DETROIT, Mich. – A Fowlerville man was killed at his landscaping job Thursday when the arm on a piece of equipment struck him in the head, and state investigators are trying to find out how it could have happened.
At around 8:50 Thursday morning, Sean McGregor was standing near a Bobcat doing some landscaping work at a subdivision in Genoa Twp. Then something went terribly wrong. The Bobcat was on and not in motion, but the arm on the machine began to move with no one at the controls.
Michigan State Police say the machine's arm hit 27-year-old McGregor in the head, and he died here on the job.
A sergeant with the police told 7Action News that Renaissance Landscaping is a wonderful local company that started out small and grew. According to police, employees at the company are very close and all are deeply hurt by McGregor’s death.
Investigators with the Michigan Occupational Health and Safety Administration will try to answer the many questions that remain following the accident, and will try to determine whether the piece of machinery malfunctioned on its own.
Friday, May 28, 2004
| RELATED NEWS - Landscaper Dies in Equipment Accident |
WASHINGTONG, D.C. – A teenager died May 18, 2004 after he fell into a mulch-spreading truck in North Potomac, Montgomery County police said. The 17-year-old male was landscaping in the 12400 block of Bacall Lane when he climbed on top of the mulch spreader and lost his balance, said Sandy Palmer, executive assistant at TopMulch, the Brookeville company where the teenager worked. He had been with the company for "a couple of weeks," Palmer said. The machine, called a "bark blower," churns mulch with a large spinning device called an auger and then disperses it through a hose, Palmer said. The machine had jammed and the teenager had gotten on top of the truck to see why the mechanism wasn't working, Palmer said. Police said the victim's co-worker had asked the teenager to turn off the machine. When the sound of the machine did not stop, the co-worker went to investigate. "He came to the door, just screaming," said a man who described himself as the owner of the house where the workers were landscaping, but who declined to provide his name. "I called 911." The house owner, who speaks Spanish and who initially interpreted for the distraught worker when police arrived, said the deceased worker came from Guatemala. Authorities said he lived in Wheaton. Montgomery County Fire and Rescue Services received the 911 dispatch at 2:55 p.m., said police spokesman Joyce Utter. The young man was "almost certainly" dead when rescue crews arrived minutes later, she said. Rescue workers took the mulch spreader to a fire station to remove the victim's body, Utter said. She said authorities did not release the victim's name because his family had not been notified last night. TopMulch has a fleet of 10 trucks of varying sizes that are used to spread mulch, Palmer said. She referred further questions about the death to the company's owner, Paul Saiz. She said Saiz would not be available until today. Palmer said the company has safety classes for machinery operators. "We do training before anybody is allowed to even go within feet of these trucks," she said. "It was a very tragic, tragic accident and nobody deserves to have that happen to them," Palmer said. Source: The Washington Post |