Safety at Work
Boca Chica, TX (WorkersCompensation.com) – Two employees of Elon Musk’s SpaceX have filed suit against the company claiming they were injured on the job.
The lawsuits add to the growing list of complaints about the company’s safety track record at its Starbase facility in South Texas nears the state’s southern tip.
The latest lawsuit, filed in Cameron County, alleges that SpaceX and the steel firm W&W Erectors LLC were negligent in maintaining a safe worksite, and that supervisors told the employee not to say anything about his injuries.
According to the suit, Julian Escalante was working on one of the launchpads used by Starship, the company’s largest rocket. Escalante claims his right arm became “entangled and pinched” by a metal bucket carrying some 200 pounds of industrial-sized bolts when the bucket tumbled off of a pallet.
“As the bucket fell, (Escalante’s) right arm was dragged downward with (the bucket),” the suit said, according to the San Antonio Express-News. “The downward force pulled (his) right shoulder, and (he) fell with the bucket as it hit the ground.”
Escalante said that when he reported the accident, his supervisors told him “not to report the injury and instructed him to return to work,” and that his foreman, Joe Pedroza, said, “Just don’t tell anyone.”
When the injured worker said he wanted medical care for the injury, the General Foreman allegedly told him to “be a man” and to “stop crying,” the suit said.
According to the lawsuit, the incident happened in November.
Another lawsuit was filed against SpaceX earlier this month. In that case, a worker named Sergio Ortiz said that he was struck by falling debris while working in an elevator shaft at the work site. According to the suit, the heavy cables used by welding machines, called welding leads, fell on Ortiz from above and hit him in the head. The lawsuit said the leads can weigh as much as 80 pounds each.
The suits are just the latest in a number of actions that have accused the company of worker injuries and deaths, including a failed rocket test that left one employee in a permanent coma when a piece of one of Starship’s engines flew off the rocket and fractured his skull. A Reuters investigation found that at least 600 cases of workplace injuries at SpaceX in 2023 went unreported.
On Monday, Jan. 26, federal safety regulators fined one of SpaceX’s vendors for an accident during testing that sent two workers to the hospital.
Officials with OSHA said Dooling Machine Products Inc. faces $15,371 in fines over safety violations related to the July accident. The agency cited Dooling for four safety violations, two of which were identified as “serious.”
In that accident, workers were testing and repairing a valve that belonged to SpaceX when it “failed, separated and impacted” a 42-year-old worker, Humberto Benavides. The accident caused “significant, catastrophic and gruesome injuries,” the finding said. Benavides was performing a pressure check on the valve when it exploded, and he sustained “sustained direct impact in his left side torso, causing immediate discoloration and possible broken ribs,” police records said. He was airlifted to a medical facility for treatment.
Another worker, John Tolbirt, 47, was also hit by a piece of the valve and transferred via ambulance to a nearby hospital
OSHA fined Dooling $5,959 for failing to provide a worksite that was “free from recognized hazards that were causing or likely to cause death or serious physical harm to employees.” Additionally, the agency found that workers were “exposed to struck-by hazards from pressure testing valves” with “compressed nitrogen” and “pressurized water” in “an open area.”
In another “serious” violation, OSHA fined Dooling $3,972 for failing to have adequate guards on a machine. Other violations included failing to report the work-related injuries to OSHA within 24 hours and for “insufficient space around the electrical safety switch” behind a drilling machine.
Benavides’ attorneys have said that SpaceX and its vendors failed to hire qualified people or properly train them, and that there is inadequate supervision at the plant, an unsafe work environment and that the company failed to do anything to prevent the accident.
SpaceX has denied Benavides allegations.
SpaceX also faces a lawsuit for pressure testing at the company’s Hawthorne, Calif., plant in January 2022, when a piece of a Raptor rocket engine broke off and struck Francisco Cabada, 39, in the head. The impact fractured his skull and left him in a coma for months. OSHA fined the company $18,475 in that accident, and Cabada’s wife filed a negligence suit against the company.
