![]() Time and money were both on the line for Weeks Marine, the dredging company charged with rebuilding a beach near Clearwater last August. "The company gets scared because they are afraid if something goes wrong they are going to lose money." "Sometimes we feel exploited because we have so much riding on our backs ," said Ricky Hayes, a dredger who lives in North Carolina. ![]() * An Army Corps manual designed to teach dredge laborers how to work safer sits unused because the hours required to conduct the course are not built into time-sensitive contracts.ĭredgers say their supervisors make it clear that downtime, to properly care for an injury or learn how to work safer, means lost profits. But OSHA, which has fined the companies nearly $500,000 for those violations, says it has yet to collect a penny in fines against any dredging firms. * The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the federal agency with the duty to look out for American laborers, found 327 safety violations among the top three dredging firms from 1972 to 1999. Workers who fall asleep on the job are summarily fired. In reality, shifts sometimes stretch to 24 - and even 36 - hours. * The Army Corps's 10-hour limit on work shifts is routinely ignored. * Accident records are scattered throughout the nation at 41 regional Army Corps offices, so the agency often hands out multimillion dollar contracts to the companies with the worst safety records because officials are unaware of the problems. The Herald-Tribune found 25 deaths on dredging projects during the 1990s, 17 of which were linked to beach rebuilding. Records at the Army Corps, which oversees most of the nation's beach projects, are spotty at best. * No agency is keeping track of the number of workers killed on beach rebuilding jobs. In the dredging industry, employees are denied the safety net their companies and their government are supposed to provide. Instead, three agencies - the Army Corps of Engineers, the Coast Guard and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration - divide the task, with little coordination or sharing of information.Īn investigation by the Herald-Tribune found that the agencies and businesses charged with ensuring worker safety have made that task secondary to the goal of getting beach rebuilding jobs done on time and on budget. The accident record shows that dredging is made more dangerous than it has to be by companies that don't follow common-sense safety rules or refuse to listen to their own employees' suggestions about how to reduce risks.Īdd to that this fact: No single government agency is charged with policing the industry. Death on a dredge is often gruesome: Men have been caught in gears and torn apart, cables have snapped and recoiled into workers, others have been crushed by cranes or impaled. Sand dredging is more dangerous than working in a coal mine or on an oil well. "I usually lose about one friend a year." "Since I started dredging I've always been around people getting killed," said Joseph Holden, a dredger for 14 years. Hundreds more endured injuries, from bruises and broken bones to lost limbs and crushed fingers. The white sand beaches tourists and residents love come with a needless human toll.Īmerica's dredging companies have earned billions of dollars during the past decade, pumping enough sand from the depths of the sea onto the nation' s beaches to give every man, woman and child on Earth a 4-gallon bucketful.Īnd in that same period, at least 17 men have died rebuilding beaches. It would take too much time and too much money, they were told, to stop work and make those fixes. His co-workers had warned the company that just such an accident was bound to happen unless changes were made. His wife, Colleen, buried her husband a few days later, on their fifth wedding anniversary. He landed on his back, on the sand meant for the new beach. It snapped the metal rod hard against his face and neck, throwing him out of the hatch. Pearce ducked into a hatch called a "rock box" and began chipping away at the 250-pound boulder with a pry bar. 29, the Sarasota resident was working on Weeks Marine barge 265 near the mouth of Tampa Bay when a supervisor told him to clear a chunk of concrete from a massive pump that moves sand. He was going to quit the brutal job of a laborer at sea as soon as he could pass the test for his ship captain's license. Always moving, the dredges are like construction sites during an earthquake.īut the pay - which can reach $60,000 and up - was too tempting for a 32-year-old man with the equivalent of a high school diploma. David Pearce knew the dangers of beach rebuilding, that sand dredges are hot, slippery and loud that deckhands can die or lose limbs.
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