Amazon Warehouse Collapse in Baltimore Leaves Two Dead (engadget.com) 135
An anonymous reader quotes Engadget:
Amazon is grappling with tragedy at one of its warehouses this weekend. A 50-foot wall at the company's southeast Baltimore fulfillment center collapsed on the night of November 2nd in the midst of a large storm, killing two people. They worked for an external company, an Amazon official told the Baltimore Sun... The storm was a particularly violent one that had torn roofs off apartment buildings and collapsed a ceiling at a TJ Maxx store, injuring three people. Amazon was caught up in extreme weather that unfortunately led to fatalities.
Luckily Amazon sells body bags... (Score:1, Funny)
...so the supervisor placed an Amazon Prime order and a robot brought a couple of them and some cleaning supplies.
Re:Luckily Amazon sells body bags... (Score:5, Funny)
This AC is telling the truth: https://www.amazon.com/two-4-f... [amazon.com]
Re:Luckily Amazon sells body bags... (Score:4, Funny)
My x- wife bought one of these. Should I be concerned?
Great value and great for hauling dead bodies. No more bloody mess either. Leaving no trace of any corpse in your trunk!
Priceless.
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My x- wife bought one of these. Should I be concerned?
Great value and great for hauling dead bodies. No more bloody mess either. Leaving no trace of any corpse in your trunk!
People who bought this, also bought:
Duck Tape
Plastic sheeting
Heavy Duty Gloves
55 Gallon Containers of Bleach
Bungee Cords
Rope
Bowie Knives /s
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My x- wife bought one of these. Should I be concerned?
Great value and great for hauling dead bodies. No more bloody mess either. Leaving no trace of any corpse in your trunk!
People who bought this, also bought:
...snipsnip...
Duck Tape
Hydrofluoric acid [youtube.com]. Or maybe not [today.com].
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Duck Tape is actually a brand name :
https://www.duckbrand.com/ [duckbrand.com]
Bags of lime may also be safer and less expensive (if you have Prime for shipping)
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Duck Tape is actually a brand name :
https://www.duckbrand.com/ [duckbrand.com]
Yes, and it has nothing to do with ducts. It got its name from what it was made from originally: cotton duck cloth. [wikipedia.org] The adhesive version of the tape was invented in the 1940s to seal ammunition boxes so they could be opened quickly in battle.
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It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water-with which it reacts explosively.
or FOOF [sciencemag.org]
"Satan's kimchi"
[the]Hangzhou Sage Chemical Company. They offer it in 100g, 500g, and 1 kilo amounts, which is interesting, because I don’t think a kilo of dioxygen difluoride has ever existed. Someone should call them on this – ask for the free shipping, and if they object, tell them Amazon offers it on this item. Serves 'em right. Morons"
Re: Luckily Amazon sells body bags... (Score:2)
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+1000 funny!
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Although, if voting is so unimportant, why are literally billions of dollars are spent trying to get people to vote one way or another?
I think you answered your own rhetorical question, but to carry the thought further...
Billions of dollars are spent to get people to vote a certain way because it is worth those billions of dollars for some people to have their gal or guy in office.
And thus we have the Golden Rule: [s]he who has the gold, makes the rules.
Campaign finance reform has tried to address the issue by limiting individual contributions and making donors' names public. But Dark Money and PACs are not encumbered so. Time to do someth
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Two persons tragically killed at work... are you people actually joking about this?
Roughly 150,000 people die every day. Unless you know these two people, there is nothing special about them.
Why should you care about them any more or less than the other 149,998 people?
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Out of those 150,000 odd people, a good chunk of them are dying early over weird/stupid accidents. Why wouldn't you care?
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No I don't know those two persons... nor any of the 150K people you claim die everyday... I won't pretend that I'm sad about their deaths... but I will certainly not be joking about it. I do care about people's existence in this country because their tax dollars make this country great. That's where you're wrong. Plus, your name is Shanghai... why wo
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Yes? Joking about a situation even if oneself is closely involved is a way for humans to feel better.
Note that this is actually more of a joke about Amazon rather than the deaths themselves. Not caring about the workers, efficiency über alles etc.
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Dark humor is a coping mechanism. Get off your high horse.
Note: Riding a horse while its high (and/or during water polo) is very dangerous.
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You're right. It's inevitable that people will joke about tragedy eventually, but it's way too soon.
That being said, I lost it when I read the "People who bought this, also bought" comment above. Mea culpa.
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You can bet those two people were killed by the lowest tender for that wall and short cuts would have had to be taken. Unless the weather can be proven to be extreme beyond required by law design considerations, man slaughter charges should be investigated against Amazon, the Builder and the Engineers. Yeah, some greedy shit killed those two workers, end of story.
Why is it relevant? (Score:2)
The summary makes a big point that they were contractors (working for a 3rd party) and not Amazon employees. Why does that matter?
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Worker's Compensation. Or lack thereof.
This. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Contractors don't have to be covered by compo there?
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Covered by what? This is a matter of small-print in the contract. The writing was on the wall.
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Government run workers compensation. Workers, including contractors have to be covered here. Self employed have to cover themselves.
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Covered by what? This is a matter of small-print in the contract. The writing was on the wall.
I saw what you did there. Not sure whether it helps or not.
Not by Amazon (Score:3)
One more thing to add (Score:2)
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OK, here in BC (and Canada in general I believe), compo is government based and all workers have to be covered. In the case of contractors, the contracting company or in the case of self-employed, the individual, have to cover it. It costs money but the idea is that all workers are protected.
So in this case the only difference using contractors would make is who pays for compo, or in the case of not covering the workers, who gets sued/charged by the Province.
Seems in America, the workers have shit rights co
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Walls have engineers that did complex calculations.
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Many American companies have outsourced abusive labor practices to China, etc. That hasn't insulated them from criticism.
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It has insulated them a lot more than you think; you only hear about the huge instances, like Foxconn.
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The summary makes a big point that they were contractors (working for a 3rd party) and not Amazon employees. Why does that matter?
People injured in the event and next-of-kin for the fatalities can't sue Amazon over this, because they aren't technically employed by Amazon, they work for a much much smaller company that can declare bankruptcy at the drop of a hat.
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Bullshit.
The families of the people that died can sue anyone directly or indirectly involved in the tragedy. It's up to the court to decide who's liable and to what degree.
Yeah, but Amazon has better lawyers than those families will, and with no direct link between the victims and Amazon you're naive if you think this is going to go anywhere close to them. Most likely the actual (sub-contractor) employer, and the structure's insuring company. And this was a damaging storm that effected other buildings in the area, so the insurance company is just handling it as their normal "Act of God" procedure. The real issue is more likely to be if the contractor took steps to ensure empl
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You can sue anybody for anything. Whether you get a day in court and win ... that's another issue. But you can still sue.
The families of the people who died can sue Amazon because it's Amazon's warehouse. I don't know whether Amazon owns the building (maybe they're renting it) but that doesn't mean they are immune to a lawsuit. Amazon has a presence at the site of the accident, so it's not a stretch to sue them.
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I don't know whether Amazon owns the building (maybe they're renting it) but that doesn't mean they are immune to a lawsuit. Amazon has a presence at the site of the accident, so it's not a stretch to sue them.
Have you ever worked in a factory or warehouse? I have. And there was more than one company having work done within it. I was not an employee of any of these companies. The work was being carried out by the contractor. But I was not an employee of the contractor either. I was hired by a temp agency whose office was literally at the front door of the factory. Their office was inside the building but the office and I'm pretty sure the surrounding building were not owned by any of the companies I've mentioned
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Contract law != tort law.
I repeat: you can sue anyone for anything. A contract may be a factor in the case, but it doesn't have to be the only one.
Wait, what? (Score:2)
I'm not employed by Amazon, but if one of their buildings drops a wall on me, you better believe I'm suing.
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I'm not employed by Amazon, but if one of their buildings drops a wall on me, you better believe I'm suing.
That's the point. It's likely not Amazon's building. It's probably not even owned by the company that hired all the workers. It's owned and leased from a third party.
Well shit. (Score:5, Funny)
Well that's the last time I order a "like new" warehouse support beam. ;)
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Like new,
much akin to virtually new... which means not precisely new, with an apparently reasonably explanation as to the change in conditions.
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Don't worry - it'll be completely automated within a decade and you won't have to/get to feel smugly superior to these hard-working folks who are doing tough jobs you feel are beneath them, even though they took the job voluntarily.
But I'm sure you're busy creating jobs when you're not criticizing employers and employees as a /. AC. /s
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soviet capitalism
Oxymoron.
I'm not saying the soviet system didn't result in misery and death. Just not because of capitalism.
And I don't give capitalism a complete pass either. Slavery, the Great Depression, wars ... they're all linked to capitalism.
I found this article interesting:
https://eand.co/if-communism-k... [eand.co]
TL/DR: any ideology can be a weapon of mass destruction.
Re: “Oh shit... (Score:2)
I checked and my shipments are all still on schedule, so crisis averted!
They shouldn't have been there. (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't mean this was the fault of the workers. Quite the contrary. If conditions outside are such that it's barely safe for emergency crews, then an employer who is not involved directly in health and safety has no business calling its employees in to work. Now two people are dead because the warehouse couldn't deal with hunkering down for a storm.
I could see keeping a Wal-Mart open under such conditions. People may need things desperately, and people might need a place to shelter if things get really bad. But there is nothing that warehouse could do to help the situation right that moment, and it should have been left to a skeleton crew of security guards who can hunker down wherever they feel safe -- NOT try to work through the storm.
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Re:They shouldn't have been there. (Score:5, Insightful)
Statistically, it is safer to stay in a building than to try to drive home in a storm. Amazon made the correct call to keep people at work. They had no reason to believe that the wall was going to collapse.
Re:They shouldn't have been there. (Score:5, Insightful)
If the storm kicked up after the people were already there, then those people should have been pulled into the most reinforced areas of the building (typically the office) until it passed, because walls do collapse. This is not an unforeseeable event. Get the people away from the most hazardous conditions and ride it out. Don't just keep working.
I suppose you'd argue against evacuating the entire building when there's a fire, too. Only move the people that will be in the way of the fire department. No. Overreaction for the sake of caution is tolerable when the events are infrequent enough.
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Too bad ignorant people like you aren't a minority.
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Re:They shouldn't have been there. (Score:4, Interesting)
It depends on the storm. We've had bad storms, and if you stopped working every time a storm warning comes out, you might as well take the rest of the year off.
So perhaps it was a bad storm, but as far as anyone was concerned, par for the course during the stormy season. Of course, storms can kick up some wickedly local phenomena - microbursts for example that are difficult to predict, extremely local and can be damaging.
It can be a matter of just bad luck - it looks like a seasonal storm and everyone goes about their business, but then something wicked gets whipped up and a wall collapses as misfortune.
Of course, I wasn't there, but that's what I think when we got storm warnings - all it means is to be more careful when outside because winds might be strong and rain might be driving.
And of course, the wall could be defective, too - perhaps it was made incorrectly, or poorly maintained or something else that made it collapse prematurely.
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If there was advance notice of the storm, they made a business decision to have people come in to work. In this case it cost two workers their lives.
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I see how these places are built. When they built the fanatics warehouse next to amazon here in Las Vegas, a large pipe rack fell due to negligence of the Electrical Contractor to support it correctly. It had passed an inspection funny enough. The company I work for only happened to be there to install the wireless system(300+ powerful AP's) Never trust the construction of a building in extreme storms, get near elevator shafts and stair wells. They are built the strongest.
For the people that already don't k
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"I suppose you'd argue against evacuating the entire building when there's a fire, too. "
Turns out, in multi-story buildings this is exactly what happens. "In a typical scenario, the occupants of the fire floor and the floors immediately above and below it should immediately use the exit stairs" https://www.nfpa.org/Public-Ed... [nfpa.org]
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That was on the other side of Baltimore.
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Oops nevermind, I can't read.
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One other issue with this generation of warehouses— the unbraced height of the walls is 50’ so over-designing beyond code requirements gets very expensive.
Re:They shouldn't have been there. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:They shouldn't have been there. (Score:4)
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I could see keeping a Wal-Mart open under such conditions. People may need things desperately
I'm an Amazon Prime member you insensitive clod.
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I was out in Baltimore city that night doing some bar hopping, less than six miles from where this tornado hit, and there was NO indication that the storm was anywhere near this bad. We had some rain and minor wind, and that was it. It was a hyper localized freak thing that came up without warning. Unless you're going to send people home every time there's a minor thunderstorm (which is what this was in about 99% of the Baltimore area), this wasn't something that was really preventable.
A TJ Maxx was destroyed! (Score:2)
Working during a severe storm that tears roofs off (Score:2)
Amazon: "Thoughts and prayers"
Well that makes it all better then. Nothing to see here, folks. Case closed.
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Who said they were working?
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Baltimore has the highest murder rate of US cities (Score:4, Informative)
It has way more important problems than some freak accident that is highly unlikely to happen again.
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https://www.usatoday.com/story... [usatoday.com]
It has way more important problems than some freak accident that is highly unlikely to happen again.
Problem solving steps.
1. Define the problem correctly. This is important, since you need a solution that does more than reduce one narrow case of gun crimes.
2. Take no possible solutions off the table initially. Republicans, for instance, automatically take any solution off the table limiting gun availability.
3. Find the solution or combination of solutions that best mitigate the problem for least cost. Republicans often say, well that wouldn't work in this case, completely missing the point, or, far mor
That murder rate keeps droping (Score:3)
As long as there is murder there will be a city with the highest murder rates. The question is are we doing everything we can to stop murder? Of course not. We could legalize drugs tomorrow, treat the hard stuff as a medical problem and massively cut back on murder. But just because we're not doing everything we can to stop murder doesn't mean we should ignore or even de-prioritize workplace safety.
Why were they working? (Score:2)
There was an EF-1 Tornado powerful enough to take off roofs..... everyone ought to have evacuated when a warning sounded to a structurally sound room --- makes you wonder what kind of operation Amazon is running there...
no emergency preparedness?
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From my understanding there was no tornado warning.
This is no accident (Score:2)
Years ago my mother had her childcare business shut down for nearly two months. The Maryland Child Care Administration had ordered her to replace the standard deadbolt with a lock keyed on both sides. They didn't want an intruder to be able to break through the glass and turn the lock. Then the fire marshal ordered her to remove the keyed deadbolt so people could exit quickly