"You was not the first person to lose his life during construction of the EV plant and its suppliers. In April 2023, Victor Gamboa died on the megasite after falling 60 feet to his death.
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."
Yeah, the $1,800 fine for not filing a worker's injury with OSHA is also strange, because I don't see how it would cost a company less than $1,800 to pay a lawyer to complete and file that form.
I have driven a forklift before. There is a reason most factories have strict pedestrian zones and a forklifts have priority policy: WE CANNOT SEE YOU! when there is a load we cannot see in front of us which mean we are blind. We normally drive in reverse but that means looking over our shoulder and in turn we can't see half because our necks don't move that much.
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.
Hyundai has this really cool real time remote control technology for heavy machinery. They stitch camera footage together and make parts of the vehicle transparent.
This was the latest in a pattern of safety issues at the industrial site:
> 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.
The combination of coincidences is striking: the CEO randomly 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. (The operator then ran away without checking on the victim.)
There is a classic pattern with incident reports that's worth paying attention to: The companies with the best practices will look the worst. Imagine you see two incident reports from different factories:
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.
I wish I had more upvotes for you. While the swiss cheese model is well known on HN by now,your post goes a little bit deeper. And reveals a whole new framework for reading incident responses. Thanks for making me smarter.
Classic Swiss Cheese model. How many times did someone cross the road, wearing dark clothing, with an eyepatch on, but the operator was paying attention and successfully avoided them.
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's not striking because a person who wears an eye patch and has a tendency towards dark clothing is stastically more likely to be involved in an accident where seeing and being seen are important.
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).
ok but also something is still not adding up here - sure the operator was distracted, but you a presumably functional CEO are crossing the road, and you cant hear a forklift moving/dont think to look like at all? these things dont move that fast esp on a worksite
It may well be (and it certainly sounds it in this case), but I wouldn't always just assume profit > cost logic. When you're dealing with heavy machinery and machines that can kill with a half second of inattention or slip, then deaths will occasionally happen regardless of how careful you try to be.
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.
A relative of mine has managed building sites in the UK for decades. Nobody has ever died or had a life-changing injury. The site in the story has had multiple incidents just this year.
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.
The fatality rate in the UK is 2.4 per 100k workers. [1] In the US it's exactly 4x at 9.6 per 100k workers. [2] That's a large difference, but obviously it's not like a something vs nothing type scenario.
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.
Funny here is not used in the humerous sense, but rather the other two definitions given in any good dictionary as "used to emphasize that something is serious or should be taken seriously." and "difficult to explain or understand; strange or odd." or even the given example of the last quote as "unusual, especially in such a way as to arouse suspicion."
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.
When it's the CEO or if it's about silicon valley companies. I don't remember ever reading on HN about accidents in the shoe factory or in the construction site.
> I don't remember ever reading on HN about accidents in the shoe factory or in the construction site.
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.
by forklift it can mean a "pallet fork" which is somewhat unlikly to kill someone, or monster that would squish a human like a bug.
driver probably caught a flash,too late, felt the bump,
glanced at the mess.....panicked
the bigger machines will flatten a pickup truck, and because the operators sit so high up, the smaller gear have masts flying flags.
the real irony would be if the forklift opperators phone call, was getting the gears from his supervisor for not bieng fast, enough.
Somebody walking around on site without high-vis gear is a blatantly obvious violation. Somebody operating heavy machinery while talking on the phone is another blatantly obvious violation. They’re mistakes you don’t get without a pervasive culture of laxness towards safety. The fact there was a whole network of subcontractors on-site means that responsibility for on-site safety was too spread out for any real accountability to exist. Sounds like that site was a disaster waiting to happen, really.
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.
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.
I know someone hit by a forklift because the operator didn't slowdown for the sections going out of the dark zones.
Forklift operators are careless all the time.
If you simply give them a chance by not being 100% safe yourself it might be fatal.
Forklift operators is, unfortunately, a job that needs go be taken by robots
It has in many cases already been taken by robots. Lots of warehousing is automated. But there are many situations requiring a forklift that are not well suited to automation. Basically anything that isn't dealing with neatly stacked rows and columns of shelves.
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 1993 Rotterdam had it's first automated container terminal with driverless AGVs. If someone walked onto the road all alarms went off and everything shut down. Not something you will do twice.
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.
"The company was ultimately fined just under $10,000 for his death"
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
[1] - https://www.constructionnews.co.uk/health-and-safety/constru...
[2] - https://www.constructiondive.com/news/construction-fatalitie...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDnOSW8cHjE