads to a prison sentence
Multiple hazards uncovered at manufacturing facility
Workers rode on a conveyor line in a confined space – toward a running wood chipper
The investigation stemmed from a laundry list of complaints about a wood veneer manufacturer. The complaints included issues with cranes, lockout/tagout, safety guards, powered industrial trucks, aerial lifts and fall hazards.
One of the most notable complaints was about employees entering a confined space while a 4-foot-wide wood chipper was running. That confined space was a completely covered 200-foot conveyor line just below the floor, which was used to move wood scraps into the chipper.
That process, however, would occasionally get interrupted by the clogging of scraps at the meeting point of two conveyor lines. The employer would then send a worker down a conveyor line and toward the wood chipper – with no lifeline and no confined space permitting.
The employee would then go down, stomp on the clog to loosen it and ride a conveyor belt back up.
“What they were relying on to prevent the employee from going into the wood chipper is the supervisor of that line standing there watching down in the hole,” Bryer said.
CITATIONS: OSHA cited the company for 15 violations, 13 of which were deemed serious. (That total later increased to 14 when one violation was changed to serious from willful.) Overall, 10 citations were for permit-required confined space violations under 1910.146.
OSHA fined the employer more than $328,000. After formal and informal settlements, that amount was reduced to around $307,000.
AFTERMATH: As part of its response, the company revised its confined space and lockout/tagout procedures.
LESSONS LEARNED
- Know everything that’s required. Bryer said an often-overlooked part of OSHA’s confined space regulations is in 1910.146(k): Employers must evaluate any prospective rescuer’s ability to perform a timely confined space rescue. That includes local emergency responders. “Depending on your location, confined space rescue isn’t something that anybody can do,” he said. “Employers are required to make sure that whoever’s coming actually can do it.”
- Ensure your “competent person” is “competent” by OSHA’s definition. OSHA defines a “competent person” as someone who can identify “existing and predictable hazards in the surroundings or working conditions which are unsanitary, hazardous or dangerous to employees, and who has authorization to take prompt corrective measures to eliminate them.”
- Get a fresh set of eyes to look at your safety program. “Maybe you’ve worked in your facility for 10, 15, 20 years. Maybe it just takes that fresh set of eyes that could identify those other weaknesses or problems,” Bryer said.
- Communication is key. The employer had third-party reports about hazards – many of which were given to a maintenance manager who left the company. “Nobody else allegedly knew that the reports existed that identified all of the issues,” Bryer said.
- Safety isn’t a part-time job. The employer had someone in charge of safety who was “a corporate person from quality,” Bryer said, adding, “she did her best – really great person – but she was kind of in over her head.”
- Listen to your employees. Employees had previously complained about everything that was identified as an issue. “Get out on the floor, talk to your employees and listen to what they have to say,” Bryer said.
- Massive fire at lithium-ion battery recycling facility
- Worker dies while cleaning a bulk liquid waste tank
- Worker’s death leads to a prison sentence
- Return to start
Massive fire at lithium-ion battery recycling facility
Suspected source: a thermite reaction
Explosions led to a massive fire in October 2024 at a 225,000-square-foot lithium-ion battery recycling facility that had opened about a year earlier.
First responders needed around two weeks to extinguish the fire, and OSHA couldn’t begin inspecting the facility for about a month after the fire broke out, McDonald said. The suspected source was a thermite reaction, which typically happens with a powdered metal such as aluminum and a metal oxide.
During its investigation, OSHA found that the company had experienced another fire and explosion in a different facility two years earlier.
“They had done their homework, created a Safety Data Sheet, did some industrial hygiene sampling and found a lot of combustible dust was floating around through these processes,” McDonald said.
Before the 2024 incident, the facility had combustible dust “pretty much everywhere” – on the floors, ceiling and walls, McDonald said. The facility also had spray polyurethane foam on its walls that wasn’t coated with a noncombustible material.
The employer had a nitrogen inerting system but didn’t use it “because they weren’t sure it would work,” especially on metals such as aluminum.
“They need to figure out if it can be used or not, but they do need an inerting system to keep the oxidation process from occurring,” McDonald said.
Additionally, the employer’s combustible dust housekeeping was simply using a blower and “blowing dust all the way around.” Its dust collection system also allowed fugitive dust back into the facility.
CITATIONS: The employer received four serious OSHA citations, including two General Duty Clause citations, and an initial fine of more than $43,000. That fine was reduced to around $34,000 after an informal settlement.
LESSON LEARNED
- Lithium-ion battery processing is a growing industry. It has still-emerging safety and health issues, namely the danger of massive fires. Safety professionals can help, McDonald said, by being “solutions architects” to those issues.
- Multiple hazards uncovered at manufacturing facility
- Worker dies while cleaning a bulk liquid waste tank
- Worker’s death leads to a prison sentence
- Return to start
Worker dies while cleaning a bulk liquid waste tank
Toxicology tests showed carbon monoxide at five times the OSHA exposure limit
A truck tank cleaning company had its third confined space-related death in four years just before Christmas 2023. (Two workers died in a similar incident in November 2019.)
The latest incident occurred when an employee was cleaning a bulk liquid waste tank with acetic acid inside. He was found unresponsive by his son and taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead approximately 11 minutes after arriving.
The suspected cause of death was carbon monoxide poisoning. The toxicology report showed that the employee was exposed to five times the OSHA exposure limit, which is 50 parts per million over an 8-hour, time-weighted average.
The company revamped its tank cleaning procedures after the 2019 fatal incident, using a tank spinner that didn’t require employees to enter the tank. The employer, however, also wrongly assumed that the tank was clean and free from hazards after the tank spinning process, Vo said, so the company didn’t properly test the tank’s atmosphere. OSHA found none of the employer’s four-gas meters was used the day of the incident or the day before.
Because of the approaching holiday, no entry supervisor verified testing or a confined space permit. A ladder that allowed entry into the tanks also wasn’t locked or secured.
CITATIONS: OSHA initially cited the employer for seven serious violations related to confined space hazards, electrical hazards and carbon monoxide overexposure. It also issued eight instance-by-instance repeat citations – the first for any employer in the Dallas Region – for not testing its compliance plan before confined space entry, failure of the entry supervisor to supervise employees and lack of atmospheric testing in the confined space. OSHA initially fined the company more than $810,000.
After the formal settlement, the employer had 13 serious violations and two “other” violations, and a fine of $670,000.
AFTERMATH: The employer revamped its confined space program and trained all employees on confined space procedures.
LESSONS LEARNED
- More care is needed in the tank washing industry. Not only for confined space issues but also the potential for fires or explosions.
- Confined space programs should meet or, better yet, exceed OSHA standards.
- Have a second set of eyes, such as those of an industrial hygienist, look over your programs.
- Don’t take a holiday on safety. “When you carry out the confined space entry operation, it requires at least three people: an attendant, an entrant and a supervisor,” Vo said. “Everybody has their own function. If you don’t have enough people or manpower during the holiday season, you need to hold off (on the job) until you have enough people.”
- Multiple hazards uncovered at manufacturing facility
- Massive fire at lithium-ion battery recycling facility
- Worker’s death leads to a prison sentence
- Return to start
Worker’s death leads to a prison sentence
The employer lied under oath that the victim worked for a subcontractor
A workplace death in April 2017 led to the discovery of a tax fraud scheme that resulted in an 18-month prison sentence for the company owner and more than $2.8 million in restitution owed.
The worker died after falling off a roof at a construction site and striking his head on the concrete below.
The property developer told OSHA that the employee worked for one company. That employer, however, falsely claimed under oath that the victim instead worked for a subcontractor.
“This was news to the general contractor because there was a clause in his contract that says you can’t subcontract,” Carbone said. “That started a domino effect where the compliance officer took these falsehoods and really started to dig into them.”
The officer uncovered the employer’s “large and complex scheme” to avoid paying state and federal taxes, which helped the company undercut its competitors.
Three days after OSHA began its investigation, the subcontractor changed the listed names of its owners. One of the new owners called the OSHA inspector and said he had left the country. Then he asked if the investigation was over.
It was not. The investigation found multiple “purported subcontractors” with the listed owners as family members or associates. Instead, the original employer, whose company suffered the 2017 fatality, controlled all of those entities.
From 2013 to 2017, those companies used a service to convert $11 million worth of checks into cash, which was used to pay employees “off the books.”
CITATIONS AND AFTERMATH: From the time of the workplace death until the sentencing of the company owner on a 10-count conviction, the case spanned more than seven years. One of those counts was making a false statement to an OSHA inspector – for claiming that the deceased employee was not his. OSHA cited the company for nine violations, including six serious violations. An initial penalty of more than $86,000 was reduced to around $35,000 after a formal settlement.
LESSON LEARNED
- Don’t lie to investigators. “Unfortunately, we’re getting the subcontractor ruse more and more and more. Everybody’s either an independent contractor or they’re a subcontractor,” Carbone said. “We’ll use the Darden Factors to root that out.”
The Darden Factors stem from the 1992 Supreme Court case Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co. v. Darden. The 13 factors include the “right to control the manner and means by which work is accomplished,” according to a 1996 OSHA letter of interpretation.
