Tragedy in a Small Space
MARGOLIS, RICHARD J.
States of the Union TRAGEDY IN A SMALL SPACE BY RICHARD J. MARGOLIS Early-morning breakfast had become a pleasant ritual for Jeff Link and his older brother Tim. After finishing the third...
...Part of theproblem, one guesses, has been the usual bureaucratic paralysis that benumbs so many Federal agencies (another sort of confined space...
...Last July Fourth they paraded in front of the Bastian plant (while a Bastian executive videotaped the proceedings...
...At the entrance, heasked a truck driver when Jeff would be coming out...
...Their high proportion underlines a unique quality of confinedspace accidents: The workers involved invariably suffer from illusions of security...
...They really enjoyed each other's company," recalls Linda Link, their mother, who with her husband James had raised four sons in Auburn, Indiana...
...Others in Auburn—families of the dead workers, labor unions, Common Cause, andagroup known asFAiR (Foundation for Advancement of Industrial Research)—are trying to do just that...
...Moran, who spent five years investigating confined-space disasters as research director for the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH...
...That's a lot of protesters for a town like Auburn...
...All the victims were under 30...
...Nowadays it is more likely to be known as "the industrial death capital of America...
...David Kurtz, editor of the Auburn Evening Star, has intimated as much...
...In this town," he told me, "people are just happy when they get a job—and they're grateful to the company that pays their wages...
...The other part of the problem has been conservative doctrine—namely, the Republicans' suspicion of any regulation that seems to interfere with the heavenly mechanics of free enterprise...
...That was the label hung on it recently by an Associated Press reporter investigating the latest local epidemic of fatalities...
...They die by suffocation, poisoning or drowning inside tanks, tunnels, sewers, and grain elevators...
...Workers think they can tell when they are getting into trouble, but they can't...
...Or maybe—perish the thought—in such towns the managers tend to take their workers for granted...
...As a critic of the company's safety policies has commented, "They killed about one-seventh of their workers in one day...
...The Federal government keeps remarkably close track of confined-space accidents, even if it does nothing to prevent them...
...And everybody knows industry is going to challenge whatever they come up with, so everything piles up in the legal counsel's office...
...Once," recalls Mrs...
...then Tim went to work and Jeff went home to bed...
...Even on their toes," he adds...
...As Moran points out, "Small towns are where you find the not-so-big, familyowned companies, and those are often just the companies that don't recognize any hazards...
...they have no sense of impending danger...
...Asked if his newspaper ever questioned the safety policies of Bastian Plating or the Foundry, he said, "We haven't made an issue of it...
...Five men—Jeff and four would-be rescuers —eventually died of the fumes they inhaled that morning...
...People don't talk much about the accidents," says David Kurtz...
...That's what Jeff told me," says Linda Link...
...It was common knowledge around town, according to James Link, that Bastian workers frequently suffered cyanide burns on their arms and legs...
...It was really emotional...
...But one morning—June 28, 1988 —Jeff did not show up at his brother's house...
...On my desk lies a stack of reports on "Fatal Accident Circumstances and Epidemiology," issued by NIOSH...
...A smokestack community with better than 100 small factories, it has had more than its share of work-related funerals...
...Last May it ran an article focusing on the phenomenon in a publication known as the "Morbidity and Morality Weekly Report...
...From the perspective of an industrial safety expert, what happened at Bastian Plating that morning was a classic "confined-space" accident, the kind that kills about 300 industrial workers each year...
...There was only 20 months' difference between those two...
...Three Sanitation Workers and One Policeman Die in Underground Sewage Pumping Station___" In theory, industrial accident prevention is the job of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, commonly known as OSHA...
...Right up to the moment of death they may have no inkling of the danger they're in...
...So, while OSHA has fiddled, Jeff Link and some 4,500 other workers have died, all martyrs to red tape and marketplace dogma...
...The format is mimeo-drab, but the titles read like tabloid news headlines: "Truck Driver Dies While Cleaning Out Inside of Tanker...
...His story considered as well the six deaths that took place between 1974and 1986 at the Auburn Foundry, an old-fashioned ironworks that happens to be located across the street from Bastian Plating...
...After finishing the third shift at Bastian Plating, Jeff would drive to his brother's house for a half-hour of chitchat over coffee and donuts...
...Given all the industrial mayhem, you would think that on-the-job safety—or its opposite number, on-the-job danger —might be a popular subject around Auburn, but it isn't...
...In contrast, the corresponding rate during 1980-84 for the nation's most hazardous industry, mining, came to 30.1 per 100,000 miners per year...
...The specific causes of these six fatalities varied," Moravetz concluded...
...There is something insidious about most of these accidents," says JohnB...
...Jeff and Tim were in the middle...
...What the reporter had in mind of course went beyond Bastian...
...And then, most likely, they find they are helpless: Without oxygen the muscles don't operate...
...Maybe they don't have the money for safety prevention and training...
...A man'd wrap his burns in Saran Wrap and keep on working...
...We told them there must be no more senseless deaths," says Linda Link, "and they all agreed...
...Bastian Plating employs some 35 people...
...Investigators later pieced together the fatal chain of events: Jeff had been cleaning sludge from deep inside a zinc cyanide tank when a reaction with muriatic acid produced a deadly gas...
...They grew up together here in Auburn...
...Link, "the Bright Dip [an acid used in metal-plating] ate Jeffs shirt right off him...
...For instance, I've been told that one of the victims, 21-year-old Barney Sweet, had fainted weeks before in another tank...
...The driver answered, "Jeff won'tbe coming out...
...Six fatalities over 12 years may not seem extraordinary, but at the Auburn Foundry they added up to a whopping annual mortality rate of 185 per 100,000 workers...
...He went on to stress that "the cluster of fatal events in so small a workforce indicates a need for intervention and preventive action...
...Public Health Service...
...He collapsed, and fellow workers who climbed in to rescue him, collapsed, too...
...So startling were the Foundry figures that they ultimately caught the attention of the U.S...
...Certainly at Bastian—if we can credit the testimony of workers and their families—there had been a number of earlier warnings to which management apparently paid little heed...
...Some of the bereaved Bastian families went to Chicago to testify...
...They just took him out into the fresh air and let him lie on the ground till he came to...
...Written by John Moravetz, who directs the Center for Worker Health and Safety Education at the Chemical Workers Union in Cincinnati, the article bore a dryly eloquent title: "Acute Occupational Fatalities in a Foundry— Indiana, 1974-86...
...In fact, since 1975 OSHA has been dawdling over a set of proposed safety guidelines which, if ever approved and enforced, could virtually eliminate fatalities in confined spaces...
...We had 250 people there," says William Groth, a lawyer who helped organize the rally...
...A few months ago OSHA held yet another hearing on its proposed safety rules for work in confined spaces (now 15 years old but unborn...
...Here is how Sidney Shapiro, a professor at the University of Kansas Law School and an expert on OSHA's habits of procrastination, explains the delays: "The agency has a small staff and a large agenda, and it doesn't appear to have a means of setting priorities...
...Then the crowd marched downtown to the courthouse lawn, where they held a memorial service for the five victims...
...Tim waited as long as he thought he could without being late for work before he got into his car and drove to the Bastian plant...
...He's dead...
...In times past the town was known as the "home of the classic automobile," the spawning ground for such sporty phaetons as the Auburn, the Cord and the Duesenberg...
...Thestuff would burn clear through their red rubber boots...
...Those who have rushed to therescue, moreover, make up nearly two-thirds of the victims...
...That a great many of those deaths have occurred in small towns like Auburn (population: 9,000) should not surprise us...
...But the Bastian tragedy was not the only disaster of its kind to have occurred in Auburn...
...Two Supervisors Die in Manhole...
Vol. 73 • March 1990 • No. 4
