CEO killed at industrial site by worker operating forklift
12onyourside.com
12onyourside.com
Bryan County EMS records show in a 16-month period there were 53 calls for services at the site, including over a dozen for traumatic injuries. One of these injuries included another forklift accident, while one involved a worker being caught in a conveyor belt.
In March, prior to You’s death, a construction worker on the site went to the hospital after being seriously injured in a pipe explosion.
In May 2025, 27-year-old Allen Kowalski died on the HL-GA Battery construction site after a metal frame fell on him.
OSHA has opened at least 15 investigations into incidents at the site, including You’s death and the March pipe explosion."
>The company was ultimately fined just under $10,000 for his death.
Anyway I suspect they missed the deadline because it slipped through the cracks.
> Bryan County EMS records show in a 16-month period there were 53 calls for services at the site, including over a dozen for traumatic injuries
Which, lacking any other contextual clues, notably lessens the chances of this being directed malice by the worker, given an average time of 1.3 weeks between calls for over a year.
Why?
Someone decided to walk across the road, was wearing dark clothing, had an eyepatch on so he couldn't see one side of the road well, and was struck by a forklift while the operator was on the phone.
What combination of coincidences is striking? People are careless all the time.
It would only really be a striking coincidence if each of these elements is a rare occurence - although if the site has a poor safety culture and this sort of stuff is happening all the time, it becomes less of a coincidence and more of an inevitability.
In the UK for example sites generally mandate hi-vis vests, establish pedestrian walk routes, ensure visitors can't walk straight into the warehouse without supervision or training, and ban using mobile phones when using any form of MHE - so if sites had good safety standards and enforced all this, then the chance of it happening would be much smaller than a site that didn't enforce all this (Just saying this is how it is in the UK as my experience all this is less common in the USA - although no doubt many sites operate the same).
If a site lets people wear what they want and does not stop MHE operators from using phones and lets a visitor freely walk around the warehouse... I don't know if a person getting hit at that stage is a coincidence IMO (regardless of the eye patch).
1. An operator made a mistake and opened the wrong valve during a routine operation. 15000 liters of hydrochloric acid flooded the factory. As the flood started from the side with the emergency exits, it trapped the workers, 20 people died horribly.
2. At a chemical factory, the automated system that handles tank transfers was out of order. A worker was operating a manual override and attempted to open the wrong valve. A safety interlock prevented this. Violating procedure, the worker opened the safety interlock, causing 15000 liters of hydrochloric acid to flood the facility. As the main exit was blocked, workers scrambled towards an additional emergency exit hatch that had been installed, but couldn't open the door because a pallet of cement had been improperly stored next to it, blocking it. 20 people died horribly.
If you look at them in isolation, the first looks like just one mistake was made, while the second looks like one grossly negligent fuckup after another, making the second report look much worse. What you don't notice at first glance is that the first facility didn't have an automated system that reduced risk for most operations in the first place, didn't have the safety interlock on the valve, and didn't have the extra exit.
So, when you read an incident report, pay attention to this: If it doesn't look like multiple controls failed, often in embarrassing/bad/negligent/criminal ways, that's potentially worse, because the controls that should have existed didn't. "Human error took down production" is worse than "A human making a wrong decision overrode a safety system because they thought they knew better, and the presubmit that was supposed to catch the mistake had a typo". The latter is holes in the several layers of Swiss Cheese lining up, the former is only having one layer in the first place.
My point was that in any competent organization, incidents should be rare, but if they still happen, they almost by necessity will read like an almost endless series of incompetence/malfeasance/failures, simply because the organization had a lot of controls in place that all had to fail for a report-worthy bad outcome.
Overall incident rates are probably a good way to distinguish between "well-run organization had a really unlucky day" and "so much incompetence that having enough layers couldn't save them" by looking at overall incident rates... and in this case, judging by the reports about how many accidents/incidents this company had, it looks like the latter.
But if you judge solely on a single incident report, you will tend to see companies that don't even bother with safety better than those that generally do but still got hit, and you should be aware of this effect and pay attention to distinguish between "didn't even bother", "had some safety layers but too much incompetence" and "generally does the right thing but things slipped through the cracks this one time".
Knowing about the swiss cheese model is great, but you also need to have some heuristic about when those holes might line up and bite you. Typically it's when people are rushed, stressed and tired and you have to be able to spot that even when you're rushed, stressed and tired.
That said, forgetting to put on your hi-vis might be a careless error, but walking outside of marked pedestrian zones and operating a forklift while using a phone absolutely aren't! The forklift driver fleeing the scene makes me think safety culture had to be abysmal.
when around a forklift assume they don't see you unless there is clear indication they do.
i can't make out details from the article but I assume the forklift was working as expected.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_SMTc-sOHQ
It also detects humans of course.
When CEO dies for the same reason it's "the universe randomly hands out some justice" story, which is always a good story.
It's all just a game of numbers. If something is 99.99% safe then that sounds great, but that means a failure rate of 1 per 10,000 which means you're going to see large numbers of those fails. This is why even in a society of perfect drivers you'd likely still see thousands of people killed in crashes each year. There's enough entropy, and a large enough sample, that deaths will always remain relatively high.
What's the difference?
The fines for safety failures leading to deaths in the UK are frequently six figures and sometimes seven. So management takes safety seriously and accident rates are very low.
It is about the money.
And the difference is probably caused by worker quality than anything else. In the US a significant chunk of construction workers are in the country illegally, and tend to be relatively unskilled but willing to work hard, rarely/never complain, and work for very low wages. The article mentions that 475 workers were detained by ICE for this company in a single raid.
Obviously companies should be held liable for hiring people in the country illegally, but it comes down to plausible deniability. The applicant puts forth some fake documentation, including experience/qualifications alongside citizenship proof, and even if the employer knows it's most likely fake, they now have plausible deniability of the 'gosh I just had no idea' type.
Though I have to acknowledge I am ostensibly contradicting myself here as this is easy to see as a profit > cost type thing, but it's also not easy to overcome if one wants to take a politically correct approach to things. I can all but guarantee that the machinery operator in this case produced certifications and proof of competence, and was being managed by somebody comparably qualified, according to their papers. So it's a somewhat more nuanced situation than it might seem.
[1] - https://www.constructionnews.co.uk/health-and-safety/constru...
[2] - https://www.constructiondive.com/news/construction-fatalitie...
It's generally management that has the desire to rush the project forward and may be looking to cut corners. Good workers help create a favorable balance between economic concerns and practical outcomes. But needless to say when you get a bunch of workers who are just the cheapest possible, may have fabricated experience, and who will generally be willing to do anything to not risk losing their job, it's going to create a very dangerous situation for both themselves and the job at hand.
Workers soon become inured to their daily risks and will adopt unsafe working practices if it increases their efficiency. Sure, they'll complain about other people's working practices if they pose a danger to them, but they will not self-regulate. If you doubt this look at the builders working on small jobs like domestic roofs and extensions where there is no management. They will not be following the rules.
I'm talking about my experience of the UK. I guess you're talking about America. The incentives are different. Not least because many British workers are self-employed and working "on a price". The big construction firms directly employ approximately nobody.
But in this case you tend to get involved in the work because you enjoy construction and you want to do a good job for the sake of doing a good job. It's like programming. If there weren't external forces, it's not like programmers want to do a haphazard job - but they end up getting pulled in a dozen different directions and, at the end, making code that won't even be formally attributed to them. I suppose one huge difference is also in construction if you do a poor job, you can end up getting sued for everything you own - whereas in code when code crashes, people just shrug.
eg: Tesla Doors: 15 People Have Died in Crashes Where it Wouldn't Open (18 hours ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46365597)
and a host of similar stories about worker / third party accidents and fatalities related to tech.
There are very few HN stories about shoe factories or construction sites full stop.
That's a whole other issue.
The hook for this story is Occ Health and Safety, many people have an interest in safety and the fact that a CEO died hasn't stirred interest out of pity or sympathy for a CEO, it's schadenfreude that lax safety standards caught someone that could have improved those standards.
Systemic issues make poor clickbait.
Replace 'funny' with 'weird' (in a slightly sarcastic tone for sure) and the comment makes sense whilst being less offensive to the reader and not diminishing someones death.
I don't think this is a matter of just fining the company. He should be subject to a criminal court.
the real irony would be if the forklift opperators phone call, was getting the gears from his supervisor for not bieng fast, enough.
A few months a go a dutch train hit a truck that had been stuck on a crossing trying to turn for something like 15 minutes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsuyLs_0C0I
This is how technology is "progressing".
With a bunch of sensors, some cameras, some relays, a simple computer and a bit of software you can make fork lifts work. We are even spoiled with AI now, should be easy to spot safety violations as false positives are not an issue.
People getting killed is never something to celebrate, but there is a certain degree of poetic justice in a company’s CEO dying to that company’s safety violations.
Forklift operators is, unfortunately, a job that needs go be taken by robots
I worked night shift at steel processing plant once. Lots of my coworkers were walking around zombiefied. Forklift and crane operators were moving around 10-20 tons coils of steel and loading them into machines and people were paying no attention to them. Yes, the guy with 10 tons of product on his forks is responsible for paying attention, but the same rules apply as in traffic - right of way doesn't matter when you're dead. Pay attention and be aware of what's going on around you. Do not wear headphones!
Also CEO types on job sites, in my experience, often get to skip the mandatory safety course, because nobody dares tell them no and they feel big and important because they're wearing a tie and have shiny shoes. And these types need it the most, because they have zero experience working and moving around these types of places.
In a lot of cases its perceived that its cheaper and faster to not "do" safety. Plus unless your leadership is fully bought in, or visible on the "shop floor" safety can appear like road blocks to productivity.
"any employee can say stop and the entire place stops?!" fuck that, they'll use it to skive off.
"oh we have to pay for PPE?" they'll just nick it.
I have worked at a place where a transformation happened because there was a death and number of grievous vegetative injuries. The C-suite got nervous that funding might be pulled so made safety a top-line company metric.
It took years to make a difference, but it also varies by region.
Wouldn't you rather have no fine? I'm know this is a strawman take but it SOUNDS like you can just pay 10k whenever an accident happens instead of preventing it.