Amazon Warehouse Collapse in Baltimore Leaves Two Dead (engadget.com)

An anonymous reader quotes Engadget: Amazon is grappling with tragedy at one of its warehouses this weekend. A 50-foot wall at the company's southeast Baltimore fulfillment center collapsed on the night of November 2nd in the midst of a large storm, killing two people. They worked for an external company, an Amazon official told the Baltimore Sun... The storm was a particularly violent one that had torn roofs off apartment buildings and collapsed a ceiling at a TJ Maxx store, injuring three people. Amazon was caught up in extreme weather that unfortunately led to fatalities.

Comments

Re:They shouldn't have been there.

[DNS-and-BIND]

Obviously you have never had a shitty low level job before. They want you there rain or shine and there are penalties for absenteeism - in the database there are no fields for excuses. Miss work and you get written up and miss it again and you get fired. You've got to save those write-ups for the critical times, like when you're sick or your kid has a school concert. Can't waste them on a silly storm which will pass in an hour anyway.

Re:They shouldn't have been there.

[tlhIngan]

If the storm kicked up after the people were already there, then those people should have been pulled into the most reinforced areas of the building (typically the office) until it passed, because walls do collapse. This is not an unforeseeable event. Get the people away from the most hazardous conditions and ride it out. Don't just keep working.

I suppose you'd argue against evacuating the entire building when there's a fire, too. Only move the people that will be in the way of the fire department. No. Overreaction for the sake of caution is tolerable when the events are infrequent enough.

It depends on the storm. We've had bad storms, and if you stopped working every time a storm warning comes out, you might as well take the rest of the year off.

So perhaps it was a bad storm, but as far as anyone was concerned, par for the course during the stormy season. Of course, storms can kick up some wickedly local phenomena - microbursts for example that are difficult to predict, extremely local and can be damaging.

It can be a matter of just bad luck - it looks like a seasonal storm and everyone goes about their business, but then something wicked gets whipped up and a wall collapses as misfortune.

Of course, I wasn't there, but that's what I think when we got storm warnings - all it means is to be more careful when outside because winds might be strong and rain might be driving.

And of course, the wall could be defective, too - perhaps it was made incorrectly, or poorly maintained or something else that made it collapse prematurely.