Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, February 27, 1992 TAG: 9202270328
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CATHRYN McCUE NEW RIVER VALLEY BUREAU
DATELINE: FAIRLAWN LENGTH: Medium
ARSENAL FATALITIES CASE ENDS
The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration has closed the case on Mary Duncan and Ivery Boysaw, four months after the arsenal workers died of ether poisoning.Hercules Inc., which runs the Radford Army Ammunition Plant, has corrected safety violations and paid a reduced penalty of $6,546, said Leo Edwards of the agency's Norfolk office.
"We'd like to put it all behind us," said arsenal spokeswoman Nicole Kinser. "We still have friends and families of the two women working here."
OSHA closed the case Feb. 7 after receiving a letter from Hercules detailing how the company had addressed nine violations found during an inspection after the fatal accident.
Duncan, 56, and Boysaw, 44, died Oct. 18 when they tried to clean up spilled liquid ether, once used by doctors and dentists as an anesthetic. The women had been unloading ether from a rail car about half a mile away into a storage tank.
An Army report released last month concluded that the women violated rules by entering an enclosed area around the tank. There were no witnesses.
Documents received from OSHA on Wednesday through a Freedom of Information request contained a company memo, dated one month after the accident.
Addressed to all arsenal supervisors, it emphasized the need for employees to follow procedure at every level, "from the vice-president and general manager level to the lowest-paid job in the plant."
It also said that - like the television commercial that asks parents if they know where their children are - supervisors should know "where are the people you supervise, what are they doing, and are they SAFE?"
OSHA reduced the original fine of $9,350 based on a rating system that gave good grades to the company's overall health-and-safety program, Edwards said, even though some procedures were not strictly followed. Hercules agreed to pay the reduced fine and correct the violations.
Companies that challenge OSHA findings don't have to fix problems until a judge orders them to do so, Edwards said, and his agency's primary concern is to provide a safe workplace.
"We have to give a little to get a lot, rather than have employees working in unsafe conditions while the courts figure this out," he said.
In a Dec. 6 letter to OSHA, Hercules stated that its procedures were adequate and that it had complied with the intent of federal law, but that to improve worker safety, changes had been made:
Workers sending and receiving solvents, such as ether, will maintain two-way radio contact at minimum intervals of 10 to 15 minutes.
If radio communication fails, the area supervisor must be contacted.
Solvent transfers shall be stopped if radio contact cannot be re-established within about 20 minutes.
Sending and receiving operators both are responsible for checking valves before, during and after transferring solvents. They also must document the inspections on a checklist.
Supervisors will give written instructions about which tanks shall be used during a transfer and which operators will perform the job.
All solvent tanks have been labeled with the appropriate hazard warnings. In big stenciled letters, the ether tanks say "ETHER. EXTREMELY FLAMMABLE. CAUSES DROWSINESS."
The night of the accident, unknown to the two women, a valve was left open on one of the tanks, allowing it to overflow. When they discovered the spill and tried to clean it up with dustpans and buckets, the fumes overcame them and they passed out.
About 2 1/2 hours lapsed from the last radio contact with the women to the time their bodies were found.
During that time, other workers finished unloading the ether, and, along with the area supervisor, went to look for the women.
Several of the violations against Hercules involved the supervisor on duty that night, John Mills. He has since been "removed from his supervisory capacity," the OSHA documents said.
Further, all solvent operators have been retrained under the revised procedures.
Keywords:
FATALITY
Memo: a shorter version of this story ran on A1 in the New River Valley