Washington:
U.S. worker safety officials fined Elon Musk's SpaceX $3,600 this month after an accident at its Washington state site led to a “near amputation,” according to inspection data reviewed by Reuters.
A Reuters investigation late last year found that Musk's rocket company ignored employee safety regulations and standard practices at its facilities nationwide. Through interviews and government documents, the news organization has documented at least 600 previously unreported injuries to SpaceX employees since 2014.
SpaceX did not respond to Reuters' questions about any of the incidents, which included the death of a worker and the injury of another worker who remains in a coma after his skull was fractured during a rocket engine failure in 2022. Also to a request The company did not respond for comment about the new safety fine.
Washington state Department of Labor and Industries inspectors discovered new safety violations at the company's site in Redmond, Washington, last December during a visit in response to worker complaints, according to state inspection data obtained by Reuters through an open records request. An agency spokesperson said SpaceX can still appeal the decision.
Inspectors concluded the site lacked a “thorough safety program,” adequate communication about work rules and a system to “correct violations,” the documents say. The “near amputation,” as inspectors called it, occurred after a roll of material fell and crushed a worker's foot.
Managers at SpaceX told state inspectors that it was a one-time incident and that the problem had been resolved.
However, inspectors found that workers were not required to wear steel-toed shoes, even though the rolls of material they had to load into a machine had become heavier – from about 80 pounds to 300 pounds (36 kg to 136 kg) each. .
One employee at the site told inspectors that “safety can be overlooked” because the “goal of the company is to make as much money as possible in a short period of time,” according to the data. The injured worker said the machine into which the rolls were loaded was “intentionally misconfigured for the purpose of increasing production speed during the material loading phase.”
The employee, who was not named in the report, told inspectors that the issue had not been addressed and that company safety officials “do not have the reading comprehension nor the overall competency to implement a safety plan at the Redmond site.”
In a separate incident reported less than 24 hours later, an unidentified Redmond employee was hospitalized for a broken ankle after jumping from a dock during a fire alarm, which inspectors said the company could not have anticipated. SpaceX was not fined as a result.
Last year's Reuters report revealed that the billionaire's security agencies fined the billionaire's rocket company a total of $50,836 for various violations over the past decade.
SpaceX's history of injuries and regulatory conflicts underscores the limits of worker safety regulations. According to U.S. worker safety experts, fines are limited by law and are little deterrent for large companies. Federal and state regulators also suffer from chronic understaffing of inspectors, they said.
The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which has paid SpaceX more than $11.8 billion as a private space contractor, did not respond to questions about the matter. The space agency has repeatedly declined to comment on the company's safety record, saying only that the agency has the ability to enforce contract provisions that require SpaceX to “have a robust and effective safety program and culture”.
Last month, the employee's wife, who is in a coma after his skull was fractured, filed a negligence lawsuit against the company. NASA and SpaceX have not commented on that complaint.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)