No one at the controls in New London
On the afternoon of Jan. 30, 2014, when 59-year-old Floyd Smeeton arrived at the New London transfer station with a neighbor's couch in the back of his Toyota pickup truck, he was directed at the front gate, the weigh station, to drive on in to the compactor area.
"Be careful, the blade (inside the compactor) is running," the city public works employee running the transfer station that day told police he called out to Smeeton, as the city resident drove off unescorted to dump the couch.
That employee, the crew leader in charge of the station that day, has a history of discipline related to medical or drug and alcohol issues, city personnel records show.
The next customers arriving at the transfer station, contractors there to empty a truck, found Smeeton inside the compactor, crushed and surrounded by garbage, as the machine was still running.
Smeeton's pickup truck was parked inside the safety gates around the compactor, which were wide open, according to a police report, wedged open on one side, a safety wheel missing. The contractor control booth was unmanned — no one was there to shut off the machine.
The pavement where Smeeton's truck was parked, next to the rim of the compactor pit, was surrounded by slippery wet garbage, police said.
The city was later fined $10,800 by the Connecticut Department of Labor's Division of Occupational Safety and Health for "willful" safety violations at the compactor site. A lawsuit over the death is pending.
No one was ever disciplined for what went wrong that day.
And yet the Smeeton death was just the latest incident in a long history of dysfunction within the city's public works department and transfer station. No one should have thought things there were running smoothly.
The first major scandal within the department broke in 1990, with a federal investigation by the U.S. Attorney's Office and the FBI into possible kickbacks, bribes and bid-rigging.
By the time a 1994 FBI report implicated the public works director and superintendents, two had retired and the third had been laid off.
Fast forward to 2007, when the New London city manager hired outside investigators to again look into problems in the department.
A scathing report found poor management, favoritism and nepotism, on-the-job drug use and misuse of city equipment and materials.
After interviewing 34 of the department's 57 employees, investigators reported workers indicated there was "no structure within management." Morale was abysmal.
Employees complained of managers and supervisors who appeared to be unqualified for their positions and who allegedly favored certain employees for better jobs. Investigators said "sick time is used for everything but actual sick time."
Overtime was unfairly distributed, employees said, and there were irregularities in overtime records, the report said.
Certain members of the department "smoke marijuana on a regular basis during work hours," the report said. Employees routinely disappeared from work and used city equipment for personal business.
The city subsequently reorganized the department. One supervisor retired and the public works director later resigned, citing health reasons. No one was ever fired.
In the middle of the city response to the public works debacle then was Brian Estep, a city attorney, who, these many years later, is still involved in dealing with public works dysfunction as the city fends off the Smeeton lawsuit.
Things certainly had to improve, under the stewardship of a new public works director named in 2008.
Still, a few years later, in 2010, CONN-OSHA levied a set of fines for safety violations at the transfer station.
"With reasonable diligence the employer should have known of the condition," CONN-OSHA said in its report then.
The unresolved problems from 2010 is the reason why the fines after the Smeeton death were so heavy, because necessary changes were never made.
Not only were required safety improvements not made, but management remained the same. Bill Watkins, the head of the local municipal employees union who was in charge of solid waste and the transfer station in 2010 when the first violations were found, was still in charge when Smeeton was killed and the big new fines were levied.
The employee in charge of the compactor the day Smeeton was killed, a worker directly under Watkin's supervision, was terminated in 2005 after losing his commercial driver's license. He was rehired in 2006, with an agreement that he complete counseling related to substance abuse.
He was out of work for an extended period of time a few years later but was allowed to return to work, not driving a city vehicle, in April 2008, provided he would "regularly pass any and all follow-up random or reasonable suspicion testing," according to personnel records.
He was charged with operating a motor vehicle under the influence of alcohol or drugs in October of that year, according to state criminal records.
Just last month, long after Smeeton's death, the same worker who directed the city resident looking to dump a couch to the running compactor was disciplined with a written warning for failing to report an accident in which he allegedly struck a city vehicle with a backhoe.
Given the loss of loss of life, and the skyrocketing liability costs for the city due to what appears to be gross mismanagement, someone should insist that Mayor Daryl Finizio explain why no one was disciplined after Floyd Smeeton fell to his death Jan. 20, 2014, despite all the warning sirens that had been sounding long before that.
Neither the transfer station employee who waved the city resident on to his death, nor the solid waste manager, the union president who knew the history of safety violations at the station, were disciplined.
Nothing happened either to the director of public works, who was put in charge of that important city department by the mayor despite not having any experience at all in public works.
Maybe the buck will stop with the mayor?
This is the opinion of David Collins
d.collins@theday.com
Twitter: DavidCollinsct
Comment threads are monitored for 48 hours after publication and then closed.