Hotel workers seek new safety measures after freezer death

Federal regu- lators and hotel employees are calling for new safety measures after a worker was found dead inside a walk-in freezer at the Westin Peachtree Plaza in down- town Atlanta.

Investigators believe Car- olyn Mangham spent about 13 hours at temperatures below minus 10 Fahrenheit. Her frozen body was found after her husband called the hotel to report her missing.

Devices should be placed inside the large freezers so t hat anyone trapped or injured inside could send an alarm directly to hotel security or emergency ser- vices, union leaders say.

Hotel employees also want to carry “panic buttons” to alert others to emergencies.

“At the end of the day everyone deserves to go home to their families,” said Wanda Brown, who worked with Mangham at the hotel and is president of the Atlanta chapter of the UNITE HERE union.

“We’ve given our demands to the hotel and we are wait- ing for a response, but we will not stop asking for these things to be done,” Brown said.

The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration is proposing about $12,500 in penalties for a safety violation in the death of Mangham, 61.

In the two days after she was found dead on March 22, more than 30 tests of the exit device on the inside of the door were conducted, and the door opened properly each time, hotel spokeswoman Sally McDonald said in a statement March 24.

However, a follow-up inspection in April “proved the button to malfunction,” the autopsy report states. On that day, an OSHA inspector and a hotel employee allowed the door to close as part of the test, and they became trapped. They had to pound on the door to let people outside know they couldn’t get out.