It is well-known within the industry that working on the job collecting trash is a dangerous line of work. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health was demanding more safety regulations be in place for garbage trucks back in 1992, when the federal government’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration didn’t even have safety regulations in place for these huge and heavy trash collectors. Even today, trash trucks aren’t given the same regulatory treatment as other kinds of commercial trucks under federal regulations.
Learning of any employee being seriously injured or killed while earning a day’s pay working on the job is never easy: when it is a young man not even out of his teenage years working as a garbage collector, it’s truly heartwrenching.
17 Year Old Teen Dies While Working On the Job as Indiana Garbage Collector
In today’s news, we learn that the family of a seventeen (17) year old boy is grieving today, after he was killed in a horrific accident yesterday afternoon while working on the job on a moving front-loading garbage truck. The teenager was working for his family’s own trash collecting business, picking up garbage near Parker City, Indiana, when he and a co-worker fell off the front end of the moving truck after it bucked on a rough patch of roadway. Both were run over by the huge machine.
Unfortunately, the 17 year old young man died from his injuries; he has been identified in the news media as Stephen Tiller of Greenville, Ohio, and today our sincerest condolences go out to his family and loved ones.
His co-worker remains hospitalized at IU Health Ball Memorial Hospital in Muncie, where he is recovering from a broken leg.
Garbage Trucks Are Huge, Powerful, and Sometimes Deadly
The cause of this teenager’s death is not confirmed yet: media reports have the coroner arguing that the boy should not have been on the front of the garbage truck; however, it’s understandable why he might have been there — this was a front-loading truck (image below).
Did the truck itself play a part in this travesty? We don’t know. What were those road conditions? We don’t know. What we all do know is that workers should be safe on the job, especially when they work on trucks like this — which everyone knows to be dangerous (image shown is merely an example of a front-loading garbage truck, this one operated by Waste Management, a company not known to be involved in any way with today’s tragedy):
From Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain Image
