OSHA is investigating the death of a Carlisle, PA woman while she was working at the Amazon.com warehouse near Walnut Bottom Road in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
Jody Rhoads, 52, of Carlisle, died as a result of multiple blunt force injuries at Carlisle Regional Medical Center after the motorized pallet jack she was operating crashed into shelving, according to Cumberland County Coroner Charley Hall.
This is truly a tragic event for the Rhodes family. No one asks to get hurt at work, let along lose their life. OSHA will be investigating whether any policies, procedures, or OSHA standards were violated by Amazon that could have resulted int he tragic accident.
The geographic area we serve, mainly, Greencastle, Chambersburg, Shippensburg, Carlisle, and Mechanicsburg areas, are continuing to have experience quite a boom in warehouse, distribution, and trucking type facilities. The area is not limited to, by any means, simply warehouse and distribution type facilities, but it is the largest booming type industry along the Interstate 81 corridor. You can see it up and down this corridor. The reasoning is quite clear, Interstate 81 allows business access to the entire East Coast on one highway that avoids most major Metropolitan areas. We just wrote two articles on two new projects coming or may be coming to Shippensburg, Pennsylvania along I-81, Procter & Gamble and Georgia Pacific.
With these type of facilities come tons of trucking jobs, shipping and receiving jobs, warehouse labor jobs, and forklift and pallet jack operating jobs. We are seeing more and more injuries piling up from pallet jack and forklift type incidents and accidents. We can only hope that the employer in these facilities, which many employees start out under temporary agencies, provide more than adequate training on this equipment. It is not just the unfortunate type of accidents above, but also legs and ankles being run over, boxes, stacks, and shelving being knocked over and hurting other employees in the area, lifting injuries form unloading, and repetitive injuries from use of this equipment.
Again, we stress, if you work in a distribution/warehouse type facility and experience an injury, provide notice immediately to your employer and seek medical treatment. Frequently, injuries in these types of facilities are also denied by the employer. Don’t wait. If your employer is causing you problems with your work injury, or with you getting benefits, or even getting medical treatment, we stand ready to assist with your Workers Compensation claim. Our consultations for workers compensation are ALWAYS FREE.
