DEADLY MIX
There were no warning signs of a chemical reaction. As a worker checks a barrel’s lid, the barrel explodes. He is gone.
Second of four parts
Raymond Chojnacki was standing beside Charles Duggan on the day the steel drum exploded in Duggan’s face.
It was 1984. A cold, February day in Oak Creek, a suburb south of Milwaukee. The two worked at Mid-America Steel Drum and had just come back from lunch.
Chojnacki had just stepped away from the drum full of unknown chemicals as Duggan leaned over to make sure the lid was fastened.
There were no warning signs of a chemical reaction, Chojnacki recalled in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. No crackling, popping or strong vapors.
“Whatever was in that drum reacted somehow and just exploded under pressure,” he said. “Maybe he shook the barrel a little when he put the cap on, and that was it.”
The force sent Duggan high into the air. Chojnacki was covered with chemicals that spewed from the drum — like opening a giant shaken soda can.
“They heard it on the other side of the plant,” he said. It sounded like several sticks of dynamite going off.
A co-worker grabbed Chojnacki and pulled him into a nearby shower to wash off the chemicals. Others frantically searched for Duggan. They found him wedged in a stack of drums, upside down, a few feet away. Duggan, 23, died from head injuries. “He didn’t know what the hell hit him,” Chojnacki said. “It was over in a second.”
A co-worker found Duggan’s torn hat, 50 yards away, on the roof of the plant.
Investigators later determined the violent reaction in the drum was caused by the mixture of two common industrial chemicals: hy-
Workers told investigators that they had been worried about chemical reactions and had warned supervisors that, “someone is going to get his head blown off,” according to the Milwaukee County medical examiner’s death report.
drochloric acid and sodium hypochlorite, undiluted industrial bleach.
Workers told investigators that they had been worried about chemical reactions and had warned supervisors that, “someone is going to get his head blown off,” according to the Milwaukee County medical examiner’s death report.
Plant managers, including Scott Swosinski, denied knowing about any potential for drums to explode.
Swosinski told investigators from the medical examiner’s office that labels on drums weren’t always accurate and that customers trying to dispose of hazardous waste would commonly leave small amounts of chemicals in the bottom of the barrels. It was standard practice at the plant to commingle the chemicals, the report said.
Swosinski remained part of Mid-America Steel Drum’s management team until mid-2016. He could not be reached for comment.
Chojnacki escaped with dime-sized acid burns from the chemical spray. Emotionally, he was shaken.
“I was off work for maybe a month or so, and then I came back for a while,” he said. “Then I just quit and got another job. I was tired of the whole ordeal.”
Mid-America wasn’t the only company at fault for putting workers in danger, Chojnacki said. The companies that shipped the containers with leftover chemicals shared the blame. They shouldn’t have sent hazardous material to a drum reconditioning plant in the first place, he said.
“If they are using that chemical, they should have a way of disposing it (safely) there,” he said.
Duggan’s mother, Patricia Duggan, received a $40,000 settlement from Milport Chemical, the company that shipped one of the volatile chemicals. The agreement included a clause prohibiting her from discussing details of her son’s death.
More than 30 years later, Patricia Duggan said even if she hadn’t agreed to keep quiet, she wouldn’t want to talk about it. It remains too painful.
But she did say she hoped nobody else would be harmed in the same way.
“If they’re still doing the same thing, I do hope you’ll pursue the story,” she said.
Documents and interviews show that Mid-America Steel Drum and others in the chemical container recycling industry have been operating the same way for decades, despite the dangers.
In August 2010, a supervisor at Indianapolis Drum Service narrowly escaped injury after chemicals were commingled in a capped barrel.
Workers described the container as looking “like it was pregnant” before the lid shot off, landing 6 to 7 feet from the supervisor, Jerry Spegal. As with the drum that killed Duggan, this one spewed chemicals several feet in the air and drenched Spegal.
Spegal failed to mention the incident to inspectors from the U.S. Occupational, Safety and Health Administration who had been investigating the plant for several months following worker complaints about coughing and breathing problems from chemical exposure.
OSHA inspectors cited the company for 23 violations, the majority classified as serious. The company negotiated the fine from a proposed $308,000 down to $110,000.
The Indianapolis Drum Service and Mid-America plants are both part of a joint venture called Container Life Cycle Management — or “Click’m.” — which operates four other facilities; two more in the Milwaukee area, also called Mid-America, as well as plants in Memphis, Tenn., and Arkadelphia, Ark.
Greif Inc., a $3.3 billion industrial packaging company, is the majority owner of CLCM.
Thomas McGarity, a University of Texas law school professor who has consulted for OSHA, said the agency’s ability to hold employers accountable has been “woefully inadequate” for decades.
McGarity co-authored a study last year titled, “When OSHA Gives Discounts on Danger, Workers Are Put At Risk.”
The report noted that the agency inspects only 1% of workplaces each year, and often agrees to substantially reduced fines in exchange for a company’s promise to fix the hazard promptly.
Employers often treat the fines as a cost of doing business, McGarity said.
In 2013, Safety Management Services Co., an Iowa-based consulting firm, conducted safety audits at CLCM plants in Indianapolis, Memphis and Arkadelphia.
The consultants rated each operation on compliance with corporate policies and procedures as well as government regulations. The facilities’ performance scores ranged from 48% to 61%.
One worker told the consultants that “no one follows any safety rules.” Another pleaded: “Just continue to have prayer.”
Consultants encouraged Greif to hire industrial hygienists to come in and evaluate worker exposure to chemical fumes.
In 2014, OSHA inspectors cited the Oak Creek plant with a “serious” violation for not having proper protections in place for “release of hazardous energy,” known in industrial terms as “lockout/tagout.” It includes such practices as ensuring equipment is disabled during maintenance.
The agency fined CLCM $7,000. The company negotiated it down to $4,900.
One of the Arkadelphia employees, Billy Joe Patrick, said he heard talk over the years from managers about making his workplace safer. But not much was actually done.
“They would say ‘We’re gonna do this, we’re gonna do that, we’re gonna do this,’ ” he said in an interview. “Well, I didn’t see anything happening regarding bettering it.”
Patrick worked on a burner at the Arkadelphia plant in 2013, pouring chemical residue into a furnace and then pushing the drums through for cleaning.
He said barrels came in with all sorts of unknown chemicals.
“As soon as you dumped it, if it was real flammable, it was going to let you know real quick,” he said.
Flames would shoot out of the furnace, he said, and it didn’t matter whether you had on a face shield. The fire would flare up under it. There was not much Patrick could do but lean back as far as he could while holding onto the barrel. If he let go, fire would engulf the whole area.
“You can only step back so far. It shoots out that little opening, you don’t have nowhere to go,” he said. “There’s fire all around you, but you can’t let go.”
Patrick held on. His hair, mustache and beard were singed.
Greif told the Journal Sentinel the company is “examining investments in automation to increase safety” in its burner operations.
An incident in March 2013 prompted Patrick, 52 at the time, to quit.
He had just dumped something in the burner.
Right at that moment, he happened to be taking a deep breath.
“I went to my knees,” he said. “It felt like it just burnt my lungs . ... I started sweating golf balls.”
He went to see a doctor the next morning.
“They said, ‘Mr. Patrick, do you know you have COPD?’ ”
Patrick said he had never had breathing problems, or suspected he had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, an incurable condition, until breathing in those fumes.
“They told me if I wanted to live, I better move to a different department or quit the job.”
Eric McClure spent his shifts at the Arkansas plant the same way Patrick did, shoving steel drums into a blazing furnace.
Every day he prayed. “Lord, please don’t let anything happen to me.”
McClure, 36, had been burned. Chemicals from the bottom of a drum had splashed the back of his leg, causing painful swelling and blistering. He had seen flames scorch the faces and arms of coworkers. For close to a year, he watched as, day after day, someone at the plant was hurt, sometimes seriously.
One of his co-workers, Douglas Robinson, suffered a chemical burn on his leg that bubbled up and ate through layers of his skin, from his ankle to his knee. He spent more than a month on crutches.
“A lot of people are amazed that I still have my leg,” he said.
Another co-worker sustained a gash above his eye from the lid blowing off a drum.
In the fall of 2015, McClure left.
“I’m a man,” he said. “I done worked a lot of hard jobs, hard jobs, but this was the most unsafe job I’ve ever done in my life.”
In October 2015, the team from Safety Management Services did a round of scheduled safety audits. They identified concerns at all the CLCM plants in four states.
This time, there was a whistle-blower on their team. Will Kramer was secretly recording conversations and documenting safety and environmental hazards.
None of the Milwaukee-area plants scored higher than 39% overall.
Ratings for management support and leadership were lower than 16% at all the plants. None scored higher than 42% on regulatory compliance.
In Oak Creek, “employees uniformly indicated that they felt safety had improved at the facility in recent years since the company joined Greif.”
At the same time, workers told the consultants they were not encouraged to report risky conditions or behaviors. The plant did not have a safety committee, or regular safety training program. In the category of accident investigations and prevention, the plant scored 18 out of a possible 85 points.
Workers were seen stepping into burners to wipe away ash; they were observed dumping and burning chemicals outside the burners — all highly hazardous behaviors. In all, consultants noted 46 needed improvements.
The plants in other states scored slightly better — the highest was Indianapolis at 65% — but still fell short of the company’s stated goal of 90%.
Results of the safety audits were sent to Greif’s leadership team.
“Chemical safety needs to be addressed urgently at your facility,” consultant Dale Sabers, who was part of the team, wrote in a Nov. 6, 2015, email to a group of Greif executives regarding the north side Milwaukee plant.
“The practice whereby employees mix many different chemicals together without regard to their chemical characteristics is inherently unsafe and could result in extremely dangerous reactions.”
Sabers also warned the company about using acetone
to clean containers and storing it in an uncovered plastic bucket. Even traces of fumes from acetone — after barrels have been washed — have been known to blow up drums and kill workers in other industrial settings.
An Oak Creek plant manager said during the audit that he and others had expected they would receive support from Greif to make safety improvements.
“We were told we were going to have people on the shop floor with us going through safety procedures, hand in hand with employees,” he told consultants on their visit. “We got zero.”
Throughout the audio recordings, CLCM’s safety manager Steele Johns repeatedly told Kramer that Greif executives and plant managers were ignoring his warnings about the practice of mixing incompatible chemicals.
Johns said he’d been nagging them for years and had requested money, $60,000 per plant, for an industrial hygienist to survey the situation. He encouraged Greif leaders to come out and see the conditions for themselves, he said.
“I will make their hair stand on end,” he said.
In a March 2016 phone conversation, recorded by Kramer, Johns said there had been a shake-up in Greif management. One of the safety executives he had hoped would push for improvements was gone. On his way out, that executive told Johns: “We don’t have any money (for the industrial hygienist).”
Two months later, Kramer asked Johns what had happened.
“We haven’t changed a thing,” Johns said. “We are doing it all exactly the same.”
He said the chemicals were still “all just going into a toxic soup, particularly there at Cornell (the north side Milwaukee plant).”
Greif executives spent two years studying the drum recycling and reconditioning industry before establishing CLCM and have told investors they were aware of environmental risks.
In a September 2010 conference call with financial analysts, Greif CEO Michael Gasser said the two companies they initially acquired — in Arkansas and Tennessee —
had “by far the best practices from a risk mitigation standpoint.”
“We know that — we’re very comfortable that we’ve mitigated those risks through contractual arrangements, and also through the processes they have,” Gasser said.
Gasser didn’t elaborate on the contractual arrangements.
CLCM was created as a limited liability company, formed as a joint venture with local owners of the individual facilities.
LLCs, as they’re called, can shelter investors from lawsuits, and there are also tax advantages.
“All companies want liability protection,” said Joe Boucher, a Madison attorney who specializes in that area of law.
“We do not even fully cooperate with OSHA when it investigates our workplaces because our very job descriptions state it is our responsibility to protect the company from OSHA and other regulators.”
WILL KRAMER, WHISTLE-BLOWER WHO WAS SECRETLY RECORDING CONVERSATIONS AND DOCUMENTING SAFETY AND ENVIRONMENTAL HAZARDS
Those protections exist primarily on the civil side, he said, but don’t shield executives from criminal prosecution.
By 2013, Gasser was no longer Greif’s CEO. His successor, David Fischer, remained bullish on the drum reconditioning industry, despite problems at the CLCM plants.
“There are a growing number of very large customers — our largest, in fact, group of customers and some smaller ones — that require us to offer recycling/recondition capabilities as an imperative of doing business with them,” Fischer said in a Feb. 23, 2013, conference call with analysts.
“And that is something that we have recognized, and we are moving ahead with, in a very aggressive way.”
Will Kramer didn’t decide to become a whistleblower overnight.
For more than six years as a safety consultant, he heard executives make jokes when people were hurt. He saw others falsify safety plans. He overheard one say, “I don’t give a crap about OSHA,” when it came to the federal agency’s regulation of formaldehyde. Others stressed the importance of “making f ****** money” over keeping workers safe or protecting the environment, he said.
“I couldn’t leave it at the office,” Kramer said. “It invaded my whole life.”
He spoke up about workplace safety when “right-to-work” legislation surfaced in Wisconsin in 2015. He was arrested during a protest aimed at convincing lawmakers that the bill would result in more injuries to workers.
He wrote an opinion piece in a Madison newspaper
about the safety problems he’d witnessed over the years and conflicts of interest facing safety consultants. Riskmanagement consultants cannot uphold their ethical oath to place worker safety above all else when the companies’ clients are writing their paychecks, he wrote, noting cases where he should have spoken up sooner.
Kramer had hoped his public confession exposing the conflicts would lead to industrywide solutions. Instead, the federal Board of Certified Safety Professionals stripped him of his professional certification, citing his violation of ethical standards.
In his April 2015 hearing before the board, Kramer defended himself.
“Show me a CSP (Certified Safety Professional) who is not actively violating our ethical standards ... and I will show you a CSP that is either a liar or unemployed,” he said. “We do not even fully cooperate with OSHA when it investigates our workplaces because our very job descriptions state it is our responsibility to protect the company from OSHA and other regulators.”
Moreover, consultants usually have to sign nondisclosure agreements forbidding them to discuss publicly the internal workings of the companies they’re auditing — a deal that allows misdeeds to continue, he said.
Kramer said he couldn’t ignore what he saw at Greif’s CLCM plants. He wasn’t going to let a nondisclosure contract keep him from doing what he thought was right.
On June 27, 2016, he filed a whistle-blower complaint with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, detailing his findings and alleging that Greif was misleading investors by not disclosing their environmental risks.
READ THE INVESTIGATION
For stories, videos and documents related to the Journal Sentinel’s “Burned” investigation into hazards in the drum reconditioning industry, go to jsonline.com/burned.
It was the best way to get the company’s attention, his attorneys advised him.
Sept. 16, 2016, was Kramer’s last day on the job for Safety Management Services. He visited the Arkadelphia plant and invited Johns to lunch at a Chinese buffet. Kramer was leaving the risk-management business and had enrolled in law school.
He asked Johns for an update.
“I just don’t want us coming out again and seeing them mixing 1,000 different things into a drum,” Kramer said.
“You will never change that process,” Johns replied, noting he was still frustrated with what was going on: “You can’t take and mix flammables and caustics, bases, acids, everything into the same dang 275-gallon tote.”
Kramer had hoped to hear that the company had finally addressed the dangers of mixing unknown chemicals. It hadn’t. “They don’t care,” Johns said. “This is the way we’ve always done it.”
COMING TUESDAY
Fires at drum reconditioning facilities across the country have endangered neighborhoods, as well as firefighters.