Occupational Safety and Health Administration officials are on-site in Springfield to investigate last week’s death of a construction worker at Austin, Texas-based Aspen Heights’ center city housing complex.
Springfield Police Department spokeswoman Lisa Cox said via email Joshua Halphin, 25, of Springfield, died March 24 after the accident occurred. An employee of Springfield contractor RF Barratt Enterprises LLC, Cox said it’s the Police Department’s understanding the accident occurred when Halphin was “offloading supplies from a forklift onto the fifth floor of the complex when he lost his balance and fell to the ground.”
The
primary general contractor for the sprawling $26 million development under construction at the site of the former Earthgrains bakery is Aspen Heights Construction LLC.
OSHA spokesman Scott Allen said investigators would spend about a week at the 1028 St. Louis St. student housing development interviewing the RF Barratt construction supervisors, workers and witnesses and examining the employers’ safety records. Bob Barratt of RF Barratt declined to comment pending OSHA's investigation.
“A company can be issued up to $70,000 for either repeat or willful violations. Those are the most extreme penalties. For serious violations, it could be up to $7,000 for each,” Allen said. “If OSHA comes in there and finds that they were not following all the standards and regulations and it caused a fatality, the fines could be greater, especially if they had similar violations in the past.”
Falls are one of the most common OSHA violations and a leading cause of worksite deaths.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data found that falls, slips and trips accounted for nearly 17 percent of all worker fatalities in 2014.
“Unfortunately, it’s all too common in the workplace,” Allen said. “There’s no doubt in my mind or anyone from OSHA that these types of incidences can be completely prevented if proper fall protection is provided by the employer and used by the workers.
“Again, we don’t know all the details of this particular incident yet, and that’s what we’ll try to discover in our investigation.”
Expected to open this fall with 166 units and 564 beds, the
Aspen Springfield development calls for 172,000 square feet of living space across four, five-level buildings.
