Nearly $1 Million In Fines Proposed for Deadly Liquid-Nitrogen Accident

 

Last January 28, workers at the Gainesville, Georgia chicken-packing plant operated by Foundation Foods began to show up for work.  Several workers were assigned positions in the below-ground-level freezing room on Production Line 4, one of several in the large plant.  Not too long before, the old ammonia-refrigerant freezing system had been replaced with a new liquid-nitrogen (LN2) system.

 

On the face of it, liquid nitrogen is a safer chemical than ammonia, which is both toxic and explosive.  Nitrogen makes up 78% of the atmosphere, and while liquid nitrogen can cause painful burns, as long as it is confined to locations inaccessible to workers, no direct harm from it can result.  However, breathing nitrogen gas cannot support life.

 

The freezing stage itself was in a separate freezing room, and consisted of an immersion freezing line in which the chicken pieces were immersed in liquid nitrogen at around -321 F, followed by a spiral freezing chamber where the gaseous nitrogen boiling away from the liquid surrounded the pieces as they spiraled upward on a conveyor belt. 

 

Just after the shift started, Line 4 had a problem, and three maintenance workers entered the freezing room.  What they apparently didn't know was that the malfunction had filled the entire room with evaporated liquid nitrogen, displacing most of the oxygen in the room.  The workers immediately passed out and died shortly thereafter.  Two more workers entered the room and died, and a sixth was sufficiently overcome that he died on the way to the hospital.  The release of liquid nitrogen created a condensation fog that made escape difficult, and at least twelve other workers were injured enough to require hospital care. 

 

Both the U. S. Chemical Safety Board (CSB) and the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) began investigations of the accident.  In February, the CCB issued some preliminary updates, and on July 23, OSHA announced its intention to assess Foundation Food Group Inc. (the plant operator), Messer LLC (the LN2  supplier), Packers Sanitation Services Inc. (the cleaning and sanitation service provider) and FS Group Inc. (the equipment and mechanical servicing provider) a total of nearly $1 million in fines.

 

OSHA found 26 violations committed by Foundation Food Group.  The agency discovered that the workers at the plant had received no training or warnings about the hazards of LN2 and safety precautions they should observe.  There were no written lockout procedures dealing with how maintenance should be performed.  While the following is reading between the lines, something like this accident could have occurred if someone had shut off the LN2 supply to the system while leaving an LN2 valve or joint open in the freezing room, and then someone else came along and opened the shut valve, not knowing it would kill six co-workers. 

 

Lockout procedures are vital for work on hazardous equipment of all kinds, ranging from conveyor belts to high-voltage power systems.  If equipment is being worked on, a typical lockout procedure specifies brightly-colored tags that must be placed on critical controls in a way that will prevent the control from being operated.  Evidently, nothing like this was done.

 

Another standard safety measure is to train everyone who has a reason to work inside a confined space where hazardous gases (such as pure nitrogen) can accumulate.  Ideally, an oxygen monitor or some way to indicate a problem with the air inside the room should have been operating, but at least the workers should have been made aware of the possible danger.  That way they might not have simply walked into the room to their certain deaths. 

 

If a person strays into an area where there is no oxygen but the air pressure and other conditions seem normal, there is usually no time to react, turn around, or do anything except pass out and drop.  I once saw a dashcam video taken from a state trooper's car.  The trooper had stopped to investigate an accident involving a liquid-ammonia truck.  The gas had been released invisibly, and you can watch as the trooper walks toward the truck and then falls as if shot through the heart, and eventually dies.  Even the miserable coal miners of nineteenth-century England were able to bring a canary into the mine with them to give advance warning of "black-damp"—air without enough oxygen to breathe.  But canaries wouldn't be allowed by the microbiologists who rule meat-packing plants—too unsanitary.

 

While there was probably some mechanical malfunction that caused the initial release of nitrogen, the fatalities could have been avoided with better communication among all the parties involved.  The factory operators needed to give instructions in their employees' native language (Spanish) about the hazards of working around LN2.  The LN2 supplier needed to communicate with the factory operators and maintenance workers concerning the delivery and transmission of their product.  And the maintenance and supervisory personnel in charge of fixing Line 4 needed much better lockout and safety procedures, which were signally lacking in this tragic case.

 

Vigilance is perhaps not taught that much in business schools.  It sounds like an old-fashioned, rather static virtue, somewhat passé when compared with flashier virtues like competitiveness and enterprise.  But clearly, whatever safety procedures and safety officers were in place in the Gainesville plant on last Jan. 28 were sadly inadequate to prevent a tragedy that didn't have to happen.  Not everybody enjoys going around their place of business imagining what could go wrong and how to keep it from happening.  But that's the main job description for those charged with the safety of workers, and it's a job that looks like a loss on a company's balance sheet until something like the LN2 accident happens.  Then it's a lost opportunity, and the beginning of something much worse. 

 

Sources:  OSHA's press release on the fines assessed so far regarding this accident can be found at https://www.osha.gov/news/newsreleases/national/07232021.  Some preliminary findings of the CSB are at https://www.csb.gov/third-csb-update-on-poultry-plant-incident/.  I also referred to a news article at https://www.npr.org/2021/07/23/1019784347/six-poultry-workers-died-from-a-nitrogen-leak-osha-has-issued-1-million-in-fines.  I previously blogged on this topic on Feb. 1, 2021 at https://engineeringethicsblog.blogspot.com/2021/02/six-die-from-liquid-nitrogen-accident.html.

 

Six Die from Liquid Nitrogen Accident at Georgia Poultry Plant

 

Last Thursday, January 28, emergency responders in Gainesville, Georgia began to receive 911 calls from Plant 4 of the Foundation Foods Prepared Food Division in that city.  One caller reported, "I've got two people not breathing."  Another said he had gotten a call from another part of the plant saying that someone could be "frozen from liquid nitrogen."  Firemen recovered five bodies from the facility and took ten people to hospitals, where one later died from injuries received in the accident.

 

Liquid nitrogen is manufactured by the ton for food processing applications such as flash freezing.  At a news conference following the accident, the U. S. Chemical Safety Board Chairman and CEO Katherine Lemos said that the factory receives two or three tank trucks of liquid nitrogen (LN2) every day.  At a temperature of -320 F, liquid nitrogen freezes nearly everything it touches, as long as you have enough of it.  For one summer in my somewhat misspent youth, I worked at a facility that made the frozen cornbread sticks known in the South as hushpuppies.  After being squeezed out of a gizmo that worked like a gang of toothpaste tubes, the sticks were cut up and went through a stainless-steel tunnel about three feet on a side and ten feet long.  By the time they came out they were hard enough to use as a murder weapon, though that never occurred to me at the time. 

 

Something along the same lines was probably in use at Foundation Foods, only scaled up to handle tons of chicken parts.  With proper ventilation and control of the release rate, liquid-nitrogen flash freezing can be a safe and efficient way of making frozen foods.  But obviously, too much LN2 at once in one place can create major hazards.  If the skin contacts LN2 for more than a second or so, the tissues freeze and create serious burn-like injuries, and if such injuries are extensive it can result in death.  And even people who are not in direct contact with the super-cold liquid can suffocate when it boils and expands by many times to exclude the oxygen in ambient air.

 

A combination of these hazards ended the lives of six workers at the Foundation Foods plant and injured nine more in one of the most serious cryogenic accidents in recent memory.  The CSB news conference revealed that the freezing system involved had been installed in the last four to six weeks, and tools were found in the vicinity of the system, indicating there may have been a maintenance problem.  Within a short time after the accident occurred, the main shutoff valves from the LN2 tanks outside the building were turned off, limiting the damage.  But by that time a number of serious injuries had been sustained.

 

Working at a meat-processing plant is no picnic.  The work environment is dictated by microbiologists whose paramount concern is to avoid contaminating the product with bacteria or other pathogens.  Employees must follow strict protocols such as stepping in sanitizing baths before entering certain spaces, wearing clothing to prevent contamination, and enduring long hours of repetitive and strenuous work in windowless, noisy, and often cramped spaces.  Add to these trials the new complications imposed by COVID-19 restrictions on employee spacing and contact, and it is no wonder that meat-processing jobs are not more popular.  But the work is steady and for those who can take it, it is often one of the very few options in rural parts of the country.

 

Moving from facts to speculation, it's pretty clear that a whole lot of LN2 got loose at once where it wasn't supposed to be.  A properly designed plant would have had sufficient ventilation to keep ahead of whatever LN2 is released under normal operating circumstances, but could have been overwhelmed if a supply pipe cracked under the stress of extreme cold or a joint came loose. 

 

In the hushpuppy plant I worked in back in the 1970s, the largest pipe going to the LN2 tunnel might have been an inch in diameter.  If that pipe had broken, there were numerous ways to escape, but all the same, I wouldn't have wanted to try to get out of there in a hurry.  While I didn't particularly enjoy that job, it never occurred to me to worry about the possibility of death by LN2, although the supervisors warned us to be careful when opening up the tunnel to clear a jam, as there might be puddles of LN2 lying around and we shouldn't touch it.

 

The conditions that some of our lowest-paid workers endure in the U. S. would surprise many people.  As news reports noted, we never get to see news footage of conditions inside meat-processing plants.  We buy inexpensive frozen chicken at my house, but I rarely give a thought to the conditions under which it was packed, despite having worked in the industry briefly and taken a tour of an Idaho hamburger plant in connection with some technical work.  The tour convinced me never to accept another such invitation again. 

 

The Bureau of Labor Statistics says that the average hourly wage of animal slaughtering and processing workers in the U. S. is $13.76.  If the Biden administration succeeds in passing a national $15-an-hour minimum-wage law, that will significantly alter the economics of frozen chicken manufacturing, perhaps pushing it outside the country altogether.  Would that be a good thing?  Would you rather have a lousy uncomfortable dangerous job, or no job at all?  Six of the employees of Foundation Foods are now beyond such concerns, but for the sake of the others in such plants across the country, I hope both the wages and the working conditions improve after we learn what went wrong in Gainesville.

 

Sources:  I used material from Atlanta's 11Alive TV station at https://www.11alive.com/article/news/local/911-calls-from-deadly-gainesville-plant-liquid-nitrogen-leak-released/85-75a5d53f-8f74-430c-a73e-0e42f86fc6b6?ref=exit-recirc, which includes 911 calls and the CSB news conference.  I thank my wife Pam for pointing out this story to me.