Reference no: EM132223860
When Is an Accident a Crime?
On June 14, 2002, a 22-year-old plumber’s apprentice, Patrick Walters, was installing a sewer pipe at the bottom of a 10-foot-deep trench when the rain-soaked walls gave way and he was buried alive under the heavy mud.1 The company he worked for, Moeves Plumbing (pronounced MAY-vis), had a contract to run water and sewer lines to new houses in a development about 40 miles north of Cincinnati, Ohio. Walters and a backhoe operator, John Kehrer, pumped rain- water out of the trench dug the previous day, and after further digging, Walters entered the trench to cut the sewer pipe. As the trench collapsed, Kehrer felt his backhoe slide toward the trench, but he had no time to shout out a warning. It took seven hours to recover the body.
Charles Shelton, an official from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), who watched as the body was pulled from the mud, was familiar with the plumbing company and the dead apprentice. Two weeks before, on Friday, May 31, Shelton had responded to a complaint about an unsafe trench being dug by Moeves Plumbing and ordered the work to stop. Because trench walls can easily give way, OSHA law requires that trenches over five feet deep be sloped at a safe angle or else shored up with braces. If a metal trench box is used, it must be large enough to protect a worker and strong enough to withstand the force of collapsing walls. A person trained in excavation safety must examine the trench before workers may enter it. None of these conditions were met at this site.
The following Monday, Shelton returned with a tape recorder and interviewed the workers, including Patrick Walters. Walters admitted for the record that the company did not always observe the rules for trench safety and made little effort to enforce them. He also reported in the interview that he didn’t like getting down into trenches, but he had explained to his family that the attitude of the company was “either do it or go home.” Walters had reason to be grateful for this job since Moeves, a small, family-owned company with 50 employees, was paying for his four-year apprenticeship program. Shelton later learned that the company’s safety manager hadleft over three months ago, but that person confessed that he could not recall ever giving any training in trench safety during his two years at Moeves. After his departure, three Moeves supervisors did attend a course on trench safety, but two of them supervised the trench that Shelton now found to be unsafe. John Kehrer, the backhoe operator working with Walters on the day he died, said that he had taken a 10-hour training session on trench safety with a former employer but had forgotten most of it, and that in six years with Moeves he had received no safety training.
Patrick Walter was not the first person to die working for Moeves Plumbing. Thirteen years earlier in 1989, a worker named Clint Daley died in a similar accident in a 12-foot-deep trench that was neither sloped nor shored. Prior to this accident, the company had been warned three times about trench safety—in 1984, 1985, and 1986—and fined $700. The owner of the company, Linda Moeves, claimed to know none of this. She took over in 1987 upon the death of her husband, and before this time, she had little involvement with the operations of the company. After Clint Daley’s death, though, Linda Moeves promised to make sweeping changes. She resolved that all supervisors and backhoe operators would learn trench safety, that there would be regular safety meetings, and that a safety director would be appointed. A written safety policy was adopted that required all trenches over four feet deep to be sloped or shored and to be inspected daily. Until Patrick Walter’s death in 2002, Moeves Plumbing had been cited for nothing more than minor safety violations.
The parents of Patrick Walters and his young wife were understandably enraged. His father considered the conduct of Moeves Plumbing to be “flat-out criminal.” OSHA law makes it a criminal offense for an employer to cause a worker’s death through “willful” violations of safety standards. A “willful” violation means that the employer displayed either “intentional disregard” of safety standards or “plain indifference” toward them. A criminal charge could be brought only if OSHA could persuade the Justice Department that Linda Moeves and Moeves Plumbing had engaged in such a “willful” violation of OSHA law.
Case study questions:
1. Linda Moeves took over the company from her late husband in 1987. In each of the three years immediately prior to her assuming leadership of the company, there were reprimands and fines (1984, 1985, and 1986). After her assumption of the company, there were two deaths. Can the argument be made, from the information provided within the case, that the company engaged in “intentional disregard” of safety regulations?
2. Was the behavior of the Moeves Plumbing Company a “willing” violation of OSHA Safety Standards?