Bumble Bee Foods and Two Employees Charged in Accident Where Worker was Killed in a Pressure Cooker
SEAFOODNEWS.COM [Los Angeles Times] By MATT HAMILTON April 28 2015
Bumble Bee Foods and two of the tuna company’s employees were charged Monday with willfully ignoring safety rules, leading to a plant worker burning to death inside an industrial pressure cooker in 2012, prosecutors said.
The San Diego-based company, former safety manager Saul Florez, and Angel Rodriguez, the director of plant operations, were each charged with three felony counts of committing an occupational safety and health violation that caused a death, according to the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office.
On Oct. 11, 2012, Jose Melena, 62, entered a 35-foot oven at the company’s Santa Fe Springs plant to make a repair inside the machine, which is used to sterilize thousands of cans of tuna at a time.
Unaware that Melena was inside the oven, other plant workers loaded several carts that altogether held about 12,000 pounds of tuna, shut the door and turned on the oven, prosecutors said.
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