Montebello : Trucking Company Fined $5,050 for Health and Safety Violations

An interstate trucking company has been fined $5,050 by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration after federal investigators received an anonymous tip that the firm’s Montebello terminal has been violating numerous health and safety regulations.

The Chapin Road terminal of Consolidated Freightways was found to have seriously violated the federal regulations, OSHA regional manager Leonard Limtiaco announced this week. The violations include:

Failure to provide emergency eye- and body-flushing stations for employees working with corrosive or hazardous materials.

Failure to provide safe loading facilities by not taking steps to prevent truck movement or tipping during loading.

Failure to adequately mark containers of hazardous materials or provide information about the materials to employees.

“Serious violations like those against Consolidated,” Limtiaco said in a written statement, “are issued when there is substantial probability that death or serious physical harm could occur, and the employer knew or should have known of the hazard.”

However, a spokesman for the trucking company, which is based in Portland, Ore., denied that serious health and safety hazards exist at the south Montebello terminal. The spokesman, who declined to be identified, said that the OSHA investigators “were very, very petty” about most of the violations. “They are making it sound like we are the bad guys, when we are not.”

About 30 trucks arrive each day at the terminal near the Santa Ana Freeway, carrying goods that range from paper products to hazardous materials, the spokesman said. He added that the fines were the first to have been issued against the company.