Borges said she and others had complained about a gas odor about 30 minutes before the factory blew up. She is angry Palmer didn't immediately evacuate. She said the deaths of her co-workers — including her close friend, Judith Lopez-Moran — could've been prevented.
Others workers have also said they smelled natural gas, according to their relatives. Palmer, a 75-year-old, family-run company with deep roots in the small town 60 miles (96 kilometers) northwest of Philadelphia, has not responded to questions about the workers' claims.
At 4:30 p.m., Borges told the AP, she smelled natural gas. It was strong and nauseated her. Borges and her co-workers approached their supervisor, asking "what was going to be done, if we were going to be evacuated," she recalled.
Borges said the supervisor noted someone higher up would have to make that decision. So she got back to work.
Just before 5 p.m., the two-story brick building exploded.
As the trans struggle show, workers are being gaslit and have their subjective experience ignored 24/7 under bourgeois dictatorship. "If you smell gas you need CBT therapy and mindfulness training to stop being so crazy and disruptive , that's a you problem, not a problem with us"
Sadly the gutting of unions and regulations has made it scary for lower management types (who are also pieces of shit quite often) to make these life endangering calls. Like how fucked is it a floor manager making barely above anyone else's pay grade is so scared of losing their position they are cool with letting workers die instead of protesting for their safety (cuss the noisy nail gets hammered in).
That’s why you need to punish everyone in the chain of command incredibly harshly. If you know that a worker getting injured means you, your boss, your boss’s boss, and the CEO all go to prison for 30 years, I imagine you’ll be a bit more careful.