Bowman Andros employee dies at Mt. Jackson facility

[Jilly_in_VA]

A 53-year-old employee of Bowman Andros Products died Friday after entering a cold-storage room without the proper equipment, according to the Shenandoah County Fire Marshal’s Office.

Russell Conrad, of Wardensville, West Virginia, was pronounced dead at Shenandoah Memorial Hospital, Fire Marshal David Ferguson said by phone interview.

The report came in at 9:37 a.m., said Shannon Walters, service assistant with the Shenandoah County Fire & Rescue Department.

Another employee entered the cold-storage room after Conrad became unresponsive and attempted to help him but was unable to stay because of the lack of oxygen in the room, Ferguson said.

https://www.nvdaily.com/nvdaily/bowman-andros-employee-dies-at-mt-jackson-facility/article_11cce634-52e0-5025-8395-5f0ce3f8908e.htm
_______________________________________________________________________________________
There is a WHOLE lot more to this than what was reported in this story...which was apparently not even published in the Harrisonburg paper, although I don't subscribe to that rag so I only know what I see online. See my comment below for what else I know.

[vishnura]

1. And they wonder why people are shunning their workplace.

Take care of your workers not Wall Street!

[Jilly_in_VA]

2. More on this story

I cannot cite my source because of who they are, but here are some further details. The room the man was entering for whatever reason is a long-term fruit storage room where fruit is held in a 98% nitrogen atmosphere. I am not clear on the exact details of what they are supposed to do when entering these rooms but apparently there is a procedure that was not followed and he was dead immediately on cracking a wrong entrance. His co-worker could not pull him out because of the nitrogen leak and because he was wedged in such a way that he could not grab him by the legs and he himself was rapidly losing consciousness. Extraction with a fork lift was also unsuccessful. It took EMS a good little while to get him out and his O2 level was less than 15%; in other words he was effectively dead. The EMS workers who were working on him were themselves running O2 sats in the 80s because of that. And OSHA got all kinds of runaround when they started asking questions about work orders, procedures, who sent the guys out there, what they were doing, etc. This is going to get REALLY ugly before it is all done. And I'm sure Bowman will try to buy off the family....

[3Hotdogs]

3. O.S.H.A. will go through records of training. They will interview employees.

They will look for other violations on the property.

Depending on the circumstances, this could result in fines of up to 200k and prison.

[Jilly_in_VA]

4. Of course they will

However, this is a foreign owned company (in case you missed that in the story) so the owners will go unpunished and be free to carry on as usual in their facilities. Some US citizen may suffer some consequences. The deceased was an American but the company employs a lot of foreign, possibly undocumented, workers in their various operations. I have seen at least one of their buses at a local grocery carrying a number of Black workers who were either Haitian or some kind of West African (I couldn't get close enough to listen to them speaking to each other to tell, but it definitely wasn't Spanish).