"I Always Knew Somebody Would Get Killed Inside That Place"

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http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/05/us-steel-nick-revetta-osha

Early on the morning of September 3, 2009, Nicholas Adrian Revetta left the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, suburb of Pleasant Hills and drove 15 minutes to a job at US Steel's Clairton Plant, a soot-blackened industrial complex on the Monongahela River. He never returned home.

Revetta was working as a laborer for a US Steel contractor that had employed his father, at the same plant that employed his brother. Shortly before 11:30 a.m., gas leaking from a line in the plant's Chemicals and Energy Division found an ignition source and exploded, propelling him backward into a steel column and inflicting a fatal blow to his head. Thirty-two years old, he left behind a wife and two young children.

Nick Revetta's death did not make national headlines. No hearings were held into the accident that killed him. No one was fired or sent to jail.

Under the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, American workers are entitled to "safe and healthful" conditions. Revetta's death and the events that followed lay bare the law's limitations, showing how safety can yield to speed, how fatal accidents can have few consequences for employers, and how federal investigations can be cut short by what some call a de facto quota system.