Goodyear to pay $1.75M in Danville penalties

DANVILLE, Va. (Feb. 13, 2017) — Goodyear has agreed to pay $1.75 million in penalties in connection with state investigations into four fatal accidents at Goodyear's Danville plant during a 12-month period starting in August 2015.

Goodyear and the Virginia Department of Labor and Industry's Virginia Occupational Safety and Health (VOSH) program announced the settlement jointly.

The $1.75 million in penalties include $1 million to the Commonwealth of Virginia and $750,000 to abate the hazards VOSH found at the Danville plant and to implement a new health and safety management system.

VOSH said it conducted 11 inspections at the Danville plant within the last 18 months and found four willful and more than 100 serious violations at the facility, many of them related to failure to lockout and tagout potentially dangerous equipment.

The willful violations alone accounted for $1.64 million in fines, according to the attachments to the pre-citation settlement agreement signed by Goodyear and VOSH Feb. 10.

VOSH originally announced fines last October of more than $1 million in the matter. Goodyear subsequently contested the fines.

The four workers killed at Danville were:

• Jeanie Strader, 56, who was caught in machine rollers in August 2015 while trying to straighten them;

• Kevin Edmonds, 54, who was crushed between a wall and a pallet containing rubber early in 2016;

• Charles "Greg" Cooper, 53, who died in April 2016 after falling into a pit of boiling water and oil; and

• William "Billy" Scheier, 47, who was killed in August 2016 while trying to adjust a switch in a machine that had not properly been turned off.

"Goodyear is committed to working in partnership with the Commonwealth of Virginia and the United Steelworkers to continually identify hazards and improve the safety of our Danville plant," Greg Kerr, recently appointed plant manager at Danville, said in a statement.

The four fatalities at Danville were the only ones to occur at United Steelworkers union-organized tire plants over the past six years, according to Jim Frederick, assistant director of the USW's Health, Safety and Environmental Department.

"There is no scale to measure whether things were worse in Danville than elsewhere in the tire industry," Mr. Frederick said.

"But it is safe to say there were safety issues at Danville that were not being addressed."