The Gary Puleio Story, Part 1: Gary's Tower - Matewan - Journal

The Gary Puleio Story, Part 1: Gary's Tower - Matewan - Journal

The Gary Puleio Story, Part 1: Gary's Tower
On August 15, 2001, Gary Puleio climbed a 20-foot concrete tower at Meadville Readi-Mix in Pennsylvania. The tower housed the hopper where the cement was mixed and then loaded into trucks waiting beneath it. At the top was a narrow platform running around the rim of the tower. At the end of the day the loose material which had blown onto the platform had to be shoveled back into the hopper. Gary went up there to do that shoveling. A few minutes later, he fell into the hopper. He was dead when they found him.
The question is: Why the hell was Gary up there with a shovel? He was a truck driver. The job he died trying to perform wasn’t his job. He hadn’t been trained to do it, and he hadn’t been given any of the standard safety equipment. There was no railing around the inside of the platform, of course, and there was no safety line to prevent a fall from becoming deadly. Loose, raw cement mix is granular and slippery, like a cross between sand and gravel, pasty and smooth when you step on it. It’s hard to keep your footing—try it sometime. Yet the company treated it as a minor, insignificant chore to be assigned to the newest worker. That might—might—make some sense if it was the newest worker assigned to the mixer: a low-level job that required little time and only three pieces of equipment, a shovel, a harness, and a safety line which you had been shown how to use.
But Gary wasn’t a mixer. He drove a truck. So why was he the one doing it? Who told him to do it? Why didn’t he have a safety line to attach to the tower? Why wasn’t there a safety line already up there, permanently attached, since the job had to be done every day by somebody? Such a simple, inexpensive thing, a safety line.
The ‘Investigation’
From the Meadville Tribune, November 15, 2001
According to a Sept. 28 OSHA citation, there was no sign at the top of the bins warning of the fall danger where Puleio was working. The bins are used to store sand and gravel materials.
In addition, the bins and weigh hopper, into which material from the bins are dumped, were “not secured to prevent unauthorized entry,” according to the citation. The bins are at least 17 feet in depth and the hopper is up to eight feet deep, the citation said. The depths constitute a fall hazard under OSHA regulations.
John Stranahan, OSHA area director, said the violation in this case was classified as repeat, which essentially means violations were corrected but later were found to re-appear.
The citation indicated the same or similar citations had been issued during a June 25 inspection. That inspection was prompted after an OSHA study that indicated businesses like Meadville Redi-Mix had many citations, according to Stranahan. However, he noted Meadville Redi-Mix did not necessarily have a high citation rate. “A lot of concrete batch plants showed up on that list,” he said.
So in other words, there was nothing special about MRM’s negligent behavior. ‘Everybody does it.’ My mother had an answer for that one that didn’t involve letting me off the hook. Stranahan was clearly not trained by my mother. ‘Everybody does it’ works with him.
Stranahan seemed to be equally comfortable with the company’s explanation of what Gary was doing up there: he volunteered, they said. Right. This is their story as they gave it to the Tribune and it is the same story they fed Stranahan. To anybody who has ever worked for a company of any kind at ground-level, it is a story that grows increasingly bizarre and unbelievable as it goes on. The end has so little credibility it’s a wonder lightning didn’t strike them dead on the spot. The Tribune reporter got his version from Plant Operations Manager John Shartle.
Shartle said…the reason Puleio died is a mystery to him, as well.
“To the best of our knowledge, he was not instructed to go up there. He was instructed to go out back and help a couple guys go out and clean the tail pulley at the bottom of the conveyor,” Shartle said. The tail pulley is at ground level, at the opposite end of the conveyor from the bins. “He came in from his regular duties - driving truck - and he had some free time.”
However, Shartle said the workers Puleio was asked to help were apparently finished. From there, he said, Puleio apparently “took it upon himself to go up on top of the plant (bins) to possibly do some cleanup work.”
Shartle continued, “We don’t have the answers to why he went up there. We will never have the answer. He had the answer.”
He said there are safety procedures in place for employees who work on top of the bins. However, he said the main work done up there is general maintenance, and the workers who do that have the necessary safety equipment and skills. “We have straps, we have ropes. The guys that are trained in that area have that equipment. They are the ones to go up there. If (Puleio) had been instructed to go up there, he’d have had the necessary equipment. He was specifically instructed to go to the tail pulley, which is on the ground.
“However, the type of employee that Gary was, he always did more than you expected. That’s the way he was,” Shartle said. (emphasis added)
That’s good—mix a compliment into your excuse. This guy has a future in PR if he wants one. So according to Shartle, Gary died because he was a swell guy who just wanted to help out by volunteering for a job he wasn’t trained in, didn’t have the equipment for, and had told his wife he didn’t like. Oh, did I leave that part out? Oh yes, there’s another side to this story, a side that sounds a lot more like real life than Shartle’s feel-good fairy tale, and it’s a lot shorter.
According to Gary’s sister, Donna Spadaro, her 53-yr-old brother was afraid of heights and ‘had trouble with his knees’. And his widow, Linda, says he told her the day before he died that he had ‘been sent’ up the tower to clean it because he was the new guy. ‘Been sent’ is NOT ‘volunteered’. And nobody who’s got acrophobia goes climbing up a 20-foot tower for the hell of it or because he’s a swell guy. They go because they have to, and a lot of the time not then. Trust me on this—I’m acrophobic, too. If Gary went up there—and he did—it was because he was told to go, and Shartle is lying through his teeth to cover his ass.
A strong indication that what I say is true comes from the company itself, who paid a $6000 penalty after the OSHA investigation into Gary’s death without a whimper. ‘They basically paid the full penalty,’ Stranahan said. ‘They just paid it as issued.’ I don’t doubt it. Little enough after ordering a man to his death doing something he wasn’t supposed to be doing and that you knew he wasn’t supposed to be doing. I bet they were figuring they got off cheap. I hope they were, because they did. Dirt cheap.
Next: Gary Puleio - Who was the man they killed?



Posted on Oct 4, 2004 at 02:18AM by Mick in Labor Issues | 1 Comment
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