OSHRC affirms $6,250 citation over retail worker’s crushing death

The Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission on Wednesday affirmed a serious citation against an Idaho excavation and landscaping retail company related to safety lapses that led to a worker being killed when a storage unit fell.

A worker at The Rock Yard, a family-owned landscaping materials retail outlet in Filer, Idaho, run by Magic Valley Crushing & Excavation, was in a storage room in 2022 when a standalone, unanchored five-foot shelving unit fell on him. The shelving unit held boxes of nuts and bolts in stacks that were described as being “off to the side” and not “straight” in trial testimony in Secretary of Labor v. Magic Valley Crushing & Excavation, LLC, dba The Rock Yard. Testimony also included that “there wasn’t a brace or anything like that that was up there holding those boxes up.”

Upon inspection after the worker’s death, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration issued a serious citation, saying the company violated OSHA’s Materials Handling and Storage standard, and imposed a fine of $6,250.

In a decision that became the final order of the OSHRC, commissioners wrote that “(a)s evidenced by the surveillance video, this case shows that (the employer) failed to adequately supervise the decedent, had not anticipated this storage hazard, and failed to take measures to prevent the storage hazard.”

The company argued, according to court records, that “(b)ased on the Secretary’s own case file and surveillance footage, it is obvious that the shelving collapse would not have killed [the decedent] had he simply moved out of the way when the collapse began …. Although the events in this case are tragic, death by a storage shelf in a family-owned store surely was not substantially probable.” The commission described that argument as unsupported.