grain bins
lborkowski | June 24, 2013Back in January, the Huffington Post's Dave Jamieson reported on the case of Reuben Shemwell, a Kentucky mineworker who'd been fired from his welding job with an affiliate of Armstrong Coal. Shemwell filed a discrimination complaint saying he'd been fired because he had complained about safety conditions. The Mine Safety and Health Administration decided not to pursue Shemwell's discrimination complaint, and then Armstrong did something shocking: The company sued Shemwell, claiming a "wrongful use of civil proceedings," which Jamieson explained is akin to a frivolous lawsuit. Jamieson wrote…
lborkowski | March 28, 2013I wrote earlier this week about the excellent work NPR and the Center for Public Integrity did for an in-depth series on worker deaths in grain bins. Now there are even more stories on the subject, including a PBS segment and several pieces in the Kansas City Star. Plus, Salon has published "When workers die: "And nobody called 911"" by CPI's Jim Morris and WBEZ's Chip Mitchell. It's a chilling follow-up to the reporters' earlier piece, "They were not thinking of him as a human being," about temporary worker Carlos Centeno, who died from severe burns after plant managers refused to call 911…
lborkowski | March 26, 2013NPR and the Center for Public Integrity have teamed up to produce an excellent and chilling series of stories about workers suffocated to death in grain bins -- a major and well-known hazard in agriculture. Howard Berkes and Jim Morris introduce the series with the story of 14-year-old Wyatt Whitebread and 19-year-old Alex Pacas, who were killed on the job in Mount Carroll, Illinois:
... on a stifling hot day in July 2010, Whitebread joined his buddies Alex Pacas, 19, and Will Piper, 20, at the Haasbach LLC grain storage complex. Piper had begun working there the week before, and it was Pacas…