Steam causes fatal injuries to workers after 30,000 gallons of water poured onto the hot coke
Ontario employer John Kenyon Limited has been fined $225,000 after two workers sustained fatal injuries in a workplace incident.
Following a guilty plea in the Ontario Court of Justice in Cayuga, the employer was also ordered to pay a 25 per cent victim fine surcharge, as required by the Provincial Offences Act. The surcharge is credited to a special provincial government fund that assists victims of crime.
The incident occurred on April 25, 2023, at Stelco’s Lake Erie Works. At the facility, coke—a fuel source and an agent used to convert iron ore into molten iron in a blast furnace—is produced in an oven and transported via a rail and trolley system to a quench tower.
The quench tower is a metal structure approximately 120 feet tall that acts as a chimney to direct steam produced during the quenching process—when water is poured onto hot coke inside the trolley car.
During siding replacement work on the quench tower, undertaken by Kenyon, the coke oven remained in operation. The trolley car continued to automatically transport hot coke to the tower. For each quench, Kenyon workers ensure their safety by moving the boom lift—used in the siding work—a safe distance away.
Steam causes fatal injuries to workers
On the day of the incident, two workers were inside the basket of the lift, approximately 40 feet off the ground. Two other workers on the ground level assisted by signalling when the lift needed to be repositioned.
As the coke oven operation began, the workers in the boom lift acknowledged a signal from the ground crew but did not move the lift away from the tower. They again failed to act after a second signal.
The ground workers did not engage the emergency controls to move the basket to safety. When the trolley car automatically parked at the base of the tower, the ground crew began shouting to the lift workers to move away and sounded a horn.
Moments later, 30,000 gallons of water were poured onto the hot coke. The resulting steam surged up the quench tower and escaped through a gap in the external wall—where the workers had been performing repairs. This caused fatal injuries to the two workers in the lift, according to the Ontario government.
A previous CBC report identified the workers as Gabriel Cabral and Sean MacPherson.
An investigation by the Ministry of Labour, Immigration, Training and Skills Development determined that Kenyon failed to ensure that its workers followed Stelco’s safety procedures correctly.
The company “failed to take the reasonable precaution to ensure the workers were not performing work on a quench tower while the quenching process took place, contrary to section 25(2)(h) of the Occupational Health and Safety Act,” said the provincial government.
Section 25(2)(h) of the Act requires that an employer “take every precaution reasonable in the circumstances for the protection of a worker.”
Stelco was also previously charged in relation to the incident.
“The two deaths would have been avoided if the workers had made sure to move the basket away from the quench tower at the first signal,” the government noted.
