Many facilities maintenance and engineering activities come with a certain degree of risk — a fact that generally does not occur to the general public but that confronts managers and their staffs daily. Roof inspection, maintenance and repair is among the riskiest tasks, as one Pennsylvania company recently learned.
A Smethport man was killed when he fell about 90 feet from a roof while performing scheduled maintenance at the Georgia Pacific MDF plant in Mount Jewett. Michael J. Page, 41, was pronounced dead on the scene by McKean County Coroner Mike Cahill, according to The Bedford Era.
Cahill says that an autopsy had been conducted, and Page’s cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head and trunk, and the manner of death was accidental.
Page was with a crew who were doing scheduled maintenance on the brightly lit exterior roof, says Rick Kimble, company spokesman, “They were taking out some (filter) bags on the roof, which is a somewhat routine procedure. We’re struggling to determine what happened. To say that safety is a priority seems a bit lacking at this point.
“We do everything we can to put safety measures in place and do proper training” to make sure they are followed, Kimble says. “We will go back and look. There are certain procedures that should have been in place. We will look to see if all procedures were followed.”
This Quick Read was submitted by Dan Hounsell — dan.hounsell@tradepressmedia.com — editor-in-chief of Facility Maintenance Decisions, and chief editor of Facilitiesnet.com.
