Epoxy company indicted for manslaughter in Big Dig death - CORRECTION ADDED

Powers Fasteners Inc, the Brewster NY based supplier of epoxy for ceiling anchors in the Massachusetts Turnpike's Big Dig tunnels has been indicted on a charge of manslaughter. Massachusetts attourney-general Martha Coakley announced the charge today. A Suffolk County grand jury has issued the indictment.

Milena Del Val, 39, died when more than 20 tons of ceiling panels collapsed on the car in which she was a passenger late on the night of July 10 2006 while driving with her busband through the I-90 connector tunnel.

Prosecutors charge that Powers Fasteners knew the epoxy was unsuitable for ceiling anchors but failed to warn the Turnpike and willfully sold the dangerous product. A National Transportation Safety Board report released recently said that Powers Fasteners provided "inadequate and misleading information" about the performance of the epoxy, but they also faulted section designer Gannett Fleming and the Bechtel-Parsons Brinckerhoff (PB) project management team for specifying the epoxy. They also said the ceiling collapse could have been averted if Bechtel PB and the Turnpike had followed up early problems of epoxy anchor slippage with inspections of the anchors.

Manslaughter in most US jurisdictions is a serious criminal offense for which some years of jail time may be sentenced. Not so in the odd state of Massachusetts where the maximum penalty is $1,000.

There are people who run up more than that neglecting to pay a parking ticket.

TOLLROADSnews 2007-08-08

CORRECTION: This turns out to be a bum rap on Massachusetts law. The manslaughter law in Massachusetts limited to a penalty of $1,000 is Involuntary Manslaughter committed by a company or corporation. The Massachusetts law on individual manslaughter is: "Section 13. Whoever commits manslaughter shall, except as hereinafter provided, be punished by imprisonment in the state prison for not more than twenty years or by a fine of not more than one thousand dollars and imprisonment in jail or a house of correction for not more than two and one half years...." http://www.mass.gov/legis/laws/mgl/265-13.htm

It was the state attorney-general Martha Coakley who said the maximum penalty available for the manslaughter charged against Powers Fasteners was $1,000, and that the penalty needed to be increased. Apparently you can't send a whole company to jail, or at least it would be grossly unfair to a lot of its employees.

The whole notion of charging a company with a crime strikes us as ridiculous, since companies are just agglomerations of individuals. It is the acts of certain individuals within that company that may be criminal, but it is unlikely that all the people of the company could be involved in a crime. Charging a company with a crime rather than an individual or individuals within it strikes us as a sloppy scattershot approach by prosecutors, and unfair.

Maybe Massachusetts legislators in their wisdom saw this and deliberately set the penalty for "corporate manslaughter" so low as to make the "crime" seem absurd?

Powers Fasteners claim

Powers Fasteners say they never knew the Big Dig was using their Fast Set epoxy, which has a known "creep" or slippage problem. They thought only their standard set epoxy was being used.

Jeffrey Powers, president of the company said: "The Attorney General well knows that Powers Fasteners filled a special order for a different epoxy – its Standard Set product – for the tunnel ceiling. At no time did anyone ever tell Powers, and Powers never had reason to believe – that its Fast Set product was used in the tunnel ceiling."

In the statement they also say that a Powers engineer was called to the project site in October 1999 to assess why the ceiling anchor bolts were slipping. The Powers engineer brought equipment to do the kind of strength tests on the anchor bolts that the National Transportation Safety Board said should have been conducted.

They claim: "Project officials (Mass Pike and Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff) refused to allow Powers to do this test, which would have led to correction of the entire problem."

If Powers can substantiate that charge "project officials" are in trouble.

Prosecution charges that they knew

The state attorney general's case of corporate manslaughter is based on this:

"Investigators found that Powers has(?) known since at least 1991, when it(?) first began marketing its(?) Power-Fast Fast Set epoxy, that the Fast Set product was unsuitable for sustained loads based upon the corporation's own 'creep' testing. However, consistently since 1991, Powers' marketing materials did not differentiate clearly between the two Power-Fast products, nor did they mention the Fast Set product's susceptibility to 'creep.'

"Authorities determined that these materials were provided to tunnel project managers and engineers. In addition, investigators found that Powers did not make Bechtel/Parsons Brinkerhoff, Gannett Fleming, or Modern Continental aware of the difference between the Power-Fast Fast Set and Power-Fast Standard Set with respect to 'creep' resistance, and therefore with respect to the suitability of the Fast Set epoxy for heavy ceiling panels. The investigation also uncovered that Powers was(?) aware, as early as 1999, that its(?) Fast Set product was being used for a sustained overhead load in the ceiling tunnel, yet the corporation did not take any steps to caution the project managers against use of the Fast Set product for that application." 

(NOTE: the prosecutor's fuzzy-minded collective singular grammar as marked by our ?s. A company cannot know anything. It doesn't have a brain. Only individuals within a company have brains and can know, or not know. TRnews. )

TOLLROADSnews 2007-08-12