Question

Please read and react to the article in the "Building and Machine Safety and Maintenance" folder. Response should be at least 6 sentences and Identify the serious violations.

Bumble Bee tuna worker cooked to death in oven; Cal/OSHA issues fines

The death of a worker who was accidentally cooked to death in an industrial pressure cooker has resulted in fines for Bumble Bee tuna company.

Cal/OSHA has issued $73,995 in fines for six violations, five of them serious, for failing to:

• perform inspections or audits related to the energy control procedures for the production area
• determine whether the industrial ovens constituted permit-required confined spaces
• post signs or notify employees regarding the confined space created by the ovens
• develop and implement a written permit-required confined space program
• implement permit-required confined space program elements as mandated by law, and
• provide permit-required confined space training to employees working inside the ovens.

The last two violations alone accounted for $25,000 in fines.

On Oct. 11, 2013, employee Jose Melena, 62, had been assigned to load a particular oven with large baskets stacked with tuna at Bumble Bee’s plant in Santa Fe Springs. He entered the 54-inch by 36-foot oven to make an adjustment to a chain inside.

When Melena wasn’t seen for awhile, a search for him was conducted because his car was still in the facility’s parking lot. After searching for 90 minutes, an employee suggested looking in the last oven that had been loaded.

Workers let the oven cool for about 30 minutes before opening the doors and looking inside, where they found Melena.

Responding firefighters pronounced the badly burned man dead at the scene. An autopsy confirmed Melena died from burns received in the oven.

Although the Bumble Bee plant hadn’t previously received Cal/OSHA citations, the agency’s investigation into Melena’s death uncovered employee injuries that hadn’t been reported as required.

One Bumble Bee employee had a finger amputated after it got caught in a chute. Another employee suffered a fractured skull after falling from a forklift. Both injuries were never reported to Cal/OSHA.

A statement from Bumble Bee says, “We will be reviewing the citations with Cal/OSHA representatives in the coming weeks to resolve any disagreements regarding the citations. Safety is a top priority; we are cooperating fully with authorities, including Cal/OSHA, and have reviewed all safety procedures with plant employees and stressed the importance of following procedures to maximize employee safety.”

Answer 1

The post mentioned above reflects on a miserable and disastrous incident of Bumble Bee wherein a worker died in an accident resulting from negligence and absence of strict safety and maintenance measures. The post intends to highlight the various critical safety areas where the organization failed to ensure healthy working environment with strict supervision. The post efficiently mentions the details regarding how the accident took place. The post clearly demonstrates the various risks that remained unaddressed and thus contributed to the happening of the accident. Bumble Bee in my opinion deserves to be fined and its safety measures needs to be revised by imposing strict regulations and monitoring the conditions regularly.

The major violations of Bumble Bee were that it never reported its previously happened mishaps and injuries to OSHA and also did nothing to address tk the root cause of injuries inside production area.

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