Two Bumble Bee tuna execs were charged yesterday in the death of a worker who was accidentally cooked in a factory oven with 12,000 pounds of fish.
Their victim, Jose Melena, was performing maintenance inside one of the company’s massive ovens on the morning of October 11th 2012, when it was inadvertently filled with tons of tuna and then turned on.
A few hours later a supervisor noticed the 65-year-old employee was weirdly missing, and a search of the plant turned up his badly burned corpse, which had been baking all that time at 270-degrees Celsius.
An OSHA investigation of the deadly incident showed a number of known occupational hazards at the Santa Fe Springs Bumble Bee tuna facility that could have easily led to other worker fatalities and, in a rare move, charged two of its managers for Jose Melena’s wrongful death.
For their “willful” safety-violations they both now face prison sentences, as well as fines up to $250,000 when convicted, and the San Diego based Bumble Bee Foods corporation itself is also looking at a $1.5 million penalty.
The company has appealed the charges, of course, and in the interim issued a public apology-styled excuse for mistakenly baking one of their employees, claiming they’ve cleaned up their act in the wake of the dreadful tuna-fish fiasco.
“We remain devastated by the loss of our colleague Jose Melena in the tragic accident," Bumble Bee’s statement reads. “[But] we disagree with and are disappointed by the charges filed by the Los Angeles district attorney's office.”
