Kentucky launches investigation into safety at leveled candle factory where 8 died

Kentucky’s labor cabinet said Tuesday that its Occupational Safety and Health Program division has opened an investigation into eight deaths at a tornado-destroyed candle factory in the town of Mayfield, a routine probe that Gov. Andy Beshear, D, said he expected would “get to the bottom of what happened” at a facility where 110 workers were buried under a collapsed ceiling and walls.

The vast majority of employees on the Friday night shift survived the devastation at Mayfield Consumer Products, where, the company said, all workers sheltered in place as a storm of extraordinary strength pummeled the area on its tear through four states. Experts said investigators – and insurers – would look closely at the factory’s emergency plan, how it was communicated to employees, whether it was followed that night and whether the stucco-sided building complied with building codes. The investigation could take six months, a labor cabinet spokeswoman said.

But workplace safety and engineering experts said the tornado-specific requirements facing the factory, which opened in 1991 as a garment-making facility, may have been minimal. A company spokesman and the state labor cabinet spokeswoman said the factory had an emergency action plan that outlined how to handle a crisis like the storm, but federal regulations do not require such a plan at many businesses, said Jim Stanley, a former OSHA official who is now president of FDRsafety, a consulting firm.

And while the state building code in force at the time the facility was built may have included some provisions related to wind loads, experts said they are likely to have been modest and not tornado-specific. Since 2019, Kentucky has required most newly built schools to provide storm shelters, in accordance with the International Building Code, which Kentucky uses as the model for its statewide code. But that code is only now in the process of being updated to include a chapter on tornado-resilient design for large and critical businesses, said David Prevatt, a wind engineer at the University of Florida.

“As of December 2021, there are really no tornado-resilient design codes that were available for anyone to follow,” Prevatt said. “The only building category that specifically [has] been designed for tornado loads in this country [has] been nuclear facilities and probably very few critical facilities,” he said.

Bob Ferguson, a spokesman for Mayfield Consumer Products, said that the factory was inspected for code compliance this summer and that its insurance carriers “come in and do regular risk assessments.”

The factory was issued eight citations – three of them categorized as “serious” – and fines totaling $16,350 by the state OSHA department in 2019, said Holly Neal, a labor cabinet spokeswoman. A settlement agreement reached this summer reduced the fines to $9,810. Public records do not detail the citations, but Ferguson said they all related to a circuit breaker that an employee had left unlocked.

The 2019 inspection found that the factory had trained employees on its emergency action plan, Neal said. Ferguson said managers and team leaders were trained annually on the plan and “performed regular drills.” The plan called for them to direct employees to seek shelter in a windowless hallway and two large bathrooms in “the strongest point in the factory, surrounded by thick walls,” Ferguson said.

On Friday night, he said, managers took attendance at the shelter location, then rounded up three or four workers who were missing. Since the onset of the pandemic, Ferguson added, the factory has had a policy that workers can leave during their shift if they feel uncomfortable and return without penalty; none, to his knowledge, did so on Friday, he said.

In interviews, several candle factory employees said they had been told during training where the shelter-in-place spot was, but only one recalled drills. Workers on the Friday night shift said they were instructed twice – briefly around 6 p.m. and then again a couple hours later – to go to the designated spot.

Experts said that guidance – to hunker down in a windowless spot away from the perimeter of the building – was sound, and, given the catastrophic damage to the building, may have spared many lives.

“That is spot-on,” said Anne Cope, chief engineer at the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety. In a building with no designated tornado shelter, “then you go for your next best thing, which is absolutely get as far away from the windows as you can, get to an enclosed space like a bathroom, get down under the countertop if you can.”

Stanley, who was a senior OSHA official in the 1990s, echoed that. “You don’t want people to leave in this particular situation. They’re going to their death if they go outside,” he said. The storm, he added, “was like a bomb going off … eight deaths is horrible, but it could have been a lot worse.”

Kristeena Rushing, 29, a scrap coordinator at the factory who worked an earlier shift Friday, said orientation for new employees includes telling them where to go in the event of a tornado: a narrow hallway in the center of the building between the production area and the warehouse, near the men’s bathroom.

The company conducted tornado drills every six months, she said, and instructions are also posted. One afternoon a month or two ago, tornado sirens began wailing. All the employees went to the hallway and stayed there for 10 to 15 minutes until the sirens stopped, Rushing said. But “there was no safe place at all during this one,” she said – nowhere that could have withstood the winds.

When the first tornado siren went off around 6 p.m. at the candle factory, workers said in interviews, they filed into the hallway and braced for a storm that never hit. They emerged and went back to work. The second time the siren went off, some said, they had under 30 minutes to get into place before the building began to fall on top of them, trapping workers underneath walls, ceiling and each other.

An open question, some workers and experts said, is whether employees should have been at work at all. The area expected severe weather. But the storm’s duration and intensity – which has not yet been rated by the National Weather Service, but may reach the top of the 0-to-5 scale – were incredibly rare and extreme at this time of year.

Kyanna Parsons-Perez, who had worked at the factory as a quality assurance technician since last month, said she thinks factory managers should have called off the evening shift. She arrived at 6 p.m., at which time she was immediately sent to the shelter area for 20 minutes or so, she said. She said she wasn’t worried – she had hardly registered that a storm was coming.

A couple hours later, co-workers walked by her station, saying everyone again needed to head to the safe spot, a T-shaped corridor near the bathrooms, she said. Parsons-Perez said she heard no alarm or siren, though she thinks it would have been hard to hear over the factory noises. As far as she could tell, “everyone” went there, she said.

Eventually, the fallen ceiling and walls cut off groups of workers from each other, Parsons-Perez said. About eight people were in her area, some crying and moaning. Her legs were stuck under debris and she worried about breathing, but she and others broke through drywall to reach fresh air.

The factory “did the best that it could once we were there, but honestly I feel like we should have never been there,” she said. “They should have canceled it – them candles are not that damn important. Look what it cost them.”

Andrea Miranda, 21, a quality supervisor, said she asked her manager on Thursday if she wouldn’t have to go to work on Friday because of the expected bad weather.

“He said, ‘It’s a regular day to work,’ ” she said. She asked again about leaving, she said, as soon as the second siren went off during her shift Friday night. “What they told me was, ‘No you can’t until the tornado warning goes off, and we will see what’s going on. If it’s all good, we go back to work,'” she said.

Miranda filed into the hallway, wearing the safety glasses she wears on shift that helped protect her eyes from debris. She said no other kind of protection – a flashlight or helmet, for example – was offered.

Soon, she was trapped in the rubble, experiencing “the worst thing in my life.” Miranda said if she had been told there was another tornado approaching when she clocked into work that day, she would have left the factory.

She also said the company should not have had employees go into work that day, “to make sure employees are safe.”

The destruction in Kentucky and other states is likely to ignite calls for stricter building codes, experts said. Whether those actually come about is far less certain, they said.

In Illinois, where an Amazon warehouse collapsed, killing six, Gov. J.B. Pritzker, D, said Monday that he was “deeply concerned” about building codes being as stringent as necessary in the face of severe storms. Illinois has no statewide building code, Cope said; In Kentucky, “at least they have a code,” she said.

“I would love to see us take a look at this tragic event and make sure we do have the right building codes in place,” Cope said. “I don’t believe we can prevent all destruction, but I believe we can absolutely narrow the path of destruction and the impact of these terrible storms.”

Engineers have known since 1970, when a colossal tornado hit Lubbock, Texas, that there were ways and good reason to construct houses and businesses to a standard “that would have a fighting chance” against major storms, Prevatt said. But that has not happened on anything resembling a large scale, he said.

Buildings can be constructed “to withstand any force,” Prevatt said. But even if constructed to tolerate smaller tornadoes, which are most common, they would fare better against large ones, he said.

“We have, as a society, chosen not to do these things for 50 years, during which time the communities have grown, our populations have grown, and we’ve built one building at a time – we’ve built communities that are waiting to be destroyed,” Prevatt said. “It is a community-wide decision, a leadership decision, a political decision. It feels like we need a moonshot.”

Dakota Moore, 20, who was working at the candle factory Friday night, said he mostly blames the infrastructure, not the workers or their bosses.

“I mean, if I had a say so – I believe every single place that has a lot of people working in it or even at their house, I believe you should have a tornado bunker or a storm bunker or anything like that,” he said.