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Six dead after tornadoes destroy Amazon warehouse near St Louis

reuters.com

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Re: Six dead after tornadoes destroy Amazon warehouse near St Louis

#171

Post by vanusa »

vanusa wrote: post #109
JCM9 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article doesn’t support what you are saying. Do you have evidence to support these theories? What happened is terrible and is part of a much broader natural disaster. Trying to turn this into some shallow Amazon shaming is unfortunate.

Do you have evidence to support these theories? Sadly, the preponderance of evidence -- specifically the timing of the numerous severe tornado warnings in the region, starting as early as 4 hours earlier -- and the company's unfortunate track record during other severe weather events (such as Hurricane Ida) -- does suggest there is a significant chance Amazon was too slow to warn its employees of the impending danger…

Also, this particular tweet suggests that Amazon's monitoring of the actual weather conditions in the area was ... at best haphazard. Seems like they have people just randomly googling for a second or two instead of doing actual research.

I'm an Amazon worker in Kentucky, tornado hit 2 miles from my house and I physically couldn't get to work for my shift. The ERC team told me that they had no record of tornadoes in Kentucky and couldn't help me with not getting attendance time reduced for today

https://twitter.com/LCampbell_35/status/1469815411462000647

The "fuck you, prove to us otherwise" attitude of the ERC when there's obviously a major catastrophe unfolding in the region is in itself quite revealing of the companies overall sense of priorities.

Re: Six dead after tornadoes destroy Amazon warehouse near St Louis

#172

Post by markdown »

gentleman11 wrote: post #153
kello wrote: post #36

No snarky comments from me. Just RIP and I hope their families are compensated. No compensation will ever bring back those people or extinguish their families anguish but something is better than nothing.

Amazon might use this as a PR opportunity to clean up their image a tiny bit, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if the workers just get screwed. My dad had to go through workers comp once and the process took 7 years and covered only a small percent of his costs - not with Amazon, but with an employer who cared more about their employees and never made anybody go to the bathroom in bottles out of some ruthless abusive…

In my country the government pays our workers comp immediately (like, days or weeks), no questions asked.

Re: Six dead after tornadoes destroy Amazon warehouse near St Louis

#173

Post by WalterBright »

enragedcacti wrote: post #125
gizmo686 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the counter factual where the workers' don't risk their lives? My intuition is that an Amazon warehouse is safer than a typical home during a tornado. And many homes were completely destroyed during this event as well. With the benifit of hindsight, it would have been better if no one was at that particular warehouse. But we can only say that because we know where the tornado hit with an accuracy that is no w…

My understanding is that a house with a basement or other underground structure is likely far safer than the warehouse floor. Without a basement you are at much more risk but there are ways to personally mitigate risk like tornado straps and reinforced garage doors. > The safest place to be is a reinforced concrete building, but if that’s not an option a basement really is your best bet. An analysis of the Oklahoma t…

My fear is the house will collapse and trap me in the basement.

Re: Six dead after tornadoes destroy Amazon warehouse near St Louis

#174

Post by firebones »

coryrc wrote: post #117
gerdesj wrote: post #70

"Six Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) workers were confirmed dead on Saturday after a series of tornadoes roared through a warehouse near St Louis, ripping off its roof and causing 11-inch thick concrete walls longer than football fields to collapse on themselves." Horrific. A wall that size cannot possibly survive a big wind. Cannot.

Point me to a warehouse currently built in the US that would survive this.

Not a warehouse, but there are data centers in the tornado belt where the whole building is designed and built that way.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2497174/tornadoes-and-...

Re: Six dead after tornadoes destroy Amazon warehouse near St Louis

#175

Post by floatingatoll »

bmitc wrote: post #161

I don’t understand a few things, as they aren’t covered in the article, that I saw. Were there no warnings for the severe weather storm that would have prevented people coming in to work or allowed them to leave work early? When I was working in the office, we were usually forced (literally security swept the building) to leave when severe winter weather was coming in a few times. Why doesn’t Amazon, in the middle of…

Amazon penalizes their workers for bathroom breaks and replaced their HR team with a chatbot. This is allowed by federal labor laws, and Amazon’s primary source of retail revenue is externalizing human costs. Our tech and business communities believe regulations are harmful, and American politicians are inept. So I don’t see how we can prevent their abuse unless something changes; yet, no one wants to be the one that changes. A startup seems unlikely to help, but I remain optimistic that someone will change.

Re: Six dead after tornadoes destroy Amazon warehouse near St Louis

#176

Post by pacerwpg »

bmitc wrote: post #161

I don’t understand a few things, as they aren’t covered in the article, that I saw. Were there no warnings for the severe weather storm that would have prevented people coming in to work or allowed them to leave work early? When I was working in the office, we were usually forced (literally security swept the building) to leave when severe winter weather was coming in a few times. Why doesn’t Amazon, in the middle of…

Those things all sound like they might decrease profits.

Re: Six dead after tornadoes destroy Amazon warehouse near St Louis

#177

Post by marricks »

rectang wrote: post #133

When there are Tornado Warnings in the area, are there any policies at big warehouses like this one (not just Amazon's others too) to take shelter? Is there enough time to get to a reinforced area? How long would staff have to stay in the reinforced area? Low probability, high consequence events are hard to plan for. Sad for all those who have died or are suffering in the wake of the storms.

Right? In a place called tornado alley who could have thought. If only a company like Amazon had some money to spare to figure local risks and plan to protect their people.

In fact, its amazing Amazon is seen as so reliable since they couldn't foresee something like a Tornado in Tornado Alley killing their workers and disrupting business.

You imagine a company which couldn't factor in that sort of risk goes out of business from a sea of missed deliveries.

Re: Six dead after tornadoes destroy Amazon warehouse near St Louis

#178

Post by wenc »

jjtheblunt wrote: post #137
coryrc wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Point me to a warehouse currently built in the US that would survive this.

https://www.steelmasterusa.com/quonset-huts/disaster-resista... In particular, the hundred-ish year old design called a Quonset Hut is partly designed for this wind-deflecting purpose.

It's an interesting idea, but I wonder about that. The largest Quonset hut ever built was 54,000 sq ft [1]. The Amazon facility was 1.167 million sq ft.

At that square footage, the semi-circle arc (which is its main wind-deflecting feature) would have to be gigantically tall. It doesn't sound like a feasible geometry at that scale.

[1] http://varnumcontinentals.org/2016/04/the-quonset-hut-a-rhod...

Re: Six dead after tornadoes destroy Amazon warehouse near St Louis

#179

Post by wglb »

w0mbat wrote: post #57

Mods - this truncated headline makes no sense, which is awful with such a serious story. It should be rephrased to: "6 Amazon workers killed after tornadoes destroy warehouse near St. Louis".

Best way to reach mods is via email. Quite responsive

Re: Six dead after tornadoes destroy Amazon warehouse near St Louis

#180

Post by seanmcdirmid »

thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #27
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you post some citation for these allegations? Maybe this is being widely reported and I've just missed it, but I'm not aware of positive evidence for the allegations you've made.

Not specific to this situation, but workers were pissed when Amazon expected them to come in during Hurricane Ida, resulting in 14 deaths, so it's not out of the realm of possibility here. https://gizmodo.com/new-york-amazon-employees-had-to-work-du...

You should learn to read titles better or actually read the article a bit before making conclusions like this. I know it’s difficult, media will often use adjacency to imply something just as a form of click bate, but the reality is much less exciting. In this case, the deaths were not related to Amazon, just Amazon not closing down when deaths were occurring in the area.
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