Plant fined after worker is crushed in ice machine

November 13, 2009 by Fred Hosier

Posted in: Bizarre Accident of the Week, Fatality, In this week's e-newsletter, Latest News & Views, lockout/tagout, Who Got Fined and Why?

A seafood processing plant faces $66,800 in OSHA fines after a worker was crushed to death in an ice machine.

Joseph Teixeira was killed at the Northern Wind facility in New Bedford, MA, while performing maintenance work inside a large, industrial, ice-making machine.

The machine was activated while Teixeira was inside, and he was caught in the moving parts. An autopsy determined the cause of death was asphyxiation because of chest compression.

OSHA found that the plant lacked procedures to power down and lock out the ice machine before employees entered it.

Northern Wind faces 19 serious and 4 other-than-serious citations. It has 15 days to contest the fines.

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Tags: crushed in ice machine, lock out, power down

One Response to “Plant fined after worker is crushed in ice machine”

Paula Says:
November 18th, 2009 at 12:20 pm
We have a lockout-tagout procedure in place, but sometimes the employees disregard this critical procedure. Several years ago, at one of our plants, we had 3 employees in a die cast machine with two locks on the machine. One employee did not put his lock on the machine to prevent it from operating. When the other 2 employees left, they took their locks with them and the machine was inadvertantly started, with the employee inside. He was crushed to death. This was a terrible occurence which could have easily been prevented. I do not treat this incident lightly at all. Everyone in the company was horrified about this death. We stress safety daily and yet after working with these types of machines day after day, it seems to be human nature to become less sensitized to the dangers and more careless about using the prescribed safety measures. All we can do is to continue to stress safety to our employees, which we do constantly, as well as providing all necessary safety equipment.