Safety around vats of chocolate
13/02/23 00:53
At church camp we used to sing a silly song about the great Chicago Fire:
Late last night when folks were all in bed
Mrs. O’Leary took a lantern to the shed
And when the cow kicked it over
This is what she said,
“There’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight.”
At that point, we would interrupt the singing with loud yelling and tell the campers that we know that the song calls for yelling “Fire! fire! fire!” next, but this cannot be done at camp! We reminded the campers that our camp was on land that was leased from the USDA Forest Service and that we were required to be responsible in our use of federal land and that surely we should never, never yell “Fire!” unless there was an actual fire. Fire is serious business and we should never make lightly of it or pretend that there is a fire in the forest when there is no fire. Sometimes, if we had enough time, we would take a rhetorical side trip into the story of the little boy who cried “Wolf!” and the dangers of raising a false alarm. Then we would ask the campers if they knew what to do if they were to fall into a vat of chocolate. The answer is that if you fall into a vat of chocolate, you are supposed to yell, “Fire!” because no one would come to your rescue if you yelled “Chocolate!” Therefore, at camp, our tradition was to sing the song about Mrs. O’Leary’s cow with a different refrain:
Late last night when folks were all in bed
Mrs. O’Leary took a lantern to the shed
And when the cow kicked it over
This is what she said,
“There’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight.”
Chocolate! Chocolate! Chocolate!
We would continue to sing the song as a 3-part round with great gusto and much yelling of “Chocolate! Chocolate! Chocolate!” It was great fun and games.
But fun and games can sometimes turn serious. Just a few hours ago, BBC news reported that the United States Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has fined the Mars Wrigley factory in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, $14,500 for safety violations related to an incident when part time independent contractors working at the candy company’s factory last June did fall into a vat of chocolate.
According to the news story, more than two dozen rescuers responded. One worker was transported to the hospital in a helicopter. The official OSHA report labeled the incident “serious,” stating that the workers were hired to clean chocolate tanks and were not provided with proper safety training. The report noted that the workers feel into a batching tank - a tank used to mix ingredients - for Dove chocolate. I admit I haven’t been keeping up with all of the news about the merger of Mars and Wrigley in 2008, so I didn’t know that the same factory that produces M&Ms, Snickers, and Twix, also produces Dove chocolates. I didn’t even know that they had a factory in Elizabethtown. I guess Pennsylvania is a place where they take their chocolate seriously. I know that the Hershey Company has a plant in the town that bears their company name in Pennsylvania. My sister once worked briefly as a contract worker at the Hershey plant when she was part of a team of workers at Emerson Electronics Company that installed energy management systems in large production facilities. Her team was making sure that the software code was written correctly and functioned the way planned. She said that there is a cooling tower on the roof of the chocolate factory from which you can see the old 3-Mile Island nuclear plant that was shut down due to a partial meltdown in March of 1979. There was a 64 percent increase of reported cancer cases in the years following the incident. When my sister was working at the Hershey plant in the early 1980’s and told me she could see 3-mile Island from the roof of the Hershey plant, I had visions of legions of US teenagers with pimples that glow in the dark.
No such pimples were ever reported. I digress. I cannot find any mention in the BBC article about the workers falling into a vat of chocolate that tells whether or not they yelled, “Fire!”
Because we also have our attention drawn to the unfolding tragedy in Turkey and Syria in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake, I was reminded of another incident in 2015, when a Syrian refugee, trying to make his way from a ramshackle refugee camp in the woods outside of Calais to the United Kingdom. It was the refugee’s 18th attempt to flee the camp. This time he stowed away in truck bound for the UK. There were 25 refugees who were split into groups and tried to sneak on board trucks parked near a train station. The tallest of the refugees were directed to sneak to the top of a tank truck and crawl into the tank where they would not be detected when the truck was loaded onto the train for the crossing of the Channel in the tunnel. The migrant smuggler cut the cables securing the hatch on the tanker and a total of seven refugees lowered themselves into the tank, which was full of heated liquid chocolate. “It was a freezing night outside, and when we first climbed down into the warm chocolate it was a really good feeling,” the Syrian refugee reported. But at over 6 feet tall, he could not touch the bottom of the tank. The refugees had to hold onto the rim of the tank while holding onto each other and the heat was much worse than they expected. The wait was too long and the refugees had to help one another out of the tank. “The last guy struggled the most because there was no one to push him up. We were all pulling, but he was getting sucked back down by the chocolate. He had to kick his shoes off to get out. They got left behind.” The report goes on to say that they walked back to the camp and their tent covered in chocolate, licking at it all the way back. But no one yelled “Fire!.”
The story of the workers in the vat in Pennsylvania and the other about refugees trying to cross the English Channel both give good reason for more children to attend church camp. If only those victims had learned the song. . .
Late last night when folks were all in bed
Mrs. O’Leary took a lantern to the shed
And when the cow kicked it over
This is what she said,
“There’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight.”
At that point, we would interrupt the singing with loud yelling and tell the campers that we know that the song calls for yelling “Fire! fire! fire!” next, but this cannot be done at camp! We reminded the campers that our camp was on land that was leased from the USDA Forest Service and that we were required to be responsible in our use of federal land and that surely we should never, never yell “Fire!” unless there was an actual fire. Fire is serious business and we should never make lightly of it or pretend that there is a fire in the forest when there is no fire. Sometimes, if we had enough time, we would take a rhetorical side trip into the story of the little boy who cried “Wolf!” and the dangers of raising a false alarm. Then we would ask the campers if they knew what to do if they were to fall into a vat of chocolate. The answer is that if you fall into a vat of chocolate, you are supposed to yell, “Fire!” because no one would come to your rescue if you yelled “Chocolate!” Therefore, at camp, our tradition was to sing the song about Mrs. O’Leary’s cow with a different refrain:
Late last night when folks were all in bed
Mrs. O’Leary took a lantern to the shed
And when the cow kicked it over
This is what she said,
“There’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight.”
Chocolate! Chocolate! Chocolate!
We would continue to sing the song as a 3-part round with great gusto and much yelling of “Chocolate! Chocolate! Chocolate!” It was great fun and games.
But fun and games can sometimes turn serious. Just a few hours ago, BBC news reported that the United States Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has fined the Mars Wrigley factory in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, $14,500 for safety violations related to an incident when part time independent contractors working at the candy company’s factory last June did fall into a vat of chocolate.
According to the news story, more than two dozen rescuers responded. One worker was transported to the hospital in a helicopter. The official OSHA report labeled the incident “serious,” stating that the workers were hired to clean chocolate tanks and were not provided with proper safety training. The report noted that the workers feel into a batching tank - a tank used to mix ingredients - for Dove chocolate. I admit I haven’t been keeping up with all of the news about the merger of Mars and Wrigley in 2008, so I didn’t know that the same factory that produces M&Ms, Snickers, and Twix, also produces Dove chocolates. I didn’t even know that they had a factory in Elizabethtown. I guess Pennsylvania is a place where they take their chocolate seriously. I know that the Hershey Company has a plant in the town that bears their company name in Pennsylvania. My sister once worked briefly as a contract worker at the Hershey plant when she was part of a team of workers at Emerson Electronics Company that installed energy management systems in large production facilities. Her team was making sure that the software code was written correctly and functioned the way planned. She said that there is a cooling tower on the roof of the chocolate factory from which you can see the old 3-Mile Island nuclear plant that was shut down due to a partial meltdown in March of 1979. There was a 64 percent increase of reported cancer cases in the years following the incident. When my sister was working at the Hershey plant in the early 1980’s and told me she could see 3-mile Island from the roof of the Hershey plant, I had visions of legions of US teenagers with pimples that glow in the dark.
No such pimples were ever reported. I digress. I cannot find any mention in the BBC article about the workers falling into a vat of chocolate that tells whether or not they yelled, “Fire!”
Because we also have our attention drawn to the unfolding tragedy in Turkey and Syria in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake, I was reminded of another incident in 2015, when a Syrian refugee, trying to make his way from a ramshackle refugee camp in the woods outside of Calais to the United Kingdom. It was the refugee’s 18th attempt to flee the camp. This time he stowed away in truck bound for the UK. There were 25 refugees who were split into groups and tried to sneak on board trucks parked near a train station. The tallest of the refugees were directed to sneak to the top of a tank truck and crawl into the tank where they would not be detected when the truck was loaded onto the train for the crossing of the Channel in the tunnel. The migrant smuggler cut the cables securing the hatch on the tanker and a total of seven refugees lowered themselves into the tank, which was full of heated liquid chocolate. “It was a freezing night outside, and when we first climbed down into the warm chocolate it was a really good feeling,” the Syrian refugee reported. But at over 6 feet tall, he could not touch the bottom of the tank. The refugees had to hold onto the rim of the tank while holding onto each other and the heat was much worse than they expected. The wait was too long and the refugees had to help one another out of the tank. “The last guy struggled the most because there was no one to push him up. We were all pulling, but he was getting sucked back down by the chocolate. He had to kick his shoes off to get out. They got left behind.” The report goes on to say that they walked back to the camp and their tent covered in chocolate, licking at it all the way back. But no one yelled “Fire!.”
The story of the workers in the vat in Pennsylvania and the other about refugees trying to cross the English Channel both give good reason for more children to attend church camp. If only those victims had learned the song. . .
