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Hello, I woke up feeling extra generous today.
And I realized it's been a while since we released one of our fine bonus episodes to the general public. So here you go. It's called The Oven. And it's pretty horrific. So be prepared for that. But if you enjoy such stories, there are a bunch more bonus episodes exclusively available to valued listeners at valuedlistener.com. You can sign up through Spotify, Apple, or Patreon and listen to them all for as little as $5 a month.
We just released a new bonus episode called The Predator about this dude who appeared on that TV show Shark Tank because he reinvented the belt and then became a romance fraudster. It's pretty shocking, so go check that out when you get a chance. ValuedListener.com. We'll see you over there. Until then, enjoy this bonus on the house. New episode next week. See ya.
This episode of Swindled may contain graphic descriptions or audio recordings of disturbing events which may not be suitable for all audiences. Listener discretion is advised.
They bribed government officials, cleared violations of federal and state law, paid a plague of taxpayer dollars that were wasted, paid tens of millions of dollars, or a billion dollars, by falsifying its books and records, responsible for the collapse of the entire system, and in the control of some kind of swing, etc.
The Health and Safety Executive was notified that there'd been a double fatality at Fresher Bakeries in Leicester on Saturday the 16th of May 1998. I've investigated many fatal accidents in my time, but I have never investigated an accident quite as horrific and tragic as this one.
Harvest Time Bakery in Leicester, England mass-produced bread products for supermarkets. The company used three metal encased tunnel-shaped ovens for baking. The dough was separated into tens and placed on a 10-foot wide conveyor belt, which traveled through the 75-foot long oven at a snail's pace. The entire process took 17 minutes.
The conveyor was made up of gridded grills bolted to metal plates. Sometime in May 1998, one of those grids disconnected from the chain and fell to the bottom of one of the ovens. Harvest Time's chief engineer, Dennis Masters, decided it should be removed. The oven's manufacturer told Harvest Time it would take four maintenance specialists and 12 hours to do the job. The side panels of the oven would have to be removed so the loose parts could be retrieved. Parts and labor were not included.
Harvest Time executives calculated that the company would lose £1,120 for every hour the oven was out of operation. The downtime plus the cost to the repair just wasn't feasible. Apparently, Harvest Time decided to make the repair in-house.
Besides, the company was already paying labor costs. Ian Erickson, the 47-year-old maintenance engineer who worked at Harvest Times Walsall plant, had 20 years of experience working on all types of bread ovens. Surely he could handle it. And David Mays, the boiler man at the Lester plant could withstand the elements. The 43-year-old had filled potholes for a living earlier in his life. The company offered the two employees extra pay as added incentive.
The men knew it wasn't going to be easy or fun, especially as it had been described to them by management. "I have a challenge in the morning," David Mays confided to friends on May 15th, 1998. "I'm going for it. The money is good." Harvest Time planned to turn off the oven eight hours before the repair to allow it time to cool. They would set up large fans to blast cold air through the heated tunnel to expedite the process. The less downtime, the better.
Instead of removing the side panels as the oven's manufacturer had recommended, Harvest Time removed 10 grills from the conveyor. This would create a gap for Erickson and Mays to fit underneath the conveyor, allowing them to crawl in tandem with the moving belt and enter the oven through the front hatch, just like a loaf of bread. Along their 17 minute journey through the oven, the repairman would come across the misplaced part, pick it up, and carry it with them through the conveyor exit.
They had one shot at it. There was no way to reverse the conveyor, nor could the men stop or risk being crushed. On Saturday, May 16th, 1998, just before 11 a.m., Ian Erickson and David Mays slipped on thin protective jumpsuits with knee and elbow padding handed to them at the last second. Erickson commented that he wanted to get the job over with quickly because he had plans to watch the FA Cup Final with his sons later. Let's go.
Both men were handed radios and took their places underneath the conveyor. With the flick of a switch, the belt started moving. Ian Erickson and David Mays crawled with it until they disappeared into the oven. Five minutes later, panicked yells over the radio were heard by the supervisors waiting at the end of the tunnel. "It's too hot in here," one of the men screamed. "Get us out."
A glance at the oven's temperature gauge could have alerted everyone at harvest time to the danger. It was 100 degrees Celsius, 212 degrees Fahrenheit, where Ian Erickson and David Mays were crawling. Turns out the oven had been shut down only two hours before the repair, instead of the eight as planned and the twelve as recommended by the user manual. The oven had been in-service baking bread all night long. Still, no one had bothered to check the gauges before sending in the men.
Again, the only way out of the oven was to complete the 17-minute crawl to the other end. Halfway through, supervisors heard unintelligible noise coming from the walkie-talkie. Ian Erickson and David Mays had spent almost nine minutes in temperatures hot enough to boil water and melt plastic radios, evidently. Eight minutes later, amazingly, Ian Erickson appeared at the exit end of the oven. However, the hole was too small for an average adult-sized human to crawl through.
Harvest time hadn't bothered to measure. Nearby workers rushed to Ian and pried the exit hole wider, leaving the severely burned worker in the oven for an extra three minutes when they finally pulled him free. Ian Erickson's skin was bright red and slipping off. He'd been cooked alive. He collapsed seconds later and died on the factory floor.
David Mays, on the other hand, never made it out. He lost consciousness in the oven and stopped crawling along with the conveyor, becoming entangled in the machinery. It was a horrific tragedy for everyone involved. David was a good son. If his father or I needed anything, he was there. He used to come and take his bed out for a pint.
that sort of thing. They always used to come up and say, come on, pop, we're going for a pint. Yeah. I miss that. I miss it. An inquiry by the United Kingdom's Health and Safety Executive Agency concluded that it was a preventable tragedy that never should have occurred. It accused Harvest Time executives of prioritising productivity and profits over safety, and the result was a tragic loss of life. It is quite often very difficult to...
to actually prove a link of evidence between directors and senior managers within companies to the accident or event. However, in this case, there was such negligence that the Health and Safety Executive decided that there should be charges laid against them because this accident was totally preventable.
Harvest Time actually agreed. Quote, This was an avoidable accident. The company acknowledges it was at fault. It failed in its duty to both men and that has caused untold heartache to the families. For this, we publicly apologize. David Wells' parents felt it was too little, too late. It took the bakery three years to publicly apologize. And they said after three years...
It sounded a bit hollow. Three Harvest Time executives, Brian Jones, John Bridson, and Dennis Masters, pleaded guilty to criminal charges. Nobody went to jail. All three, along with Harvest Time the company, were fined a total of £500,000 and publicly condemned for the quote, total failure of health and safety.
"No level of fine can possibly compensate," said a health and safety executive spokesman. "But we think that the fine reflects the seriousness of the offense." Harvest Time Bakery became insolvent in 2005 and was sold. And I say good. Hopefully that'll keep something like this from ever happening again. Support for Swindled comes from Rocket Money.
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December 23rd, 2010, just after 9 in the morning, 54-year-old Alan Catterall, a father of three, entered one of the giant custom-built ovens at Piranha Moldings to scrape the excess plastic that had escaped from a kayak mold and dripped onto the floor. Alan had performed this task numerous times during his 12 years as a supervisor on the job, but this time would be his last.
While Alan Catterall was inside the oven, the door slammed shut and locked from the outside. Mark Francis, a fitter at Piranha, and, coincidentally, Alan Catterall's future son-in-law, had returned from the workshop with a fixed bearing that had caused the initial downtime. Mark turned the power back on to test it out.
No one could hear Alan Catterall's cries for help. The custom ovens at Piranha were lined with insulation material. There were no windows or alarms or means of escape. No formal training for the workers. No written manual of operation. No training program. Not even a warning sign.
Alan Catterall's body wasn't found until the oven belched a foul-smelling smoke. He had been baked at 500 plus degrees Fahrenheit for over 10 minutes. There was evidence he tried to use the scraping tool to let himself out desperately.
Piranha was convicted of corporate manslaughter on January 2015 and fined £200,000. The company's technical director, Peter Macarith, who designed the custom ovens, was found guilty of health and safety breaches. He was fined £25,000 and given a suspended prison sentence.
After the punishments were handed down, Alan Catterall's wife Pearl, who worked at Piranha but never returned after her husband's death, released a statement on behalf of the family. Quote,
He had missed his son's wedding and the birth of his grandson. He will not see his two daughters marry. Alan was a hardworking, conscientious man, and he gave Piranha Molding's everything. It hurts that they have not admitted any failings in their health and safety procedures.
Also, the judge added, It would be appropriate.
However, the judge said he took the company's financial condition into consideration and did not want to put it out of business. The company is relatively vibrant in profit-making and a valuable employer in its community, employing up to 90 people. It is essential that it should not be driven into liquidation, if at all possible. Oh, thank God.
Bumble Bee Foods, the maker of Bumble Bee Tuna, was founded in San Diego, California in 1899.
Bumblebee is one of the top three largest producers of canned tuna in the United States, along with Starkist and Chicken of the Sea. They have the process down to a science. This Santa Fe Springs tuna processing facility is the most efficient in the world. We run 200 tons of fish every single day. We put 40,000 cases out the door, so fish comes in one door and 40,000 cases goes out the next, every single day.
The fish arrives at Bumblebee's Santa Fe Springs, California factory, cooked, cleaned, and frozen. The tuna is thawed and separated into cans. Broth is added, and the cans are sealed. Then they're loaded into baskets by the thousands, and cooked and sterilized with 270-degree heat in a retort furnace.
Bumblebee's retorts are basically giant cylinder-shaped pressure cookers about 35 feet in length. The entire process takes about two hours to complete. Powerful magnetic elevators then transport the sealed cans into large metal baskets. These baskets are loaded 12 at a time into giant pressure cookers known as retorts where the fish is cooked and sterilized.
Each retort can cook up to 12,000 cans at a time. On Thursday, October 11th, 2012, 62-year-old Jose Molina arrived for his 4 a.m. shift at the Bumblebee factory in Santa Fe Springs. His supervisor instructed him to load one of the 10 retorts. Jose navigated the pallet jack to the oven and parked it. Jose Molina noticed the chain that pulled the cans into the retort was snagged, so he went inside and adjusted it as usual.
While inside the oven, a second employee noticed a pallet jack full of cans sitting idle and unretorted. He assumed Jose went to the bathroom, and in a well-hammered act of always looking busy, that employee loaded the oven with the 12,000 cans of tuna, shut the door, and turned it on.
This is Jose Molina's daughter. Soon after the door was shut, a bumblebee supervisor asked if anyone had seen Jose Molina. Eventually they called for him on the intercom, but Jose never appeared. His car was still in the parking lot. He must be around here somewhere.
Two hours later, when the sterilization process was completed, when the oven was opened, Bumblebee employees discovered Jose Molina's charred corpse. Support for Swindled comes from SimpliSafe. If you're like me, you're constantly thinking about the safety of the people and things you value most. After my neighbor was robbed at knife point, I knew I needed to secure my home with the best. My research led me to SimpliSafe.com.
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The entire Bumblebee Foods family is saddened by the tragic loss of our colleague, and our thoughts and prayers are with the Molina family," Bumblebee Foods spokesman Pat Mienke said in a statement to KTLA. The company hadn't shared many details about the horrific accident, not even with the victim's family. "All they came and did was notify my mother that he had lost his life in an accident and that's it. We don't have any official report," one of Jose's six children told the Associated Press.
Seven months later, an investigation completed by California's OSHA would reveal everything. Jose Molina was performing maintenance on a 35-foot long oven in 2012. A co-worker mistakenly thought he was in the bathroom and filled the pressure cooker with 12,000 pounds of canned tuna and turned it on. His body was found two hours later after the pressure cooker, which reached 270 degrees, was turned off and opened.
Bumblebee was issued six serious citations by the state's OSHA. The safety administration said the company, among other errors, did not provide an escape route or a spotter to keep watch with the worker in a confined space. And for these egregious violations, Bumblebee Foods was fined $74,000.
However, using California OSHA's findings, in April 2015, the Los Angeles District Attorney filed criminal charges against the company and two employees. Bumblebee was charged with three counts of willfully violating safety rules, causing a death.
The company's operations director, Angel Rodriguez, and safety manager, Saul Flores, were charged with the same. Charges tonight after a horrific death in a factory. The state has filed charges against Bumblebee Tuna after a worker became trapped in an oven and was killed.
Now the company and its former safety manager and director of plant operations are charged with three felony counts each of workplace violations that led to Melina's death. Prosecutors say they willfully violated safety rules. Bumblebee released a statement after the charges were announced, quote, We remain devastated by the loss of our colleague Jose Melina and the tragic accident that occurred at our Santa Fe Springs plant in October 2012.
Bumblebee cooperated fully with Cal/OSHA in its post-accident investigation, which found no willful violations related to the accident. We disagree with and are disappointed by the charges filed by the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office. We are currently exploring all options with respect to those charges and will proceed in the manner that best serves the needs of the Molina family, our employees, and the company. Safety has always been and will always be a top priority at our facilities.
Since the 2012 accident, we have made our safety program even more robust and we remain steadfast in our commitment to ensuring the safest possible workplace for our employees. On August 12, 2015, Bumblebee Foods settled for $6 million. It was the largest settlement ever and a California workplace safety violation involving a single victim. However, that single victim's family only received a quarter of the settlement.
and only $750,000 of the $6 million were penalties and fines. In fact, half of the $6 million would be used by Bumblebee to modernize its equipment. The company was punished by being forced to reinvest in itself. Make it make sense.
A year and a half later, Bumblebee's felony charge was reduced to a misdemeanor since it had complied with the terms of the settlement agreement. The company pleaded guilty. Angel Rodriguez and Saul Flores also pleaded guilty. They were sentenced to probation, community service, and safety training. "You don't have warm blood running in your veins if you're not affected by the way this guy died. It's horrific," said Hun Chun, assistant head deputy district attorney for the office's consumer protection division.
I cannot imagine a worse result of violating safety rules than something like this. I hope it sends a message that safety rules are not a recommendation, they are a legal requirement. I'm hoping people will realize short-cutting safety rules to make a few extra bucks and improve the bottom line is not a tolerable equation.
Jose Molina's daughter hoped for the same. Hopefully, I mean, they do fix all these things and not make another family go through something so horrible. After the Molina incident, Bumblebee Foods struggled financially. The demand for canned tuna had fallen and the cost had risen. Also in 2016, the company had to issue a recall of 32,000 cases for fear of contamination.
To survive, Bumblebee attempted to merge with a competitor in 2017 but was denied by the government. At the same time, a wholesale grocery cooperative in New York noticed that the price of raw tuna had fallen significantly, but the cost of canned tuna never did. A fix was in. Giant retailers such as Walmart, Target, and Kroger sued Bumblebee Foods for essentially overcharging them for canned tuna.
In 2019, Bumblebee Foods filed for bankruptcy and was sold to a Taiwan-based company for $925 million. The company had $650 million in debt from various settlements, not to mention the tens of millions it had spent on defense fees.
In late 2019,
Bumblebee's longtime CEO, Christopher Lachewski, was convicted in U.S. District Court on one count of conspiring to fix tuna prices between November 2010 to December 2013. Lachewski was the only tuna industry executive brought to trial by the Department of Justice. Former executives at Bumblebee and Starkist testified against him. Chicken of the Sea executives received amnesty for cooperating with prosecutors.
Christopher Lachewski was sentenced to three years in prison in June 2020. Swindled is written, researched, produced, and hosted by me, a concerned citizen, with original music by Trevor Howard, a.k.a. The Former. As always, thank you for being a valued listener.
My name is Jane from Melbourne, Australia. My name is Jess Midwest from wherever the fuck... My name is Tamara from Minnesota, and I'm a concerned citizen and a valued listener. The baby is watching.
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