The victim, an 18-year-old Hispanic male, and co-worker were hired as temporary laborers by a cleaning service and assigned to a paper recycling plant. The company recycled and packaged paper. It had been in buesiness for over four years. Waste paper was collected, separated, bound, and stacked in bales on site. The company had eight to ten regular employees, and routineIy contracted the cleaning serves to provide a crew of three or for laborers. The company did not employ a designated safety person or have written safety policies or procedures. Neither the company nor the cleaning service provided safety training for the temporay employees. The incident occurred 90 minutes into the victim's first day at the plant. He and two co-workers were alone in the main facility, sweeping in the vicinity of the plant waste-paper conveyor and stacked paper bales. The paper bales were stacked 25 feet deep and 18 feet (seven bales) high along the side of the building. Without warning, four of the bales of wire-bound waste paper fell 18 feet onto the victim and one of his co-workers. The bales weighed approximately 1,300 pounds and measured approximateIy four feet by two and a half feet by five feet each. The victim suffered massive crushing injuries to the upper body and head and was pronounced dead at the scene. The co-worker was airlifted to a regional hospital here he survived the acute trauma.
Links with this icon indicate that you are leaving the CDC website.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) cannot attest to the accuracy of a non-federal website.
Linking to a non-federal website does not constitute an endorsement by CDC or any of its employees of the sponsors or the information and products presented on the website.
You will be subject to the destination website's privacy policy when you follow the link.
CDC is not responsible for Section 508 compliance (accessibility) on other federal or private website.
For more information on CDC's web notification policies, see Website Disclaimers.
CDC.gov Privacy Settings
We take your privacy seriously. You can review and change the way we collect information below.
These cookies allow us to count visits and traffic sources so we can measure and improve the performance of our site. They help us to know which pages are the most and least popular and see how visitors move around the site. All information these cookies collect is aggregated and therefore anonymous. If you do not allow these cookies we will not know when you have visited our site, and will not be able to monitor its performance.
Cookies used to make website functionality more relevant to you. These cookies perform functions like remembering presentation options or choices and, in some cases, delivery of web content that based on self-identified area of interests.
Cookies used to track the effectiveness of CDC public health campaigns through clickthrough data.
Cookies used to enable you to share pages and content that you find interesting on CDC.gov through third party social networking and other websites. These cookies may also be used for advertising purposes by these third parties.
Thank you for taking the time to confirm your preferences. If you need to go back and make any changes, you can always do so by going to our Privacy Policy page.