Work Injury Kills Recycling Company Employee
St. Louis Today reported earlier this month on a tragic work injury that struck at a recycling plant near the Illinois border. As Chicago personal injury lawyers, we felt important to draw attention to the incident to warn both workers and employers on the dangers that may exist in the workplace.
While working at the plant on a Sunday, the 43-year old victim began calling to his co-workers for help. When another employee rushed to the scene, he saw the man caught inside a baler compact machine. He had apparently become trapped while trying to fix a jam in the machine that compacts and bails recycled paper. The co-worker called emergency workers who rushed to the scene.
The responders were able to get the victim out of the machine. He was conscious and talking at that time. However, he had suffered severe injuries to both legs before his rescue. Shortly after arriving at a nearby hospital he was pronounced dead. He leaves behind a wife and four children. The oldest child was actual an employee at the same plant and was one of the co-workers who helped pull his father out of the compactor.
The recycling company had not issued any statement at the time the story ran. Friends and family of the victim have been a bit surprised by the lack of response from the company. They had failed even to reach out to the victim’s family in any way.
The U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration is investigating the death to understand what went wrong. They will be looking to see if any safety laws were violated by the company. Another worker from the Illinois based company died in a separate forklift accident two years prior.
Our Illinois personal injury attorneys at Levin & Perconti understand the extreme hardship that families often face when they lose members in terrible accidents such as this one. In situations like this one, where the companies involved are engaged in higher-risk activities, it is essential that they design their products properly and ensure that reasonable safety protocols are in place. When those steps are not taken, deadly accidents more frequently result. That is why the law holds those negligent actors accountable to help ensure that future victims are not created.
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