One Man Went Down. Four Went In After Him.

Good morning. Thirty-eight years ago today, before the sun was up, five men in Auburn, Indiana ended up in the same plating tank — and not one of them climbed back out. None of them did anything you and I haven’t watched happen on a hundred ordinary shifts. That’s the part that should keep us honest.

Around 5 a.m. on June 28, 1988, at Bastian Plating Company in Auburn, Indiana, a crew was cleaning out a holding tank — about five feet long, four feet wide, five feet deep — that had held zinc cyanide. The shop was switching from a cyanide-zinc process to a non-cyanide one, and the old tank had to be emptied and scrubbed.

Somewhere in that cleaning, acid went into the tank instead of the bleach (sodium hypochlorite) that safely neutralizes cyanide. Acid plus cyanide makes hydrogen cyanide gas — the same gas once used in execution chambers. It kills in seconds to minutes by starving your cells of oxygen, and at high concentration it gives almost no warning.

The first man went down inside the tank. A second went in to pull him out — and dropped. Then a third. Then a fourth. Then a fifth. OSHA’s own report says it flat: “the five employees who entered the tank all died” — four right there, the fifth two and a half days later. Nine more workers were hurt; two were hospitalized. The men were Baron Sweet, 21. Larry Hensinger, 29. William Freeze, 29. Jeffery Link, 25. And one more who held on for two and a half days. Firefighters and police who responded were among the injured. (OSHA Accident #997346.)

Here’s what I need you to hear, because it’s the whole lesson: not one of those four rescuers was reckless. They saw a buddy face-down and did what your gut screams at you to do. That instinct is human — and it is exactly how one fatality becomes five. NIOSH has the brutal number: more than 60% of people who die in confined spaces are would-be rescuers. The air that drops your coworker will drop you just as fast, and now there are two bodies instead of one.

Name it and cite it: 29 CFR 1910.146 — Permit-Required Confined Spaces. OSHA finalized it in 1993, built on years of confined-space deaths exactly like this one. Translate it to the floor: a tank, pit, vault, or vessel that looks empty can hold an atmosphere that kills on the first breath. So before anyone’s head goes below the rim, you test the air (oxygen, flammables, H2S, CO). You ventilate. You pull a permit. You clip into a retrieval line on a harness. And you post an attendant who stays outside, never enters, and whose one job is to call trained rescue when it goes wrong. Auburn had none of those barriers. 1910.146 is the rulebook written in those five men’s names.

This was never a story about five careless men. It was a story about a system that let one normal mistake — and one normal human instinct — turn into five funerals. Build the barriers so the instinct never gets the chance.

Heat enforcement is live — and the new folks are the ones who go down. OSHA’s updated Heat National Emphasis Program is in force right now, and under it OSHA can run a heat inspection on any day the National Weather Service posts a heat warning or advisory in your area. So what for safety leaders: the people who die in the first days of a heat wave are almost always new hires, returning workers, and temps whose bodies haven’t adjusted yet. Use the acclimatization rule OSHA spells out in “Protecting New Workers” — the Rule of 20%: a brand-new worker does no more than 20% of the normal heavy-heat workload on day one, and you add about 20% more each day. Water, rest, shade, and a buddy watching for the early signs aren’t a nice-to-have in late June. They’re the plan.

Hurricane season is open — fix your storm plan before there’s a name on the map. On June 2 the Chemical Safety Board urged facilities to prepare now, pointing to two it investigated: Arkema (Hurricane Harvey, 2017) and Bio-Lab in Lake Charles (Hurricane Laura, 2020), where lost power and flooding turned stored chemicals into fires and toxic plumes. So what for safety leaders: if you store or process reactive or hazardous materials anywhere a storm can reach, walk the plan this week — secure the materials, confirm backup power for your critical safety systems, drill the emergency protocols, and meet your local emergency managers before you need them. The plan you exercise in calm weather is the only one that holds in a Cat 4.

A maintenance tech gets sent to clear a clog in a below-grade sump — a quick job he’s done plenty of times. He pops the lid, the gas monitor on his belt hasn’t been bump-tested in who-knows-how-long, and he starts down the ladder. His attendant — there mostly because the permit said so — happens to glance at the meter and sees the oxygen reading sliding. He calls it. Tech climbs back out. The retest comes back oxygen-deficient: low enough to drop a man in that hole without a sound.

Nobody got hurt, so it’s easy to wave off. Don’t. Read it the way HOP teaches: the tech wasn’t lazy and the attendant wasn’t a hero — the system made the fast, unsafe path the easy one (uncalibrated monitor, “routine” job, lid already off) and got bailed out by one person actually watching the numbers. The fix isn’t “be more careful.” It’s bump-test every monitor before the shift, treat every below-grade space as a permit space until the air proves otherwise, and give the attendant real authority to stop the job. The save here was a person who spoke up. Build a floor where that’s automatic, not lucky.

Got a fail or a near-miss? Hit reply. We’ll feature it anonymously — no names, no company, no blame. Just the lesson, so the next crew doesn’t learn it the hard way.

Before anyone on your site puts their head below the rim of a tank, pit, vault, or vessel today: test the air first, every time. And settle the rescuer question out loud at the toolbox talk — if a coworker goes down inside a space, nobody enters to grab them; you call rescue, because the air that took them will take you. Then go bump-test your gas monitors. That’s the whole job today.

Please stay Safe & Hydrated!!!