Dallas Oosterhof worked at Didion Milling in Cambria, Wisconsin, for 25 years until May 2017, when he was working late finishing paperwork and the mill exploded due to a buildup of combustible dust. Covered in debris, he was able to crawl out with the help of light from a co-worker’s cellphone.
A corn processing company, Didion Milling is currently facing over $2.5m in Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Osha) fines related to workplace deaths and injuries, and a criminal prosecution by the US justice department. A final hearing before the trial in the criminal case is set for Friday.
“I’m alive, but five other guys died that night. I was friends with two of them. It changes your life big time, medically and psychologically,” said Oosterhof. “They knew this was a possibility that could happen. Osha fined them and wanted them to put these glass gates in, so if there was a fire it wouldn’t go any more than a little way up the pipe. But they said it was cheaper to pay the fines than to pay for the equipment to make it safe.”
Since the explosion, the site of the mill was rebuilt and is back to operating, but for Oosterhof and his family things will never be the same: he still suffers from debilitating medical issues he sustained from the explosion. His family has also been left bereft of his wages. Despite receiving disability compensation through social security, he said the long-term disability insurance he paid for through his job was denied.
“We don’t hear anything from them to see if you’re doing OK or anything. They sit there and preach about being a family-environment employer. The rich get richer, and the poor, the workers … I put 25 years in that place, I made them a lot of money. They’re back to making millions and they don’t look back to what happened to us.”
His wife, Rita Oosterhof, said less than a year after the incident her husband almost died in her bathroom, and she had had to revive him with CPR. Doctors said he had an arteriovenous malformation (AVM) in his brain as a result of the incident, noting he had head injuries from debris caused by the explosion.
“They kept telling me he was going to get better, and he kept getting worse,” she said.
For a while, Oosterhof said, it was causing him to have seizures. She or another family member were calling the paramedics so frequently, they came to know them on a first-name basis. He eventually required an operation to remove the AVM. Shortly after, doctors discovered a tumor in the back of his neck that he underwent radiation therapy to treat.
Currently, Oosterhof walks with the assistance of a crutch, and the left side of his body is partially paralyzed. Throughout all of his medical issues since the incident, Rita Oosterhof said Didion Milling never provided any support or assistance. She criticized the denial of his long-term disability claim through the company.
“We never got a dime from them,” she added. “How can they tell me he’s not disabled?”
Didion produces corn and ethanol products, processing over 86,000 bushels of corn daily, producing over 50m gallons of ethanol annually and producing over 350m meals for the USAid food relief program every year. It employs about 250 workers.
The company and six managers were indicted in May last year on nine criminal counts for document falsification, obstructing a federal Osha investigation, and falsifying entries in a cleaning logbook required by Osha.
The indictment alleges Didion Milling violated two Osha federal safety standards, failing to develop and implement a program to prevent and remove combustible grain dust, and not installing venting or suppression on a filter to prevent an explosion.
The Environment and Natural Resources Division of the US justice department declined to comment, though the case is set to go to trial in October.
Five workers were killed in the explosion: Duelle Block, Robert Goodenow, Carlos “Charly” Nunez, Angel Reyes and Pawel Tordoff. Fourteen other workers were injured. Osha issued proposed fines of $1,837,861 for 14 violations related to the incident, which Didion is contesting. The company was placed in Osha’s severe violator enforcement program.
Rena Steinzor, a law professor at the University of Maryland and the author of Why Not Jail? Industrial Disasters, Corporate Malfeasance, and Government Inaction, said: “For those of us who have been involved in watching Osha fairly carefully for several years, its inability or unwillingness to cope with combustible dust is a central disappointment, because it really kills a lot of people because of these kinds of incidents.
“They’re dying for completely avoidable circumstances, and it is a revelation for the weakness of the agency.”
Steinzor criticized the minimal fines Osha imposes for incidents that kill workers, as well as the chronic and severe underfunding of the agency, and said the charges in this case were lesser than could have been pursued by prosecution.
“A false statement to the government [and] falsifying records doesn’t get to the heart of the problem, which is: you knew that there was this catastrophic possibility, and you weren’t on it in a responsible way. So it’s an issue of company failure and negligence, but also agency weakness,” he said.
The US Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board is scheduled to publish its final investigation report later this year. The board has long called on Osha to issue a standard on combustible dust. Between 1980 and 2017, 386 combustible dust incidents resulted in 178 deaths and over 1,000 injuries.
Didion has continued receiving millions of dollars in federal contracts and grants since the incident, including $61.5m in federal contract awards in 2021 alone. The company has also faced additional scrutiny from government agencies over workplace safety issues.
The Wisconsin attorney general office announced a proposed settlement of $940,000 against Didion Milling and Didion Ethanol in August, related to alleged air pollution violations.
In December 2020, 52-year-old Randal Rote was killed on the job at Didion Milling after being engulfed in a grain bin. Osha issued proposed fines of $676,808 for 14 violations that the company is also currently contesting. The agency criticized the company for failing to learn from previous incidents.
Just a few months prior, according to Osha, a large grain shelf collapsed and nearly engulfed another Didion Milling employee who was cleaning the inside of a grain bin at the time.
Terri Gernstein, the director of the State and Local Enforcement Project at the Harvard Law School Center for Labor, said: “Clearly those fines weren’t sufficient to get the company to completely overhaul its operations to make sure to really, really prioritize workplace safety.
“Because if they had, another worker wouldn’t have been killed three years later.”
Didion Milling did not address the proposed Osha fines or claims from the Oosterhofs.
A spokesperson for the company said in an email: “Didion Milling continues to prepare for what is expected to be a complex trial related to this matter, and we believe the court of law is the appropriate forum in which to present our position on these important issues.”
