OSHA won't file charges for fatal Amazon warehouse collapse
Source: The Verge
Amazon won’t be fined or cited by US safety officials after a tornado caused one of its Illinois warehouses to collapse, killing six workers, according to a letter sent to Amazon on Tuesday from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (or OSHA). The regulator says that it has a few recommendations for the company after its investigation, where it interviewed workers and reviewed records and the facility’s emergency action plan.
OSHA’s letter still flags a number of concerns with Amazon’s handling of the incident, including an unnecessarily convoluted process for raising the alarm. When the order to shelter in place first came through, managers had to yell to employees instead of using a megaphone since the megaphone was “locked in a cage and not accessible.” Some workers didn’t know where the designated shelter in the facility was, while others had never done a tornado drill.
Some Amazon workers have accused the company of not providing sufficient emergency training or communication at other facilities. One employee recalled having to yell evacuation orders to her coworkers in response to a chemical leak.
"OSHA recommends Amazon make changes to its safety procedures"
As OSHA describes it, the fatalities were a direct result of confusion between the facility’s two restroom locations. The designated shelter for the building was the facility’s northern restrooms, and according to the report, managers told employees to head to the restrooms around 10 minutes before the tornado touched down. However, some workers went to the southern restrooms instead, not knowing that they weren’t designated a shelter. According to a CNBC report, at least five of the six workers who were killed at the warehouse were sheltered in the southern restrooms.
Read more: https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/27/23043685/osha-safety-amazon-warehouse-collapse-illinois-tornado-report
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