OSHA issues fine in death of
presser
The
Occupational Safety and Health Administration has fined Stacy’s Cleaners, Inc., of
East Longmeadow, MA, for a safety violation related to the Feb.
26 death of 44-year-old presser Debra A. Zerbarini.
OSHA filed a citation that requests plant
owner Donald Stacy to either pay or appeal a $2,100 fine by the
end of April. “The maximum fine for a fatality is $7,000,
but we also take into account the size of the company, its
history, and their good faith efforts when we are determining
the fine,” said Ronald E. Morin, the area director for
OSHA.
He stressed that the safety organization
is taking the accident very seriously and that Stacy’s
Cleaners had no previous safety violations in the past. In
addition to the fine, the citation requires that Stacy make
certain safety modifications by May 4 on the machine that
killed Zerbarini, including the installation of a
“machine guarding” that will protect other
employees from becoming trapped in the plant’s
shirt-pressing machinery. Douglas Boyd, a lawyer who handles
Worker Compensation claims, told the press that federal safety
officials have recommended modifications that may prove
problematic, but Stacy is committed to taking the steps to
create a safer workplace.
Local police originally reported the
accident back in February when they said that Zerbarini had
leaned into an open space created when the
mechanically-operated buck move sideways into a nearby steam
cleaning unit for a 25-second cycle. Donna Learned, a co-worker
present at the time of the accident, believed that a piece of
Zerbarini’s clothing got caught inside the machinery when
she bent over to retrieve something, possibly a bracelet that
had fallen in the vicinity.
“She was definitely pinned into the
machine to whatever she was caught on,” noted Learned in
a statement to the police. “I screamed for Susan and
Arlene (two other Stacy’s employees). The three of us
tried to get Debbie out and there was no way we could get her
out. Arlene and I hit the buttons for the machine to go back
in, but the machine was jammed and would not move at
all.”
Zerbarini, who had over two decades of
pressing experience at Stacy’s Cleaners, is survived by a
son, Benjamin E. Nuzzolilli, 24, who has retained an attorney,
John Ross, who is investigating the accident.
Nuzzolilli did not want to speak publicly
about the potential litigation, but he didn’t mind
talking about his mother with the Union-News newspaper,
commenting that “I was an only child, so losing my mother
took a large piece of me. There are good days, and there are
bad days. Most of them are bad, actually. I was so incredibly
close to her.”
He added that Stacy’s Cleaners paid
for a substantial portion of his mother’s funeral costs.
Days after the funeral, he took his suit to the plant to be
cleaned “because I wanted them to know that my mother
loved the place, that she loved the people,” he told the
newspaper.
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