Officials baffled after worker falls inside 6,000-gallon chemical container at N.J. plant

Authorities were alerted to an accident at an oil refinery plant in Linden, New Jersey, on Jan. 19. When they arrived, they found a 71-year-old worker had fallen into a 6,000 gallon vat filled with mineral oil. He died on the spot. But now the authorities and the company are trying to figure out exactly how and why it happened.

The company, Infineum, released a statement on their website saying: “At Infineum, one of our goals is to maintain a safe workplace, to ensure that workplace hazards are eliminated or mitigated, and to ensure that each individual working at our site is trained to perform his or her daily duties safely.” The company extended their condolences and vowed to do an internal investigation to figure out how to prevent that from ever happening again.

Accidents are one of the things in life we just have to contend with, whether it’s factory workers or Hollywood stars — authorities tend to be in a position where sometimes all they can do is learn from it. For the Linden Police Department, they will lead the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) into an external probe to see whether it aligns with Infineum’s findings. Sometimes rules aren’t followed in accidents, and while in less dangerous activities that could just end up as a lapse in judgment, in factories that is no laughing matter.

On the fateful Monday, Jan. 19, the unidentified man is believed to have been standing atop the 6,000 gallon container working, and he accidentally fell inside. The first responders were alerted to the accident at around 2 p.m. local time. According to People, fire personnel were able to retrieve the man’s body from the vat and pronounced him dead on site.

Infineum is a multinational oil refinery headquartered in the UK. They are involved in just about every vertical of the energy sector, including e-mobility. Their American branch is at the Bayway Chemical Plant in Linden, N.J. In their official statement, they wrote they’ll ensure they can “determine exactly what happened, why it happened, and how we can keep this from happening again.”

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there was an overall total of 5,283 deaths directly tied to work related injuries from 2023 — which was the last time they released such statistics. 391 people died directly as a result of injuries in the manufacturing industries.

The further you dig into the stats, the more is revealed, because out of every 100,000 workers in manufacturing, 2.5 die at work. When you widen the net and include nonfatal injuries, then 2.6 million people were injured at work in the manufacturing industry — specifically factory workers.

Transportation mishaps or slips cause the most damage in this particular field. Which is probably why OSHA is hard at work in this particular case, trying to figure out what exactly happened and what caused it. The goal, as you can expect, is to finish a year off without a single death in the industry. But considering there are currently 12.7 million workers in the manufacturing sector — there’s still a long way to go to achieve that goal.