Worker claims manager threatened discipline if she left job amid storm
MAYFIELD, Ky. — An employee of the Kentucky candle factory where eight workers were killed by a tornado said Tuesday that a supervisor threatened her with written disciplinary action if she went home early because storms were approaching.
Haley Conder, who worked at the Mayfield Consumer Products factory on and off for 10 years, also questioned why the company did not encourage workers to go home — or at least give them a better understanding of the danger — between a first tornado siren around 6 p.m. Friday and another one around 9 p.m., shortly before the tornado hit.
“They (the company) had from 6 o’clock to 9 o’clock to allow us to go home, to tell us really what was going on and that we needed to prepare ourselves for the worst,” Conder said in a phone interview. “It was nothing like that. Not one supervisor told us what was really going on.”
A spokesman for the company
insisted that employees were free to leave anytime.
Conder’s comments came on the same day that the state’s governor said Kentucky’s workplace safety agency would look into the eight deaths, which happened as violent weather spawned tornadoes in five states.
Gov. Andy Beshear told reporters
that the Kentucky Division of Occupational Safety and Health Compliance would conduct a review.
“So it shouldn’t suggest that there was any wrongdoing. But what it should give people confidence in, is that we’ll get to the bottom of what happened,” he said.
Mayfield Consumer Products spokesman Bob Ferguson, who works for an outside communications firm, said the company welcomes a review by the state and will cooperate.
Ferguson denied that employees were stuck at the plant or would face retribution if they left.
“Not true. That is absolutely not true. We followed our protocols exactly,” he said.
Mayfield, home to 10,000 residents and the candle factory, suffered some of the worst damage in the country. The tornado outbreak that killed at least 88 people — 74 of them in Kentucky — cut a path of devastation from Arkansas, where a nursing home was destroyed, to Illinois, where an Amazon distribution center was heavily damaged.
Six people died in the Illinois warehouse collapse, and the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration has opened an investigation into what happened there. The tornadoes also killed four in Tennessee, two in Arkansas and two in Missouri.