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Six dead after tornadoes destroy Amazon warehouse near St Louis
- markdown 5y ago> Amazon did not have an exact count of the number of people working in the sorting and delivery center at the time the tornadoes hit, Whiteford said. WTF? Do they record attendance on paper?
- jessaustin 5y agoUsually they're bragging about how everyone is tracked relentlessly so they can penalize people for taking longer than 38 seconds to piss. It does seem unlikely that such a system could function without knowing how many people are working at any particular time.
- noah_buddy 5y ago*"reduce to rubble" or "destroys" How tragic, I feel awful for their families and so close to the holidays. :(
- JadeNB 5y agoIt looks like the title just got truncated by the HN mangler; the original has "to rubble" (as genocidicbunny points out at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29525689 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29525689).
- throwawyag 5y agopoverty is one hell of an issue in the us. it boggles the mind how people live in such brittle homes and yet nothing changes. perhaps just like with covid “prayers” and “thoughts” are all the future dead will be given by the “freedom loving” society?
- MattGaiser 5y agoThese workers were killed in a warehouse, not their homes.
- sillysaurusx 5y agoI slept through three tornado sirens last night. It was pretty wild. The first one, I thought it was a test. (We have tests every month on the 1st.) But it wasn't until a few minutes in that I realized it was for real. Then apparently I just... went to sleep? That wasn't the smartest decision I've ever made. It went off a couple more times. One strange thing was the realization that I had no idea where to turn for information. The fall of TV means that in a situation like that, there isn't any "tune to your local TV station" type broadcast. All you get is a tornado siren. I imagine if nuclear armageddon ever happens, it'll be similar. Though at least with that, there'll be some information channel to turn to.
- oatz 5y agoYou can use your phone as an FM/AM radio receiver. Tune to your local station.
- driverdan 5y agoI downvoted you because very few phones have AM and/or FM receivers. I've never owned a phone with one. None of the most popular phones have had them.
- hereforphone 5y agoI assume you're talking about streaming the station over the Internet
- hutzlibu 5y agoNo he or she is not, a radio receiver is not such a high tech after all and I think all of my mobile phones had or have that feature build in, even though I never used it (in some you would have to have earphones plugged in as a antenna)
- thepasswordis 5y agoDo you live in the American Midwest?
- loonster 5y agohttps://patch.com/illinois/chicago/tornado-hits-southern-il-amazon-center-workers-trapped-reports https://patch.com/illinois/chicago/tornado-hits-southern-il-... EF-3 tornado: 136-165 mph
- genocidicbunny 5y agoUnfortunate that the title got cut off: "Six Amazon workers killed after tornadoes reduce warehouse near St. Louis to rubble" But the bigger story here is that despite multiple warnings of dangerous weather, the workers at this warehouse still ended up having to choose between risking their life or being fired/written up for refusing to come in. They didn't feel like they had the power to say "No, I won't work because its too dangerous" and some of that paid for that with their lives. Everyone responsible for that decision should be prosecuted criminally for each of those deaths.
- fastball 5y ago> They didn't feel like they had the power to say You definitely don't know this. Please don't speak to the mindset of people that just died when you have no idea.
- thr0wawayf00 5y ago14 people died at an Amazon facility when they were asked to work during Hurricane Ida, why does this theory seem so far-fetched to you? https://gizmodo.com/new-york-amazon-employees-had-to-work-during-deadly-flo-1847606546 https://gizmodo.com/new-york-amazon-employees-had-to-work-du...
- asdfasgasdgasdg 5y agoYou posted this elsewhere in the thread but I just want to clarify here as well. 14 people in the whole new York area were killed. No Amazon workers.
- syshum 5y agobecause tornado;s are not hurricane, and you literally only get a few minutes notice... not days like you do with a hurricane Unless you think every business should shut down every time there is a tornado watch issued, which hell they issue those like candy the entirety of spring and summer around here we would never get anything done if we shut down for every tornado watch
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- suqiifkfkg 5y agoAre Amazon workers somehow special that they get upvoted on HN. What a bizarre, bizarre society we're living in.
- anon84827820 5y agobig tech bad!
- black_13 5y agoSo someone is more deserving? You tell us who.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- bamboozled 5y agoIt’s got to do with “tech” apparently.
- StevePerkins 5y agoThere are five sure paths to the HN front page: 1. Material about Big Tech being evil. 2. Material about how to get hired in Big Tech. 3. "_______ written in Rust". 4. Cities good, cars bad, Elon's good. 5. Typography.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago>3. Cities good, cars bad (except Elon's). And Toyota, they can't do any wrong either. Brands that tend to have lots of mind share among the well do to white collar demographics tend to get a free pass around here (generally, not specific to cars or anything else)
- azth 5y agoAlso, rewriting service N in golang.
- ahefner 5y agoAlso random old lisp stuff.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- kello 5y agoNo 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.
- gentleman11 5y agoAmazon 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 system to squeeze more work out of people
- markdown 5y agoIn my country the government pays our workers comp immediately (like, days or weeks), no questions asked.
- w0mbat 5y agoMods - 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".
- wglb 5y agoBest way to reach mods is via email. Quite responsive
- cesarb 5y agoFor future reference, the current headline is "Six Amazon workers killed after tornadoes reduce warehouse near St. Louis", which makes one wonder whether it was a tornado or some sort of shrink ray.
- jagged-chisel 5y ago"Reduced to rubble" is familiar enough to me to get the gist. I did think it an odd choice, but had no problem understanding. I mean, I'm not aware of any current shrink ray technology...
- Dylan16807 5y ago"to rubble" is a reasonable guess but chopping off a piece of the building is also a plausible interpretation. And actually, looking at the right images, that might be more the more accurate interpretation. It seems like the warehouse was big enough that half of it is intact.
- fraXis 5y agoWhen is the character limit on HN going to be increased so we can create longer subjects/headlines?
- dang 5y agoWe're not going to do that, for a bunch of reasons. One is that it's a creative constraint which (after 15 years I think we can say) is always possible to work within. Another is that if we made it longer, people would soon experience the new length as a constraint in its own right.
- gerdesj 5y ago"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.
- fosk 5y agoI wonder why they haven't compartmentalized the wall in such a way that in case of structural failure only individual sections will potentially collapse, not the whole thing.
- blamazon 5y agoLook at the photos—the panels that make up the exterior wall are segmented into narrow vertical strips. There’s not much you can do about a direct hit across all the cells.
- WalterBright 5y agoCompartmentalization doesn't work when the iceberg slices them all open.
- lotsofpulp 5y agoMost likely the cost benefit ratio is too high.
- stohk 5y agoThis type of warehouse building is extremely pervasive right now. Having worked in an amazon facility and several other 'modern' warehouses, they all share the same design. It's prefabbed concrete sections held in place by steel support columns. Steel truss structure holding roof with steel I-beams providing support to roof. Any modern warehouse struck by the same inclement weather will suffer the same exact fate. Will add that the weather affecting this particular facility was extreme by any measure but most facilities that occupy the tornado alley should seriously consider this. My facility had a shelter in place policy in case of inclement weather which basically means, everyone(800-1k people?) huddle into 4, 6 person bathrooms. Amazon Leased the building I worked in, so kind of removes them from blame of structural failure, but maybe not he decision to occupy the building during known severe weather.
- blamazon 5y agoThe photos of the aftermath are shocking. More than half of the building is completely demolished. Exterior walls flattened. Vans are draped with 30 foot concrete panels. The roof is everywhere. A ruined skeleton of support columns and trusses towers ominously above the wreckage. I can only imagine the terror of witnessing this devastation unfold around your person. Aside - check out the difference in the photos from last night to today. The emergency response has cleared out an incredible amount of rubble.
- throwaway3337 5y agoTo this day i fail to understand how americans live in such low quality housing and yet are surprised each year a tornado comes. Sure one feels “richer” when paying no health care and living in cheap homes but it boggles the mind how this can be the norm. As a european i simply cant understand how such poverty became normalised and even more, celebrated, in “the richest country in the known universe”.
- rectang 5y agoWhen 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.
- marricks 5y agoRight? 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.
- gammarator 5y agoSt. Louis gets tornadoes, but it is not in tornado alley.
- pigbearpig 5y agoYeah, probably not what most people think of as Tornado alley, but it’s pretty loosely defined. Just about anywhere east of the Rockies should be prepared for tornadoes.
- jfrunyon 5y agoIt absolutely is. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a9/Tornado_Alley.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a9/Tornado_...
- dave78 5y agoThat map is not showing "tornado alley", this one is (from the same Wikipedia article): https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/43/Tornado_Alley_Diagram.svg/1280px-Tornado_Alley_Diagram.svg.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/43/To... Note that there's no formal definition, but most people would not consider Missouri/Illinois to be "in" tornado alley, despite regular tornadic activity.
- bmitc 5y agoI 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 Tornado Alley, have tornado shelters for its employees? Employees should not be having to run around finding places to hide. There should be designated shelters.
- floatingatoll 5y agoAmazon 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.
- asteroidbelt 5y ago> unless something changes People will be replaced by robots, this is what will change. It is already happening. McDonalds is canonical example of that.
- Hokusai 5y agoThat is there best argument to fight now for good conditions, the more robots in the future the less leverage to negotiate. On a second note, if robots replace humans. Who is going to buy products? Because humans without jobs do not have money. Why have warehouses if nobody can but anything? That hypothetical future were robots replace workers is way more complicated that many people thinks.
- asteroidbelt 5y ago
- stavros 5y agoWhy were they forced to work during a tornado?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- crossroadsguy 5y agoProbably for the same reason they’re not allowed to take bathroom breaks.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- adrr 5y agoAssuming they had no reinforced structure to shelter in. What would they do to prevent injuries and deaths.
- wglb 5y agoWho the heck schedules tornados in December ? What a disaster.
- DantesKite 5y agoWhat’s crazy is how at least 70 people have died in other states. A bunch of tornadoes happened at around the same time. It caught everybody by surprise.
- GavinMcG 5y agoIt shouldn't have been that much of a surprise. As of Thursday morning, the Storm Prediction Center had identified the threat: > Severe thunderstorms capable of producing several tornadoes and scattered to numerous damaging winds appear probable from mainly Friday evening into Friday night across parts of the lower/mid Mississippi Valley into the lower Ohio Valley and Tennessee Valley. Some of these nocturnal tornadoes may be strong. https://www.spc.noaa.gov/products/outlook/archive/2021/day2otlk_20211209_0700.html https://www.spc.noaa.gov/products/outlook/archive/2021/day2o...
- jfrunyon 5y agoUnfortunately, this will cost Amazon significantly less than if they were to... you know... have well-constructed buildings, and severe weather plans, etc. Businesses are responsible for the physical welfare of their employees when they require their employees to be on the business premises. But until the cost of not ensuring their safety exceeds the cost of occasional death or injury, this will keep happening. It's not the first time severe weather has killed multiple people in a warehouse (this year, or probably even this month), and it won't be the last until we demand change.
- itsjustme2 5y agoWe stayed in the basement after the sirens started, and followed it on the weather radar. We got notifications on the phone, and kids were dismissed from evening activities early. Pretty rare to get this type of weather this time of year.
- dhosek 5y agoI find it interesting that no one seems to be talking about the fact that we're having deadly tornadoes in December. This is not normal, especially if this was a multiple tornado event, but even one really big one would be way out of the ordinary. Maybe it's my northern Illinois upbringing, but tornadoes this time of year seems way unlikely.
- danans 5y agoIt's pretty shocking. I found this paper which mentions the following, most of which I don't understand: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212094717300956 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221209471... "Recent work has determined that peak, or maximum, tornado activity in the Great Plains has shifted earlier in the year by an average of 7 days (Long and Stoy, 2014) and 12–13 days (Lu et al., 2015) relative to the 1950s. Observed shifts in the seasonality in the Great Plains are accompanied by corresponding trends in convective available potential energy (CAPE) and the fourth power of storm relative helicity (SRH4), as well as their interaction, CAPE × SRH4 (Lu et al., 2015)." The CAPE measurement above, which seems to be a measure of fuel availability for thunderstorms, is apparently predicted to rise with global heating: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2020JCli...33.2025C/abstract https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2020JCli...33.2025C/abstra...
- jptech 5y ago> It was unclear how many workers were still missing, as Amazon did not have an exact count of people working in the sorting and delivery center at the time the tornadoes hit, Whiteford said. I find this hard to accept. They keep track of workers' productivity by the second, but they don't know how many were working there at that time??
- axiolite 5y ago> They keep track of workers' productivity by the second, but they don't know how many were working there at that time?? I'd say there's a good chance their on-site computer systems that keep track of employees and their productivity happen to also be out of commission ATM.
- WillJS 5y agoThey’re not accessible via and/or redundant to the cloud? Shame they’re not aware of a company that provides that type of service.
- kome 5y agoThis is bullshit indeed. Amazon is terrible.
- bagacrap 5y agoI mean the real question is how many people are in the premises. How can they know how many people stopped in the bathroom after clocking out? They don't have an exact count but I'm sure there's some estimate.