Following up with last weeks article on the Lumber Bridge ammonia explosion, the Mountaire Farms Plant has been found to have 15 workplace safety violations, nine of them serious. This is the same plant that killed one worker last week and injured several more due to an ammonia leak.
The Robeson county plant that’s about 16 miles south of Fayetteville was fined a total of $19,600 for violations cited in April, said Dolores Quesenberry, a state Labor Department spokeswoman. Those violations included sanitation issues and noise control, and the agency cited nine serious matters and six other violations.
Clifton Swain, 47, of Fayetteville, a maintenance employee, died after ammonia leaked when a refrigeration line ruptured. Swain was a retiree from the Air Force and had worked at the plant since 2001, the Fayetteville Observer reported. Quesenberry said that inspectors are at the plant trying to determine what happened.
The U.S. Chemical Safety Board is not investigating the incident due to limited resources available to the group. They deem the accident worthy of investigation but can’t commit the extra resources toward further investigation.
The Chemical Safety Board has about 12 field investigators and they are all on as many other investigations currently. There is a team of six agency workers in Garner this week investigating an explosion at the Slim Jim plant that killed three workers.
Holding an internal employee meeting Monday, Mountaire Farms of Millsboro, Del., answered questions about this incident in which four other workers were also injured. Their names and injuries were not released. Two of them were sent to the burn center at UNC Hospitals.
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Rick Shapiro has practiced personal injury law for over 30 years in Virginia, North Carolina, and throughout the Southeastern United States. He is a Board-Certified Civil Trial Advocate by the National Board of Trial Advocacy (ABA Accredited) and has litigated injury cases throughout the eastern United States, including wrongful death, trucking, faulty products, railroad, and medical negligence claims. During his three-decade career, Shapiro has won client appeals before the VA Supreme Court, VA Court of Appeals, NC Supreme Court, SC Supreme Court, WV Supreme Court, TN Supreme Court, and three times before the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, underscoring Shapiro’s trial achievements. In addition, he and his law firm have won settlements/verdicts in excess of $100 million. His success in and out of the courtroom is a big reason why he was named 2019 “Lawyer of the Year” in railroad law in U.S. News & World Report's Best Lawyers publication (Norfolk, VA area), and he has been named a “Best Lawyer” and “Super Lawyer” by those peer-reviewed organizations for multiple years. Rick was also named a “Leader in the Law, Class of 2022” by Virginia Lawyers Weekly (total of 33 statewide honorees consisting of lawyers and judges across Virginia). And in September 2023, Rick was selected as a recipient of the National Board of Trial Advocacy (NBTA) 2023 President’s Award. Although many nominations were submitted from across the country, Rick was just one of eight attorneys chosen by the prestigious National Board which certifies civil trial attorneys across the U.S. Rick was also recently named to Virginia Lawyers Weekly 2024 Virginia’s Go To Lawyers Medical Malpractice. The attorneys awarded this honor are nominated by their colleagues and chosen by a panel from the publication.
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