State: Camas mill death ‘could have been prevented’

A Washington State Department of Labor and Industries (L&I) investigation shows the March 8 workplace death of 32-year-old Camas paper mill employee Dakota Cline could have been prevented.

“(Georgia-Pacific) knew what needed to be done to make this equipment safer, but didn’t take action that could have prevented this worker’s death … tragically, our investigation found this fatal incident could have been prevented,” Craig Blackwood, assistant director for L&I’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health stated in a press release announcing L&I’s citation and $648,292 fine against the Camas mill, which is owned by Georgia-Pacific, a subsidiary of Koch Industries.

Cline died inside the paper mill on March 8, after becoming entangled in a unitizer machine that prepares boxes for shipping.

Mill employees told Camas police in March that the machine where Cline was working had been having issues. Mill representatives later said Cline was fully trained on the machine and had operated it for three months prior to his death.

A Georgia-Pacific spokesperson told The Post-Record in March the company had “extensive safety protocols,” including training on specific machines before allowing employees to operate the equipment.

The L&I investigation, however, showed that Georgia-Pacific violated “fundamental safety rules that contributed directly to (Cline’s) death, along with other safety issues identified at the site.”

Those violations included removing permanent guards on the machine in question in 2017, and replacing the guards with what L&I investigators said was “a fence built around the machine that did not prevent physical access to parts of the machine that could cause serious injury or death.”

L&I reported that Georgia-Pacific’s own equipment analysis had shown that “they needed doors guarding this machine that would not unlock unless power to the machine was shut off.”

Construction for those doors, L&I stated in a news release, “was not completed until after (Cline) was killed on the job.”

The state also cited and fined Georgia-Pacific for failing to follow rules meant to protect workers in isolated areas.

According to the L&I report, “safety rules require pulp and paper mills to periodically check in with those workers,” but Georgia-Pacific employees in Camas told L&I inspectors that, although they were aware of a policy stating that a lead must check in with employees working alone every two hours, that policy “hasn’t been enforced for years.”

The citation against the Camas paper mill shows L&I fined the company $161,323 for failing to “ensure that when permanent guards are removed, they are replaced with (an) equivalent to the permanent guards removed or replaced with adequate temporary safeguards prior to putting machines into operation as required.”

The state also fined Georgia-Pacific $161,323 for failing to “ensure that energy control procedures were used to protect employees servicing or maintaining machines and equipment from potentially hazardous energy;” and an additional $161,323 for not making sure that employees “completely isolated the machine or equipment from its energy sources with the appropriate energy isolating device after the machine or equipment was turned off.”

L&I investigators said Camas mill employees were “exposed to serious machine hazards while entering the perimeter gates to (the unitizer) machines using energy control procedures that did not specifically identify what the procedural steps were for isolating the stored energy from the machine’s stacker arms, placing lockout devices for the stacker arms and how to test the machine to verify the effectiveness of the energy control measure.”

Another $161,323 fine against the Camas paper mill stemmed from what L&I investigators said was a failure to “ ensure that working alone procedures were used to protect employees working in remote or isolated areas.”

The state also fined Georgia-Pacific $3,000 for not ensuring their employees were “protected from the hazards of stored and residual energy” while working on the unitizer machine and said Cline had been killed while working underneath the machine’s box-stacking arms “without ensuring that the stored, residual energy was restrained and rendered safe, or was otherwise protected by fixed machine guarding.”

The investigators also found that Cline had called for help troubleshooting the machine four times in one hour prior to his death.

“Before anyone responded to assist him, co-workers nearby noticed boxes backing up on the conveyor belt and went to investigate,” L&I stated in the report. “They found (Cline) dead, crushed between the large metal arms that help feed the boxes through the machine and the conveyor belt.”

To view L&I’s video of how the Camas mill’s unitizer machine works, visit tinyurl.com/bde9ayr8

Georgia-Pacific has appealed L&I’s decision.