Dairy Manure Pit Deaths Raise Warning Flag

The brothers shared the bond of their immigrant journey. There were eight days spent shivering in a Tecate, Mexico, orchard, abandoned by an unscrupulous guide. There was backbreaking work flipping sheets of raisins in the Fresno heat. Then came the gentler apricot harvests near Patterson. Next, the boost to higher pay at the concrete pipe company, where they built and installed irrigation systems for farms and dairies across the western San Joaquin Valley.

Over the course of two decades, Sergio and Jose Ortiz together inched toward the stable lives they had dreamed of in the rural Mexican town of their youth. In his pocket, the burly Sergio carried two Social Security cards: one fake, from his years as an illegal immigrant, the other real, tucked proudly next to his green card.

Today, those belongings bear the marks of his journey’s end, a death so horrific that Jose hides the truth from their frail mother back home. Sergio’s identification is stained with cow manure. The $30 in bills that he carried on the day of his death in August are discolored from the acids of animal urine. His watch is corroded. All of these now rest in a makeshift shrine that Jose maintains in his well-tended home in rural Patterson.

Sergio Ortiz died in a stew of liquefied manure on the job in Gustine, a modest dairy town south of Patterson on a narrow highway that slices through cow country like a razor.

His death came just 18 months after a similar incident claimed two workers at another Gustine dairy farm. All were overcome by toxic wastewater gases, then drowned, after climbing inside concrete structures where manure slurry is pumped from vast waste lagoons.

The spate of deaths has prompted an unusual self-examination by the California dairy industry and representatives of companies such as the one where Sergio worked. Most acknowledge that not enough has been done to comply with state laws requiring better training for workers and deployment of safety devices to combat deadly fumes in confined spaces. Recent training sessions on the issue by the Western United Dairymen, an industry group, have been packed.

The state’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health, meanwhile, has launched unprecedented inspection sweeps of the dairy industry, which had largely fallen below the agency’s radar. Since the first two men, Jose Alatorre and Enrique Araiza, passed out and drowned inside a manure pond pump pit in February 2001, Cal/OSHA has carried out 166 inspections, 50% more than in the entire preceding decade. The agency has levied nearly half a million dollars in fines for a wide range of safety problems, records show.

The deaths, and the sudden scrutiny by regulators, have shaken the state’s 2,000 dairy farms, many of them struggling financially because of low milk prices.

“Unfortunately it takes a bad event for us to wake up,” said Xavier Avila, president of the California Dairy Campaign, an association of family-run dairies. “It is a hazard. Everybody knows about it, and I think they just get sloppy.”

Most of all, the tragedies have left a streak of grief, from the fog-shrouded towns where the workers lived to the Mexican pueblos in Guanajuato and Jalisco, where they lie buried.

“My brother and I were always together. Without him, I feel like I am missing my arms,” said Jose Ortiz, 37, a soft-spoken man with chiseled features. “One asks why. But there’s no answer. There’s no remedy.”

Jose had left the irrigation company about three years ago for a union-wage warehouse job that offered him and his family a better future. Sergio, 42, planned to follow, once he improved his English.

Turlock Irrigation Construction Co., Sergio Ortiz’s employer, remains under investigation by Cal/OSHA, an agency spokesman said. The company had been hired by the Rego Dairy, where Ortiz died, to replace a gate on its manure-pumping system.

The earlier deaths of Alatorre and Araiza, employees of the Aguiar Faria Dairy, resulted in more than $166,000 in OSHA fines, which that dairy is appealing. The Merced County district attorney is also investigating Aguiar Faria for possible criminal prosecution.

Jim Garner, Ortiz’s boss, said he found out only after the fact about the deadly gases that can rise from manure water.

“I learned a lot that day,” said Garner, who is now trying to craft a safety program for workers entering confined spaces, as required by law. “Unfortunately, it was too late.”

Attorney Larry Kazanjian said owners of the Aguiar Faria dairy were “devastated” by the fatalities on their farm.

He acknowledged that the dairy had not taken all the precautions required by law, but said many small dairies are guilty of the same oversight.

“This is a small mom-and-pop dairy farm, like many in the Valley. There’s a level of sophistication that does not exist with many of these farmers that they need to have a confined space safety program,” Kazanjian said. “Maybe now it will.”

Before the deaths, workers without safety equipment regularly entered the concrete sump to unclog the pumping system, said Arsenio Araiza, brother of one of the men who died at Aguiar Faria. After the incident, Arsenio was asked to drain the open-air lagoon. Although he says he never had to enter the confined area where gases can accumulate, he nevertheless felt unsafe and quit last summer.

Rules on the Books

Cal/OSHA requires that workers be trained in confined-space hazards; that the air be tested before and during entry; that respiratory equipment be provided; that workers be lowered into the space on a harness; and that a second worker remain outside at all times to perform rescues.

But few farmers appear to carry out such measures, the agency said. A trend toward bigger operations, with more cows, often means more maintenance is required to prevent corroded floodgates from jamming and pumps from clogging with field detritus, said Bill Krycia, Cal/OSHA’s agricultural enforcement coordinator.

Farmers must be warned against complacency because workers can enter one of the concrete structures dozens of times without incident before tragedy strikes, Krycia said.

The recent deaths in Gustine were not the first to prove the dangers of animal waste to farm workers. Dozens have died in similar circumstances in regions where cold weather dictates that the manure pits be enclosed. In 1989, five family members from three generations all died in one Midwestern manure pit. After those deaths the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health issued an alert. It renewed the warning in 1993.

In California, manure and water are gathered in open air lagoons and often rerouted by irrigation systems to fertilize crops of alfalfa, corn and winter forage. It is the system that delivers the witch’s brew to the fields that has claimed lives.

Some farmers, including Ray Souza of Turlock, think the answer is keeping workers away from the gases entirely. Souza hires a contractor who uses cranes to lift malfunctioning pumps from their concrete housings for servicing. With that system, workers don’t enter areas that can fill with methane and hydrogen sulfide.

Souza, past president of the Western United Dairymen, also helps direct grants to farmers who participate in a pilot program to convert captured methane to electricity.

“At one time we looked at manure as a liability. Today it’s a resource,” Souza said.

The three deaths in Gustine bore remarkable similarities: In the 2001 incident, the 29-year-old Araiza climbed into a pump pit and fainted from the fumes. When Alatorre, 22, went to his co-worker’s rescue, he passed out too and landed in the waste. Both drowned in the stinking liquid -- Araiza with only a ChapStick, a pocketknife and one dime in his pockets, Alatorre with eight pennies and a few stray twigs. Both men had manure in their lungs. It was Alatorre’s first wedding anniversary, said his wife, Angelica Hernandez, 25.

“It’s just a very unbecoming way to pass,” said Merced County Deputy Coroner Stephen Morris. “I thought after those two, ‘that won’t happen again.’ I figured everybody would be on board.”

But it did happen again, just a few miles down the road, when Sergio Ortiz and his partner were sent to the Rego Dairy to replace the gate on a manure flush pump. Ortiz passed out and his co-worker tried to rescue him. He managed to lift Ortiz’s head from the manure water, but became dizzy and had to climb out, said Jose Ortiz and his brother’s boss, Garner.

By the time Ortiz died, however, regulators were already moving in on the industry, startled by the Aguiar Faria deaths and two other deaths of dairy workers who suffocated under fallen hay bales.

The manure deaths -- while much less common than deaths from farm equipment, falls and livestock accidents -- prompted the worker safety agency to refocus its 3-year-old agricultural health and safety project. In the past, the project has concentrated on crop farming, with a particular emphasis on punishing employers who failed to provide adequate drinking water and toilets for field hands. Last year, dairy farming joined the list.

The inspections unveiled dozens of infractions for improper gear for protecting eyes and hands, for hazardous machinery and for other problems. Agency records dating back a dozen years also show deaths from toxic manure fumes similar to the Gustine incidents in 1990 and 1999, in the Central Valley towns of Stevinson and Hanford.

“We were having fatalities and we were just not getting out to dairies....California is now the No. 1 dairy state. We’re all very proud of them. They have happy cows,” Krycia said, referring to a dairy marketing campaign. “Now we want safe and healthy workers.”

Averting Tragedy

Heightened precautions could avert more tragedy, the families of the three dead workers say, but they do little to ease the pain of loss. Jose Ortiz feels his brother’s absence every morning when he peeks into his garage at Sergio’s truck, a new white Nissan pickup that he purchased, free and clear, with painstakingly saved cash.

When Jose’s twin boys ask yearningly for their uncle, he fibs that Sergio has gone to Mexico for a visit. In January, Jose plans a trip to Santa Rosalia, his family’s home in the Mexican state of Jalisco, to help build his brother’s tombstone.

Meanwhile, his mother, who stares from Jose’s photo album with the ruddy determination of a rural matron, remains in the dark. The surviving siblings conferred with their father, a lanky campesino who cooks chicharrones -- fried pork rinds -- outdoors on an open flame, and decided to lie.

First, they told their mother that Sergio had had an accident and was hospitalized. Then, over the course of 20 days, they told her he was getting worse, until finally he succumbed. They never gave her the details.

“Two men had already died, so they should have known,” said Jose Ortiz. “It could have been avoided.”

Like the families of the other two men, he has hired a lawyer. But with some resignation, Jose Ortiz concluded: “I can only hope that it won’t happen to somebody else.”