Workplace casualties remembered

OLYMPIA – Frederick DeMaestri was crushed in a hydraulic accident with a truck. Frank Cozza’s lungs were scarred from years on the job as a sandblaster. Jeffery Paulson was electrocuted while installing an electrical panel.

Those and other workers from the Spokane region were honored Wednesday in Olympia, where a bell was rung 118 times in remembrance of the Washington workers who last year died of job-related injuries and illness.

One was a tree trimmer who died when he touched a power line. One was a millwright caught in a machine. Two were flight nurses killed in a helicopter crash. One was a social worker, stabbed to death by a mentally ill man.

“On average, that’s two people each week of the year who died on the job” or from workplace health problems, said Gary Weeks, head of the state Department of Labor and Industries.

The agency, which enforces workplace rules, organizes the annual memorial ceremony. This year, about 500 people attended.

“It gets harder every year,” said Don Brunell, president of the Association of Washington Business. “Because you know that behind every name is a family that’s suffered a great deal.”

Family members wept Wednesday as the names were read. The deaths included a broad range of occupations: a drowned fisherman, a college dean killed in a head-on car wreck, a farmer whose tractor rolled over on him, an attorney who died in another car wreck and a man crushed by a bus he was working underneath.

“All of us generally take for granted that we will come home at work’s end to our family,” said Weeks. “… The only acceptable number of deaths on the job ought to be zero.”

Alan Link, secretary-treasurer of the state’s largest organized-labor group, the Washington State Labor Council, pledged to keep pushing for workplace safety measures.

“We mourn, we remember, and we’ll never stop fighting,” he told family members.

A similar ceremony last year was one of the first assignments for Weeks, then newly hired by the governor. “It was the most difficult first day on the job in my 35 years of working,” he said. “And a year later, it hasn’t gotten much easier.”

After the ceremony, as the crowd thinned, a woman stood alone near the stage, where a list of the dead was projected on the wall. She held out her cell phone and snapped a photograph of one of the names.