Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 5, 1992 TAG: 9201060207
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: D-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
N.C. FIRE
A FIRE this past September at a Hamlet, N.C., chicken-processing plant killed 25 people and injured 56 others. Investigators subsequently found 88 safety-law violations at the plant, 54 of them "willful." Among the worst: locked fire exits that prevented workers from fleeing the building.The North Carolina Labor Department has levied $808,150 in fines against owners of the plant. That's a record financial penalty by the state. It's not enough.
For starters, how about ensuring safety-law compliance before disaster strikes?
Not once in its 11-year history had the Imperial Food Products plant been visited by state safety inspectors. The state has "no responsibility to periodically inspect plants," argues state Labor Commissioner John Brooks; it's employers' responsibility, not the state's, to ensure worker safety.
Sure, and it's motorists' responsibility to drive safely. But that doesn't absolve states of the duty to patrol the highways, and stop obviously reckless driving before it leads to tragedy.
How is Brooks' cavalier dismissal of the state's duty to be interpreted by other reckless employers? How else than that failure to abide by safety laws is nothing to worry about?
Moreover, Imperial's owners may wriggle free of the fine. The plant is now closed, apparently never to reopen, and the company is rumored to be insolvent and headed into bankruptcy. The owners may never have to pay a penny.
So how about criminal prosecution for egregious violations of safety laws?
That wouldn't bring back the victims of the Hamlet fire. But it might aid recovery of the company's assets for those injured and for survivors of those killed.
And far more than an uncollectable fine, it would send the signal to any other such unenlightened employers that blatant and willful disregard for worker safety is intolerable. Lock the doors not on workers who might need fast exit in case of fire, but on employers who give safety no thought.