Judge vacates serious safety citation for conveyor belt accident
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An administrative law judge with the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission on Tuesday vacated a violation stemming from an incident at a chicken processing plant in Claxton, Georgia, in which an employee’s arm was fractured when it got caught under a conveyor belt.
The judge in Secretary of Labor v. Norman W. Fries Inc. d/b/a Claxton Poultry Farms determined that the Secretary of Labor failed to meet the burden to prove that Claxton failed to ensure that conveyor belts were protected by a metal frame to prevent accidents such as the one that occurred in the September 2016 incident.
The worker had been cleaning an area just before his shift ended when his hand was caught in the underside of a conveyor belt, shattering the bones in his arm. A U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration inspector in the Atlanta office inspected the plant following the incident and alleged a “serious violation” for “failing to guard the ingoing nip-point on the conveyor,” which led to the accident, according to the ruling. The inspector assessed a proposed penalty of $12,675.
Commission documents chronicled the incident and procedures in place at the plant, finding that the secretary’s charge of an unsafe environment near the conveyor belts “fails to establish exposure” to hazards as “reasonably predictable,” according to the ruling.
“As seen in the photographic evidence, the conveyor is surrounded by a metal frame. Claxton Poultry posits the frame would prevent the employee from reaching the underside of the conveyor under the circumstances described by” the inspector, the ruling states, adding that “the Secretary presented no objective evidence in support of his theory of access to the ingoing nip-point of the conveyor.”
The administrative law judge’s decision became a final order of the commission Tuesday.
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