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Family of man who fell seeks answers

The mother of a Tarpon Springs man who fell to his death at a St. Petersburg construction site wonders how safe conditions were.

By ROBIN STEIN
Published May 5, 2006

The family of a 25-year-old Tarpon Springs man killed on a construction site this week is questioning whether working conditions were safe.

Jarrad R. Sussman was not wearing a safety harness or protective gear when he fell 33 feet Tuesday afternoon through roof panels at the Valpak construction site in St. Petersburg.

"No one actually saw him fall," his mother, Janet Sussman, said Thursday. "He fell through this opening. ... He must have died immediately."

Her son's death has not yet sunk in.

"It just doesn't process," she said. "It doesn't make any sense. It's not supposed to happen in that order."

Sussman was an apprentice ironworker with Local 397. He was working for Florida Structural Steel, a Tampa-based subcontractor. The crew had been working on Valpak's new 407,000-square-foot printing and distribution facility at 2700 102nd Ave. N in St. Petersburg for the past six weeks. The facility is slated to be completed by the end of the summer and operational by early next year, said David G. Williams, a spokesman for Valpak, which prints mass advertisements.

Charles Werner, a supervisor who was on the roof with Sussman, told St. Petersburg police he had momentarily turned to address a second worker. "When he turned back toward where Sussman was, he was no longer there," the police report says.

The company told police it uses a "monitoring safety system" where supervisors monitor workers to inform them if they are too close to the edges of roofs or near openings. Werner was monitoring Sussman and another worker.

Inspectors with the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration are reviewing the incident, said Les Grove, director of the agency's Tampa office. Grove said he would not speculate about whether there were safety violations that led to Sussman's death until the investigation is completed. That may take as long as six months. OSHA investigates all fatal work site incidents.

Grove did say that federal rules do not always require safety gear, even for people working at high elevations.

Janet Sussman says either safety regulations are too loose or they weren't followed.

"Is "in compliance' good enough? Maybe the bar is not high enough," she said. "They weren't tethered to anything, There was no netting, no pads."

"It's pretty easy to buy a body harness and a lanyard for somebody," said Robert Nesbitt, the program manager for the OSHA training institute education center at the University of South Florida in Tampa. "They would let an apprentice up in a situation like that with no fall protection gear? I don't understand the risk manager at that location who would let that happen."

Citing the ongoing inquiry, David Hale, president of Florida Structural Steel, declined to comment or discuss the company's routine fall protection practices Thursday.

The general contractor, the Austin Co. of Cleveland, said it does not appear that any safety lapses played a role. "From what we understand, the person made a mistake and took the fall," said Philip Todd, senior vice president for the company. "In our opinion, everything was being installed under the OSHA rules."

Janet Sussman said she has already been surfing the ironworkers union Web site to find out more about the rules.

"I'm not looking to be angry at the union people or even Florida (Structural) because what I've read on the Web is that there are 50 deaths a year (of ironworkers)."

But the difference is that, now, one of those was her son's.

[Last modified May 5, 2006, 02:30:26]