When your hot gas defrost just isn’t get’n her done!

Just when you think you have seen it all, some business steps up and surprises me once again!  This time we visit a refrigeration process at a cold storage facility that specialized in fruit juice concentrates.  This team did not like to “defrost” their evaporators the traditional way using hot gas; so much that they preferred to let their evaporators run until the ice got so thick they actually stopped remove heat from the space.  They would then STILL NOT perform a hot gas defrost and instead provided the newest employees’ hammers and chisels to remove the ice from the evaporators!  You just can’t make this stuff up and at approximately 10:00 a.m. on July 8, 2008, what most can imagine happening … happened…

The company is also involved in fish processing, packaging, and freezing. Employee #1 was hired the day before to help in moving the boxes of fish from the packaging line to pallets. On that particular day, the employer had hired too many temporary workers and some of them were sent out to do other tasks. Employee #1 was one such employee and after working two hours in the fish line, Employee #1 was reassigned to help in the maintenance department. The company’s refrigeration system could not keep up with the automatic defrosting of ice causing it to accumulate on the evaporators over time, making their refrigeration system very inefficient. To resolve this, the employer resorted to having its employees manually “chip” the ice by providing them with hammers. On Employee #1’s second day of work, he continued chipping ice off the same evaporator. Employee #1 was working on the top part of a ladder that was propped against an evaporator. Employee #1 had chipped a big portion of ice and as it fell, it hit and punctured an anhydrous ammonia line. Ammonia vapor was released and caused a severe chemical burn to Employee #1’s eyes, face, neck, hand, and lungs. With his eyes closed, Employee #1 managed to climb down the ladder, crawl over several 55-gallon drums of concentrated juice to exit the freezer room. Once outside of the freezer, other employees secured a water hose and doused him with water. Employee #1 was then taken to a local hospital where he stayed for seven days for burn treatment.