Tag Archives: OSHA Violations

Chilos Builders Fined Over $230,000

Chilos Builders, an Everett company, was fined over $230,000 for safety violations. The Washington State Department of Labor & Industries (DLI) cited the company for eight safety violations, including exposing employees to fall hazards while working two and three stories above ground. The company has a history of safety violations.

“We’ve cited this company for numerous safety violations the past few years, and we’ve told them many times how to protect their workers from falling from elevations,” said Anne Soiza, DLI assistant director for the Division of Occupational Safety and Health (DOSH). “These safety rules are in place to protect workers, and this employer is blatantly ignoring them while other employers protect their workers from harm.”

As a result of these recent violations, DLI has designated the framing contractor a severe violator. That means inspectors will continue to inspect the company’s work sites until the unsafe conditions no longer exist.

It appears from Washington State data that the corporation has been dissolved and the business closed.

Apart from these current citations, DLI has inspected Chilos Builders under its current name and a previous name, Solorio’s Framing, five times since 2016. Each of those prior inspections resulted in DLI citing the company for safety issues including fall violations. Chilos Builders has appealed the citations from one of the inspections in 2018.

In a separate action, DLI suspended the company’s contractor registration in April for failing to have liability insurance. The registration remains suspended.

The United States Department of Labor Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has an open inspection report with over $137,000 in safety violation fines pending, as well.

History of Workers Injured in Falls

Chilos Builders, owned by Ana Iglesias and managed by Cecilio Solorio, has reported 30 worker injuries under the two companies since 2016. The injuries include three caused by workers falling from heights of 8 to 15 feet.

Details of the Current Citations

DLI issued the recent citations for violations at job sites in the Georgetown and Ballard neighborhoods in Seattle. The fines were imposed after inspections at two Seattle construction job sites found numerous problems that placed workers at significant risk.

Georgetown: Refused to Follow Safety Rules

The most recent safety violations occurred in April when the company was helping build new apartments in Georgetown. Inspectors found inadequate safety rails on the roof, where six of the company’s framers were working just over 28 feet above ground.

In addition, there were four unguarded wall openings 9.5 feet above ground and no handrails on stairways leading to the second floor.

The Georgetown violations resulted in three citations totaling $126,000 in fines. The citations were designated “willful,” meaning the employer knew or should have known the rules, but refused to follow them.

The company corrected the safety hazards the day after inspectors first arrived.

Ballard: Fall Protection Lacking on Second and Third Floors

Two months earlier, in February, inspectors found five safety violations when the company was working in Ballard on another multi-unit residential project.

Two of the citations were considered willful, including one for failing to install fall protection on window and door openings on the three-story building. Inspectors saw at least two workers on the second floor and one worker on the third floor exposed to the potential fall hazards.

The company, which said it had 66 workers, was also cited for failing to train at least three employees on how to prevent fall hazards, failing to document weekly safety inspections and weekly safety meetings, and failing to ensure crew leaders and supervisors held valid first-aid certificates.

The Ballard site citations resulted in a total of $108,360 in fines.

Employers have 15 business days from the time they receive a citation to appeal. Penalty money paid as a result of a citation is placed in the workers’ compensation supplemental pension fund, helping injured workers and families of those who have died on the job.

Recent Posts on Related Topics

NYTimes: 2 Years, 31 Dead Construction Workers. New York Can Do Better.

On Dec. 23, on the Upper East Side of New York City, yet another construction worker died. His name has not yet been released, but he was the 31st to die on the job in the city in the past two years. He was working on a nonunion work site, as were 28 of the 30 others. Fabian Para, who worked nearby, explained that “he was on the third floor, and he was wearing a harness but wasn’t hooked to a cable, and when he fell, he just went down.”

Just three weeks earlier, Wilfredo Enriques fell to his death at the old Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn. Deaths 27 and 28 occurred on Nov. 22, when a steel beam fell four stories at a Queens job site, crushing George Smith and Elizandro Enriquez Ramos. Mayor Bill de Blasio said that the workers’ deaths were a “tragedy” and that “we need to know, of course, right away whether it was mechanical, or was it human error? We don’t know yet.”

Actually, we do know; it is abundantly clear: We are in the midst of a public health epidemic brought on by inadequate safety regulations and public inattention. Construction-safety lapses happen because it pays for companies to run the risk of letting them happen. When the dead are largely foreign born and, in many cases, undocumented, no one much cares.

Spending in the construction industry is at a record high. And yet many contractors can’t be bothered to pay for training programs and safety measures, even those required by law, such as installing “fall protection” systems like nets and railings. The federal agency tasked with enforcing such safety protocols, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, is severely understaffed. Between 2011 and 2014, the number of building permits issued in New York City jumped by more than 18 percent, but the number of OSHA inspectors for all of New York State dropped by more than 13 percent (as of 2014, there were only 71 left in the state).

Because there are so few inspectors, only a small fraction of construction sites are ever inspected. When sites are inspected, not surprisingly, OSHA finds a high level of violations. And even when sporadic inspections lead to fines for violations, the fines are too small to deter misconduct. According to records kept by the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health, a nonprofit group that lobbies for worker safety, of the city contractors that were inspected from 2009 to 2014, 73 percent had at least one “serious” OSHA violation, mostly of “fall protection” standards — precisely the violation responsible for the most deaths.

Predictably, the number of construction injuries and fatalities has soared. The Department of Buildings recorded a 250 percent increase in construction injuries from 2011 through 2015, with construction fatalities increasing each year as well.

Read the full story on NYTimes.com

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