In One Week, Three Workplace Deaths in Massachusetts

On August 31st, a 51-year-old worker was killed when he fell from a forklift, striking his head on the floor inside Super-Dog Pet Food Co. warehouse in Taunton. It appears that the worker was not using an operator restraint system.    Full Story

The death comes just one year after Super-Dog Pet Food Co. received eight OSHA violations, three of which were for violation of powered industrial trucks (forklifts). Other violations included failure to ensure that each operator had successfully completed the operator safety training and failure to provide periodic safety inspection of forklifts.

“While it is always a tragedy to hear of a worker death, it is particularly troubling when an employer has already been warned that his practices are putting workers at grave risk,” said Bob Burns, a health and safety trainer at MassCOSH, the Massachusetts Coalition for Occupational Safety and Health. “Forklifts are potentially dangerous, heavy machinery. It is imperative that workers operating forklifts be afforded the proper training and available safety equipment, and that all forklifts be inspected for safety defects on a daily use basis.”

Monday’s tragedy in Taunton came just a couple of hours after the Commonwealth’s second workzone fatality in a week. Monday morning, Attleboro water department employee Jeffrey Burgess died after being struck by a van that hit Burgess while he was repairing a break in the water main. One week earlier, 34-year-old police officer Michael Davey was killed in Weymouth while directing traffic at a utility site.

While those accidents are still under investigation, work zone accidents are both all too common and preventable with well-established safety measures — signage, traffic control and buffer zones, and vehicle-excluding protective barriers.