working with a large paper winder that day: a machine that spun industrial-sized rolls of paper weighing thousands of pounds.
As the big rolls went down the conveyor line, Wesson applied tape to the “tails” so that the rolls would remain tightly coiled when they were shipped.II For reasons that remained unclear, Wesson left the area where he was supposed to stand and walked farther down the line to apply more tape to the rolls, perhaps because the first application wasn’t working. His movements could be described as “nonroutine” by Georgia-Pacific’s standards. If Wesson was trying to compensate for a problem with the taping process, then Koch’s voluminous work standards might have recommended that he follow a procedure that employees called LOTO or “Lock-out, Tag-out.” The LOTO would have required Wesson to lock the machine down by stopping it, and then record the reasons for doing so before verifying again that the machine was in fact turned off. Georgia-Pacific’s LOTO work standard paper was roughly twenty-five pages long. Wesson did not follow the LOTO procedure, and he approached the rolls instead to apply the tape. Production ran smoothly.
As Wesson approached a paper roll, he failed to take into account the movements of a large piece of machinery called a “kicker,” a giant metal arm that shoved the heavy rolls down the assembly line. As Wesson stood near the roll, the kicker engaged and smashed his skull, killing him. His coworkers later discovered his body.
Wesson’s death was the fifth fatality at Georgia-Pacific in 2014.
A few months earlier, in March, when Hannan attended the safety meeting in Atlanta, no workers had yet died that year. Hannan had reported this piece of good news to the team, but it turned out to be an anomaly. Accidents and the injury rate were sharply higher by the end of the year.
Roughly a month after Hannan’s presentation, a contractor named Sam Southerland was working at Georgia-Pacific’s plant in Pennington, Alabama. He was not intimately familiar with the facility. Southerland, who went by the name Sambo, was twenty-nine years old and married to his childhood sweetheart, Michele. He had a son named Carson, and a newborn daughter named Caylin. Southerland was something of a country boy, with a broad smile, who loved to hunt and play baseball with his son. On April 15, Southerland was inside the Georgia-Pacific factory, holding the bottom of a twenty-eight-foot extension ladder. He stepped backward, perhaps trying to find a better place for the ladder, when he fell into a hole in the floor. He plunged thirty feet into a cauldron of noxious chemicals that is called a “digester,” an apparatus that processes raw materials for the paper-making process. Southerland sustained multiple bone fractures from the fall, along with chemical and thermal burns on his body from the digester, and was killed.
Less than two weeks later, at Georgia-Pacific’s plant in Corrigan, Texas, a fire broke out in a tall silo that captured wood dust. Employees rushed to the location to put the fire out, many of them apparently floor workers who were not trained firefighters. Some bags inside the silo were blocking a group of vents designed to release flames and pressure inside the silo in case of emergency. Pressure built up, and then the silo vents released, engulfing the employees in flames. Different news accounts said between seven and nine employees were burned and transported to local hospitals. Some of them languished in burn wards for weeks. On May 30, a fifty-six-year-old Georgia-Pacific employee named Charles Kovar died from his wounds. About one week later, fifty-eight-year-old Kenny Morris died in the hospital. Both men left behind wives and children. Kovar’s obituary suggested that he had lived a full life that was enriched by his Christian faith: “He had just experienced his best Easter ever where he cleaned out the bowl of Aunt Diane’s famous banana pudding,” the obituary said.
On July 24, a sixty-three-year-old Georgia-Pacific employee named Lydia Faircloth was leaving her shift at the company’s mill in Cedar Springs, Georgia. Just two years earlier, Faircloth had been featured in an internal Georgia-Pacific safety bulletin. She had coined a phrase to promote safety awareness: “LET OTHERS SEE SAFETY IN YOU,” according to the bulletin. It was close to midnight when Faircloth was leaving. She cut through an area where industrial loader trucks were transporting big loads of product. She crossed the floor in a crosswalk marked for pedestrians, but was hit by a truck driven by her coworker and died from severe internal