Hornaday Manufacturing, (Carol Bryant, Central Nebraska Today)
GRAND ISLAND — Hornaday Manufacturing has been fined by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) following a fatal explosion that occurred last October.
OSHA has leveled two fines against Hornady that totals $28,807.
The fines are connected to an Oct. 13, 2023, incident where employee Adriana Alvarez, 32, was killed as the result of an explosion during the mixing process of a primer compound.
Hornady manufactures a wide array of bullets and ammunition.
OSHA states that Alvarez was scraping a primer compound batch between cycles. Another employee was performing other tasks in an adjacent room. A blast door was open at the time and the employee suffered concussive force injuries.
The first violation, fined $12,676, stated that Hornaday was, “failing to protect employees from explosion hazards.”
“The process hazard analysis (PHA) did not list as a safeguard the operating limits to include the maximum number of personnel in the operating building nor were there any postings specifying the maximum number of personnel in the building,” OSHA stated.
The second violation, fined $16,131, noted that Hornaday, “did not fully address qualitative evaluation of a range of the possible safety and health effects of failures of controls.”
