2 Die in Accidents at Lumberyard and Nearby Warehouse

A 45-year-old Moorpark man and an 18-year-old laborer from Minnesota were killed Wednesday morning in unrelated industrial accidents within two miles of each other.

Jaime Roman, a father of two from Moorpark, was crushed under an 11,000-pound bundle of lumber at 10:40 a.m. after trying to assist a crew at Hagle Lumber Co. in Camarillo with rearranging a load on the back of a flatbed trailer.

The other man, Nolan Keane, who lived in St. Paul, Minn., was killed about an hour later after plunging 45 feet through a Plexiglass skylight in a warehouse operated by Technicolor in Camarillo.

Keane was airlifted to St. John’s Regional Medical Center and was pronounced dead at 12:28 p.m. Roman was also taken by helicopter to the Oxnard hospital and died two minutes later.

“The lumber literally whipped him [Roman] to the ground,” said Doug Emslie, operations manager for American Medical Response, the ambulance company that responded to the accident. “We are not sure if it was his collision with the ground or the lumber that was the mechanism for injury.”

Roman was training as an employee at the lumberyard and had only worked there a few days, said Craig Stevens, senior deputy coroner.

Hagle Lumber, 3100 Somis Road, is a custom lumberyard that cuts large pieces of lumber to specification and serves home builders, contractors and retailers. Company officials declined comment on the accident.

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Dean Fryer, information officer for the San Francisco office of Cal-OSHA, said the lumber and wood-cutting industry is a comparatively safe field. There were eight fatal accidents in the industry in California in 1998.

“That is not a high number,” Fryer said. “According to stats, it is a safer profession than the trucking and courier services or electrical work or heavy construction.”

Fryer said it was unusual to have two accidents the same day in such close proximity.

At about 11:45 a.m., Keane was carrying a large piece of insulation on the roof when a blast of wind blew him off balance, said Mitch Breese, a spokesman with the Ventura County coroner’s office. Keane worked for Single-Ply Systems Inc., based in a suburb of St. Paul.

“Like a sail, the insulation caught the wind and pushed him across the roof toward the skylight,” Breese said. “You can’t fight something like that. It was a stiff piece of insulation.”

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Keane fell through the skylight, head first, onto a concrete floor in a warehouse filled with videocassette tapes, authorities said.

“He fell right next to the video tapes, which might have softened the fall if he’d landed on them,” said Emslie of the ambulance company, which responded to both accidents. Keane was pronounced dead at 12:28 p.m.

Fryer said the numbers of roofing deaths in the state were about 1% of total workplace facilities in 1998. “This industry is not seeing a high number either. There were six fatalities last year,” he said.

In a prepared statement, company officials said “Technicolor is deeply saddened by the incident and extends its condolences to the deceased’s family and friends.”