Grieving family seeks workplace safety

[Omaha Steve]

http://journalstar.com/news/local/article_31275354-f81d-11de-8517-001cc4c002e0.html

By ART HOVEY / Lincoln Journal Star | Posted: Sunday, January 3, 2010 6:00 am

Tonya Ford wants safer workplaces - and she's willing to go into grim detail to make her case.

And so, when she recounted for state lawmakers the January 2009 death of her 51-year-old uncle, known to his family as Bobby Fitch, she offered a diagram.

It displayed her understanding of his fall of some 70 feet at the Archer Daniels Midland grain-milling plant in southwest Lincoln in stages.

First it was 12.5 feet from a manlift to the point where he bounced off a wall and hit an air duct that collapsed under his weight. Then it was another 19 feet to a manhole that he slid through before plummeting the final 42 feet to the base of the manlift.

"We don't want this to occur to any other family," Ford said in an interview last week. "Especially with the holidays, it's hard. And we realize he could have been here."

Eleven months after the fact, Ford and other members of Fitch's family are convinced that his fall from a narrow, open platform - one that carries workers up and down in a largely vertical work setting - involved something other than his own carelessness.

FULL story at link.

[niyad]

1. k and r

[tech9413]

2. Thanks for more good info Steve

I've worked on job sites and done things that I knew were unsafe but I would never ask anyone to take the risks I did. Any company, no matter how large or small, has the moral obligation to not put the workers in harms way without taking responsibility for injuries that could be avoided. Unfortunately, most companies are not moral and will never be(unless we can change the laws, or enforce them).

[dcsmart]

3. K & R