Report on deadly workplace accident paints picture of cutting corners

Engineering supervisors at The Orleans hotel made a bad call in February and lived to regret it. But they lived. Two men died, one drowning in sewage, another choking on his own vomit after passing out from sewer gas.

Why didn’t the chief engineer call in a company trained to deal with this kind of work? Was Boyd Gaming just trying to save a few dollars?

“It was believed to be a simple fix that didn’t require an outside contractor,” Boyd spokesman Rob Stillwell said Wednesday, the day after a devastating report on the incident was released.

As for the suggestion it was a cost-savings move by Chief Engineer Steve Cooper, Stillwell said, “It’s ludicrous to suggest we’d put any of our employees in harm’s way for the sake of saving a few dollars.”

The state Occupational Safety and Health Administration report pointed out that previously The Orleans had contracted with two private firms with expertise in dealing with sewers and confined spaces.

This time, the engineers didn’t make that call.

Although the report doesn’t call Boyd Gaming cheapskates, that’s the picture that comes through. The company is described as sending employees who were “unqualified and untrained in confined space hazards” into a manhole where deadly toxic gases had backed up.

The company is paying a $185,000 fine for nine violations.

OSHA gave Boyd Gaming one very big break. After negotiating with Boyd attorneys, OSHA removed language saying the violations were “willful and repeat violations.” Eliminating that language vastly reduced the company’s liability in a potential lawsuit. Instead, the nine violations were called “serious.”

Three supervisors were present as plumber Richard Luzier, 48, entered the manhole and collapsed.

Travis Koehler, 26, tried to rescue him, but he too collapsed. So did laborer David Snow, 30, who collapsed but lived after firefighters wearing oxygen masks rescued him.

But there’s a fair amount of disagreement between the three supervisors and the men they supervised about what happened that day. Engineer Mark Seglin and Snow both said they raised safety concerns with their bosses. The bosses said no concerns were raised.

Two of the supervisors claimed not to know about a similar accident in 2001 at The Orleans in which another worker was sickened after entering another sewer pit. They claimed they thought the worker lost time from work because of food poisoning, although OSHA said that the accident was well-known at The Orleans and that the two men worked there at the time.

But it’s the pattern that blackens Boyd’s reputation. Boyd management knew of the dangers of grease trap openings in sewer pits by mid-2005, and they knew there were no training programs at the properties, OSHA said.

Boyd had been cited in 2006 at the California Hotel for failing to train employees and tell them not to enter grease trap openings. A Boyd memo written just a few days before that citation said the company was to review confined spaces on its Coast hotels.

“It is clear from this memo that corporate understood what types of hazards were associated with these properties yet chose not to take action to ensure the health and safety of workers,” the OSHA report said.

The Gold Coast casino and the Barbary Coast also had similar grease traps without safety policies.

The most damning sentence in the report is: “Generally, a culture of safety did not exist at the Orleans.”

Stillwell objected: “Saying we don’t take safety seriously is an unfair characterization of our company.”

One memo from Boyd executives written after the Feb. 2 accident says Cooper and his assistant Tom Griffin both said four days before the accident that they had no written policy for confined spaces and don’t use respirators on site because they contract with experts for such jobs.

But days later, Cooper, who still works at The Orleans, decided, without testing the air quality, that there was an easy fix for a sewer backup.

Did Cooper order the first plumber in, or did the experienced plumber volunteer? Well, that’s another area where memories differ.

And the guy who might remember it best is dead.

Jane Ann Morrison’s column appears Monday, Thursday and Saturday. E-mail her at Jane@reviewjournal.com or call 383-0275.