Local dairy faces fines in worker death
NATHAN BROWN nbrown@magicvalley.com
Jul 23, 2016
HAZELTON, IDAHO — A Jerome County dairy is facing fines after a federal investigation into the death of a worker who drowned in a waste pond in February.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration issued two citations to Sunrise Organic Dairy on July 12. The first, for a “serious” violation, comes with a $4,900 proposed penalty and says employees feeding cows at different times during daylight and darkness were “exposed to an unguarded, unidentified non-enclosed manure pit. Employees drove feeding trucks along the edge (parallel) and straight towards (perpendicular) the edge of the manure pit.” It says the dairy has to address this by putting up barriers, signs or something similar “to positively identify the location of the manure pit regardless of ground, visibility, or other environmental conditions.”
The second citation, labeled “other than serious,” says the dairy needs to keep a log of work-related injuries or illnesses, and proposes a $700 fine for their not having done so.
Ruperto Vazquez-Carrera, 37, of Hazelton, appears to have driven a truck into the waste pond early in the morning of Feb. 16, 2016, when it was dark and the water was high from melting snow. Someone saw the truck submerged later in the morning and called police. His body was not in the truck when it was pulled out around noon, but divers found him several hours later.
The fines aren’t final. The dairy still has time to appeal, and they are meeting with OSHA next week, said David Kearns, head of OSHA’s Boise office.
“We may be able to reach some sort of settlement,” he said.
Sunrise cooperated with OSHA’s investigation, Kearns said.
Dairy owner Dirk Reitsma said he couldn’t comment on the citations since the OSHA process is still ongoing, but he expressed his sorrow for Vazquez-Carrera’s family and the people who knew him, and said he wants to create the safest conditions possible at his dairy to make sure something similar never happens again.
“Our first priority at the dairy is safety, and that day we lost a highly valued team member, a friend, somebody we cared about,” Reitsma said. “For us, that is the … part that hurts for us. That we lost somebody we really cared about.”
Kearns said there isn’t a specific law or rule the dairy broke, but in cases where OSHA is investigating a serious hazard “we can take a look at industry-recognized standards.”
Kearns said the investigation didn’t shed any more light on exactly what happened to Vazquez-Carrera.
“There are many times where the person who has the most direct information is, unfortunately, the person who is no longer with us,” he said.
Vazquez-Carrera’s death drew outside attention, with several animal rights and vegan-vegetarian websites writing about it. The United Farm Workers also took note, sending someone to the Magic Valley to meet with farm workers and their families this spring to talk about conditions, according to Boise Weekly. It isn’t the only manure pit drowning in the region in recent years. A year before, Randy Vasquez drowned in one at a dairy in Yakima County, Wash. His death led a state lawmaker to introduce a bill requiring inspections of dairies and various new safety regulations, but it didn’t pass — Vasquez had methamphetamine in his system, and dairy industry opponents of the bill argued the drugs, rather than safety regulations, were the reason for the accident.
Kearns said OSHA has been trying to increase oversight of farms, including possibly instituting random inspections, but hasn’t been successful. According to the state Department of Labor’s numbers, almost a third of workplace deaths in Idaho from 2008 to 2014 were in agriculture; most years, it is the economic sector with the most worker deaths, with the trade, transportation and utilities sectors coming in as second-most risky. The Idaho Statesman reported last year that 2014 was an especially bad year for farm worker deaths, including three in the Magic Valley due to equipment-related accidents.
Kearns said OSHA has “heard a lot of concerns about agriculture just in the past few years,” but that serious-injury or fatality accidents that should be reported promptly to OSHA sometimes aren’t, leaving them to learn about them from other sources.
“A disproportionate number of worker deaths have occurred in agriculture,” he said, “and often to vulnerable workers where English is their second language.”