Frontline - McWane Travesty

We watched this horrific story on Frontline the other night about the McWane pipe foundry. Employees have died, been injured, dismembered, trapped under equipment, pulled into equipment conveyor belts and crushed; and all the while McWane had simply paid the intolerably minimal OSHA fines (in lieu of halting production and impacting their productivity) and continued to endanger their employees' lives. Here are the victims:

Reginald Elston: On Aug. 22, 2000, while he was working at a conveyor belt that was running and unguarded, Elston was yanked head first into a machine, where he died with his left hand just inches away from a safety shutdown switch.

Ira Cofer: Ira Cofer was a mechanic at Tyler Pipe Company in Tyler, Texas. In January 1997, as he was working around an unguarded moving conveyor, one of his sleeves became entangled in the machinery. His arm was pulled under the belt system and trapped there.
Because of layoffs, Cofer was working alone at the time. He watched helplessly as his left arm slowly disintegrated. "The belt rubbed it all down to the bone and took all my flesh off," he recalls.
The report of his accident is graphic: "Cofer was missing for more than two and a half hours, yet he was crying out for help the entire time. When he was finally heard, they found him standing on top of his hard hat, trying to relieve the pressure on his arm."


Guadalupe Garcia: On Oct. 29, 2002 -- in the middle of an OSHA inspection -- Guadalupe Garcia was crushed between a truck and a metal bin at Tyler Pipe. Garcia was nearly cut in half by the incident and doctors fought for days to save his crushed legs and pelvis.

Jerry Hopson: Jerry Hopson died a long slow death after a 1996 accident that happened at the Tyler Pipe plant. As he was taking a familiar shortcut across an unguarded machine, the machine started up and crushed him.

Rolan Hoskin: Working alone at four in the morning, with little experience, Hoskin entered a sand pit to adjust a moving, unguarded conveyor belt -- a dangerous and illegal, but routine, practice at the plant. The machine grabbed his arm. The graphic photos by investigators show that Hoskin never had a chance. After the accident, the company argued that it was his own fault.

Marcos Lopez: A nurse hired by Tyler Pipe to bring soaring workers' compensation costs under control, was there when Lopez was injured. "He was obviously in an extreme amount of pain," she recalls. "There was not any position or anything we could do to alleviate his -- you can't even call it discomfort. It was just flat out pain. He was in actual shock." However, instead of calling an ambulance and sending Lopez to a hospital, skeptical company managers sent him in a van to a private clinic under contract to Tyler Pipe, where he was diagnosed with back strain and given an ice pack and some pain medication. Company records show that as Lopez was sitting at home, plant managers were discussing putting him under surveillance to see if he was faking his injury.
After ten days of agony, Lopez returned to the clinic and asked for an X-ray, which revealed that his back was broken. According to Sankowsky (the nurse), even after the X-ray, Lopez was not hospitalized. "They did not refer him to a surgeon," she says, "and, in fact, they did not tell Mr. Lopez himself that he had a compression fracture of the spine. I said, 'Why do you not tell this gentleman that he's got a compression fracture of the spine?' And they said to me, 'Well, then he'd know how hurt he was.'"

Frank Wagner: On Jan. 13, 1995 at McWane-owned Kennedy Valve in Elmira, N.Y., an explosion killed Frank Wagner, a 20-year veteran at the plant.

It's stunning to most of us that you could go to work and never come home. It's unthinkable that you would go to your job and lose a limb. Shameful.