The former president of a water and sewer company, Brent Weidman, has been found guilty by a jury of two counts of negligent homicide and two counts of endangerment in the deaths in 2001 of 26-year-old James Gamble and 62-year-old Gary Lanser, who were killed in a confined space incident while working on an underground sewage tank. Last year, Arizona prosecutors Christina Fitzpatrick and Mark Horlings convinced a jury to find the Far West Water and Sewer Company guilty on five of the six felony charges filed against it. In January, a Yuma judge imposed $1.77 million in criminal fines against the company.
This tragedy was unfortunately typical of confined space incidents, where one of the workers killed was the attempted rescuer and two other rescuers narrowly escaped death: "This is but one of thousands of cases every year where clear violations of OSHA standards lead to the preventable deaths of workers. Most employers get away with a relatively small fines (the total OSHA fine in this case was $31, 500), but sometimes aggressive prosecutors can not only punish the killers, but send an important message out to employers nationwide: Workplace killing means jail."
