by Zachary Miller
Tennessee Occupational Safety and Health Administration (TOSHA) has released a report exonerating Impact Plastics of wrongdoing in the deaths of six workers trapped at Impact Plastics in East Tennessee due to flooding caused by Hurricane Helene last year.
The report claims that workers at Impact Plastics in Erwin TN, had time to evacuate through “makeshift routes” and so TOSHA will not issue any citations of the company: “It was found that Impact Plastics, Inc. exercised reasonable diligence to dismiss employees and direct them to leave the site in this emergency situation,” the report goes on. “As the deaths of Impact Plastics, Inc. employees are not work related, no citations are recommended.”
As previously reported, the company only dismissed workers during Hurricane Helene when a nearby power plant went offline, forcing the machinery to stop.
Attorneys for the surviving family members of the six workers killed dispute the conclusion they were dismissed from work with time to evacuate safely. “TOSHA’s report ignores the testimony of multiple witnesses, critical text messages, emergency alert logs, and photographic evidence that tell the real story about Impact Plastics’ fatal failures,” said attorney Alex Little, who represents the family of Johnny Peterson. The family have filed a $25 million wrongful death lawsuit against Impact and its CEO Gerald O’Conner, who is alleged in the suit to have left the plant while forcing workers to stay behind to meet production deadlines.
On September 27, 2024, Peterson was one of twelve workers at Impact Plastics who, after being unable to leave the plant by car, attempted to escape the rising flash flood waters by taking shelter on top of a semi-truck trailer parked near the plant. As the water eventually overcame the truck, six of the twelve workers drowned. The other workers were eventually rescued.
TOSHA, attempting to justify their toothlessness, noted that its investigation was hampered by “phone service disruptions, language barriers, and other challenges.” It also says that the flooding destroyed the company’s workplace safety records. It is unclear what impact these “challenges” had on the investigation or why the inability to collect testimony counted as lack of evidence against the company rather than simply delaying the conclusion until they were resolved.
The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration—under which the state OSHAs are maintained—is held back in imposing workplace safety by understaffing and underfunding, and ultimately by the class character of its bureaucracy; OSHA is not the weapon for working class justice some imagine it to be. It alongside affiliated work safety government agencies like the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) are being gutted by the arch-reactionaries Trump and Musk in their campaign against workers’ and the people’s rights.
Image: A vigil in 2024 for the workers killed at Impacts Plastics
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