PHENIX CITY, ALA.
The police lieutenant sounded unnerved as he stepped inside the old lumber mill. The power was off. The giant saws were quiet. But the smell of fresh sawdust still hung in the humid summer air. In the darkened factory, sunlight streamed through jagged holes in the rusted metal walls as Lt. Marc Cutt walked across a machine that turned logs into lumber.
“Has it been rendered safe?” Cutt asked another police officer as his body camera recorded the scene.
“Safe is a relative term in this place,” the officer responded.
The police knew this place well. So did federal safety inspectors.
At Phenix Lumber Co., workers had lost fingers, broken bones and been mangled by machines — at least 28 employees had reported injuries since 2010, at a company with only about 50 people on the payroll at a time. Three had died. A medical examiner’s report detailed how just 23 pounds of one employee was recovered after he was caught in a machine. It had reached the point, some former workers said, that they would pray before the start of their $9-an-hour shifts.
Phenix Lumber was the deadliest workplace in America over the past five years. No other office or factory posted a higher rate of work-related fatal incidents per worker, according to a Washington Post analysis of Occupational Safety and Health Administration fatality reports since 2019. The analysis examined deaths by workplace location, rather than by company, using OSHA data on fatalities investigated by the agency, which generally does not cover small farms or federal workers.
OSHA is tasked with ensuring that American work environments are safe. “There’s no way to characterize the history at this workplace as acceptable,” the agency said in a statement.
The story of Phenix Lumber — drawn from thousands of previously undisclosed documents and recordings obtained by The Post, along with interviews with officials and former workers and managers — shows the limits of OSHA’s powers. It cannot shut down companies even after years of repeated violations and penalties, even when workers die. It even lacks the power to ask a judge to do so.
It can request a shutdown from the court only in rare cases of “imminent danger,” such as a looming roof collapse. Causing the death of a worker by willfully violating safety rules is a misdemeanor under federal law. The maximum sentence is six months in prison, less than the penalty for killing an endangered animal. In the past five years, OSHA sent fewer than 50 cases to the Justice Department for a criminal review, records show, and it’s unclear how many of those were prosecuted.
The agency tried “to use all of the resources we have, all the tools we have” in its pursuit of the lumber mill, said Jim Frederick, who was the No. 2 official at OSHA and a deputy assistant secretary at the Labor Department until January.
Since at least 2003, federal safety inspectors have fined the company nearly $5.3 million. They issued more than 180 citations for health and safety violations, accusing the company of knowingly ignoring workers’ safety “for monetary gain.” A quarter of the violations were deemed “willful,” the most severe category. Phenix Lumber workers told inspectors that they were routinely instructed to put their hands into the jaws of stuck machines to clear jams — without first cutting the power, a clear hazard. And the machines were in such bad shape that they regularly broke down.
OSHA twice forced the company into a program for what regulators deemed “the worst of the worst employers.”
“This must stop,” they repeatedly warned the mill’s owners — one of the wealthiest families in eastern Alabama.
But nothing ever seemed to stop Phenix Lumber. It kept churning out millions of board feet of southern yellow pine for the construction industry from its sawdust-covered valley on the edge of town.
Now, in August 2023, the two police officers reached a red tarp covering a doorway, according to body-cam footage. One of them pulled the tarp aside and pointed. Just below a small balcony stood an auger — a giant metal corkscrew set in an open-faced chute to move wood chips. An hour earlier, James Streetman, a 67-year-old maintenance supervisor, had fallen in while the auger was spinning. Or the auger had unexpectedly kicked on as he stepped across it. No one yet knew. Streetman’s spine was shredded, liver ejected, heart never found, according to an autopsy.
An attorney for the lumber mill said in a court filing after Streetman’s death that his “negligence proximately contributed to cause the accident resulting in his death.” The company has rejected accusations of wrongdoing in court filings. The Dudley family and a top manager all declined to comment through representatives or did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
But change was finally coming for Phenix Lumber. It would just have nothing to do with federal safety regulators.
Of all his companies, John Menza Dudley loved Phenix Lumber the most.
“I come here at 7 a.m. and leave at 5 p.m. every day,” he once told OSHA investigators.
He didn’t need to. Johnny Dudley, as most people knew him, was one of Alabama’s largest private landowners, according to interviews and real estate records. He developed subdivisions. He owned a local bank.
But Dudley seemed to love the lumber mill he’d bought in the early 1960s, when he was just 23. It had a sawmill, a planer mill and a boiler to dry out the wood.
Dudley was one of those old-timers who “had sawdust in their veins,” said Jerry Schwarzauer, a former longtime manager. “It was his one passion.”
He was so closely tied to the mill that some in town called it Dudley Lumber.
For years, Phenix Lumber had a reputation as a place to land a quick job, former workers said. The work was hard and hot. It was dangerous.
“Folks say y’all crazy as hell working up there,” said David Lee, who worked at the mill for years. But it was a job with a steady paycheck.
There was a constant stream of new faces — so many that managers often didn’t know their names or exactly what their jobs were, according to OSHA reports and interviews. Workers were fired quickly. New hires arrived just as fast, mostly by word of mouth and sometimes just out of jail, former employees said.
Phenix Lumber was always “a little bit slack” about safety, said Schwarzauer, the former manager. He said that he would argue with workers all the time about “simple things” like wearing required hard hats and safety glasses, but that “the other supervisors didn’t care about that stuff.”
Safety guards, which protect workers from getting entangled in equipment, were left off machines, according to inspection reports and interviews. Tools were left on the ground. These were the types of safety lapses that inspectors noted.
The mill was also in poor condition. OSHA officials noted repeatedly that the facility was “in a state of significant disrepair” and that “virtually no preventative maintenance is performed.” This contributed to machines breaking and jamming, and workers getting hurt trying to fix them.
OSHA considers working in a sawmill “one of the most dangerous occupations.” Heavy logs and giant saws pose constant threats, leading to the development of the kinds of protocols OSHA found lacking at Phenix. There are only about 1,900 OSHA and state workplace safety inspectors in the United States, so they can’t inspect each of the nation’s more than 8 million workplaces. But OSHA started making almost yearly visits to Phenix Lumber two decades ago after a mix of safety complaints and injury reports.
Safety investigators seemed stunned by the company’s repeated refusal to follow “lock out, tag out” procedures for maintenance and repairs. Before workers try to fix a machine, safety protocols require them to turn it off and secure the power source with a personal lock so it can’t be accidentally turned back on. It’s a common industrial practice. OSHA says it prevents 120 deaths and 50,000 injuries annually.
In 2009, under pressure from OSHA, Dudley agreed to hire the mill’s first safety consultant, according to agency records.
Months later, a worker was killed.
Doug Broadwater was Dudley’s right-hand man. He had worked at the mill since 1999, running the planer mill and eventually the entire plant.
In May 2010, Broadwater gathered three workers to help him replace a burned-out motor, according to OSHA reports and interviews. The mill couldn’t run without it and had been shut down for two hours.
Workers had removed the old motor and now they needed to install the new one, which weighed more than 500 pounds. It was a tricky job. Broadwater drove a forklift with a chain wrapped around a metal boom to drop the motor into place. He struggled to see where it was going. The workers yelled and flashed hand signs to guide him. Raise the forks, he said they told him. He tried hitting the controls. Nothing. The forklift seemed stuck.
“Something is wrong,” Broadwater recalled telling them, according to OSHA records.
He lowered the boom as two workers tried to push the motor into place. Then the boom and motor “jumped up several inches,” crushing the head of a worker named Charles Mercer between the motor and a steel support beam, according to an OSHA investigation.
Mercer, 57, had worked at the mill on and off for years. Folks called him Muffie Dog. He walked over to sit on a plastic bucket as blood poured from his mouth and nose — his left eye shut, his cheek with a “pressed-down indentation,” according to Broadwater. Co-workers called for an ambulance.
“While we waited,” Broadwater later told investigators, “we finished the job of putting the motor in place.”
The mill was back in operation the next day.
Mercer lingered in the hospital for six days before he died.
OSHA cited the mill for a series of problems related to the death, including using an unapproved, jury-rigged hoist and allowing Mercer to stand under the lift’s forks. It also cited the company for dangers raised years earlier that were never fixed.
A week after Mercer’s funeral, a worker broke his back in a 10-foot fall through a hole in a platform while working on the debarking machine. Regulators said the mill failed to provide a safety harness that could have prevented the accident — despite a warning from OSHA.
The agency combined its inquiries into that incident and Mercer’s death, announcing the results via press release: “OSHA fines Alabama lumber company for violations following worker death.” The agency asked for a $439,400 fine for 53 citations.
The fine sounded significant, but OSHA’s penalties have remained the same since 1990, except for inflation adjustments. Even today, the top penalty OSHA can hand out for a willful violation is about $165,000 — less than half the maximum daily fine for a Clean Water Act violation. “Fines are higher for killing fish than killing workers,” said former OSHA administrator David Michaels, who served under Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.
OSHA’s enforcement powers have changed little since its creation in 1971, lagging behind those of other regulators. For instance, the Mine Safety and Health Administration can shut down an operation to protect workers’ lives. Efforts to give OSHA that power — along with other tools — have regularly been defeated in Congress amid fierce complaints from industry officials and conservative politicians about the agency’s “overreach and skewed priorities.”
Just last year, Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill held a hearing to showcase complaints about OSHA. Business groups also pushed to have the Supreme Court hear a case aimed at curtailing the agency’s powers. The justices ultimately declined to take it up, but Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in a dissent that OSHA’s creation “may be the broadest delegation of power to an administrative agency found in the United States Code.”
A couple of months after announcing the fine tied to Mercer’s death, the agency discovered that Phenix Lumber no longer had a safety consultant. Schwarzauer was given the duty.
“Nobody else wanted to do it,” he said.
He couldn’t keep up with the number of problems at the mill, he said.
Within months, various workers complained to OSHA that they were being forced by supervisors to clear jams with the power still on. OSHA opened another investigation. In early 2011, a worker needed 30 stitches in his hand after reaching into a jammed machine that suddenly turned back on.
The next day, just as an OSHA official arrived in Phenix City to investigate that injury, another worker lost a finger. He was trying to fix a jammed machine that lacked a safety guard, records show.
Phenix Lumber had been cited repeatedly for failing to follow the lockout procedures since 2007. Managers “intentionally disregarded” the requirements and “exhibited plain indifference” to the hazards, an agency administrative judge ruled in 2011.
“I don’t get involved in the lockout process,” Dudley told investigators shortly after the back-to-back worker injuries, according to an interview transcript. “I rely completely on my managers to do that for me.”
They didn’t always follow the rules, a manager named Donnie Holloway told investigators.
“Our job is to keep the mill running and not let the mill be down any longer than we have to,” he said, arguing that it required five steps to fix what he called a “two-second jam.”
“It would take just too long to do that,” Holloway said.
Broadwater tried to reassure OSHA, according to agency records. “Mr. Dudley is more concerned about safety now than in the past,” he said.
“I don’t know why Mr. Dudley didn’t take safety seriously before (now) other than production,” he continued. “That has always been his primary concern. He doesn’t like to see the mill down and not in production.”
Broadwater also blamed employees, saying that “they are lazy and don’t want to” follow the rules.
During a surprise OSHA visit to the mill in December 2010, investigators discovered managers distributing locks to workers. One worker reported that a manager had told him to “be sure to lock out the sorter (machine) because OSHA is here today.”
OSHA fined the company a little more than $1 million for more than a dozen violations, including 13 willful ones, for the continued problems with the lockout program.
In June 2011, OSHA issued a new press release that rolled together the two penalties that had been assessed months apart, announcing “more than $1.9 million in fines against Alabama lumber mill.”
Phenix Lumber appealed the fine, with Dudley pleading poverty, and several months later an administrative law judge reduced that headline-grabbing figure to $300,000 and gave him five years to make payments, court records show.
Later that year, OSHA added Phenix to the rolls of its then-new Severe Violator Enforcement Program, which publicized the names of companies that “have demonstrated indifference” to worker safety standards. The companies got three years of additional scrutiny and inspections.
Still, the mill’s workers kept getting hurt. In one particularly bad year, 2015, one worker suffered a head wound. Another broke his ankle. A worker broke his shin. Another was seriously burned.
The mill’s reputation among residents for dangerous conditions cast doubt on a worker’s fatality in early 2019. Kenneth Cotton Sr., 58, was found dead on a sawmill catwalk with a gash to his head.
“There were just so many accidents up there,” said his son, Kenneth Cotton Jr., who also had worked at the mill.
Russell County Coroner Arthur “PeeWee” Sumbry recalled struggling to tell whether Cotton Sr. had slipped or tripped: “Was it an accident or was it negligence?” An autopsy ruled that Cotton had succumbed to heart disease.
The next year, another worker died.
Brandon Lee Vandyke, 34, was the mill’s overnight maintenance man. His job was to make sure that the machines feeding wood chips into the boiler — which ran 24 hours a day — didn’t get jammed.
Vandyke, originally from Indiana, was working to get his life back on track after years of struggling to hold down a job. He was inspired by his young daughter, whose name, Braelynn, was tattooed across his chest.
“He was trying to start from the bottom and work his way up,” said his brother, Troy Vandyke.
Just before sunrise on May 27, 2020, a neighbor heard an alarm blaring from Phenix Lumber. The wood chips were no longer reaching the boiler. Vandyke usually responded within minutes. Worried, the neighbor walked over to the sawmill and looked for Vandyke near a giant wood-chip silo. The auger often jammed, forcing workers to climb inside and shovel the fuel into the boiler.
He looked inside the silo. He saw a disembodied arm.
Rescuers collected what they could of Vandyke’s remains, records show. Most of them were never found. He had suffered “multiple chopping injuries,” according to an autopsy.
In OSHA’s eyes, Vandyke’s death was part of a familiar pattern. He shouldn’t have been inside the silo alone, at night, without the power fully shut down, inspectors said. They noted years of citations issued to Phenix Lumber for failing to train workers and ignoring safety protocols. “These failures directly attributed to the fatal injuries suffered by Brandon Vandyke,” OSHA’s investigation found.
Phenix Lumber was fined more than $370,000.
After a short closure to make repairs following Vandyke’s death, the mill was back in business.
In August 2022, a few months after the fine was announced, Dudley died at age 85. Some former mill workers were shocked when a county commissioner later suggested honoring Dudley with a publicly funded statue.
The mill’s operations fell to Dudley’s daughter, Leslie Greene, according to interviews. His son, John Menza Dudley Jr., ran the local bank.
Broadwater continued to run the mill day-to-day, workers said.
David Weber started working at Phenix Lumber a few months after the elder Dudley died, in early 2023.
Weber had worked in construction and at a paper mill, and he was surprised by what he saw at Phenix Lumber.
“They never locked out, tagged out anything,” he said. No one used harnesses to prevent falls. Hard hats and safety glasses seemed optional. Machines kept breaking down.
He had seen giant circular saws break apart, sending metal shards to blow tiny holes in the mill’s metal walls, Weber said. Employees learned to duck when the saws let out a peculiar scream.
Weber, 28, worked in maintenance under Streetman, who was known as Jimbo. Weber said Streetman walked with a stiff gait, like he had a crick in his neck, but he was always smiling and talking about his young granddaughter.
In August 2023, on a sweltering summer afternoon, Weber was helping Streetman clear a jam from the sawmill’s wood chipper. The spinning metal fan crushed wood scraps into smaller chips, which were then moved by the auger up along the building.
Streetman suspected the problem was in a pipe higher up in the mill. He walked inside and over a catwalk to reach an elevated doorway, covered by a red tarp, that led to the balcony over the auger. Security camera footage shows the auger beginning to spin. Then an object moves out of the shadows and onto a platform alongside the spinning auger. It was a leg.
Weber, following minutes behind Streetman, remembered pulling the red tarp aside, stepping onto the balcony and looking into the auger. He ran inside shouting, hysterical.
“I just found somebody’s leg over here,” a co-worker told a 911 operator. “I don’t know where the rest of him is.”
Authorities swarmed the mill. One officer said the scene reminded him of the horror movie “Final Destination.” Another officer, Lt. Kristi Anglin, said just the smell of sawdust reminded her of Vandyke’s death three years earlier.
“There’s always someone dying here,” Anglin said.
Another police officer questioned Broadwater.
“Do you have any idea how this could’ve happened?”
“I do not,” Broadwater said, recorded on the officer’s body cam. “I can’t logically imagine why he stepped — he had to step over and he crawled over a handrail to start with to get out there.”
Weber and other workers knew why. They told investigators it was the only way to reach the pipe that often got clogged with wood chips, and it wasn’t unusual to make that maneuver. Workers also told police that the power was rarely locked out when they did it.
Usually, no one got hurt.
That day, the auger kicked back on.
A couple of hours later, after being interviewed by police, Weber ran into Broadwater at the mill.
“You coming back tomorrow?” Weber said Broadwater asked him.
Weber quit on the spot.
Several months after Streetman died, OSHA cited Phenix Lumber for 22 willful violations related to his death. It blasted the company for a “willful disregard for safety” and fined it nearly $2.5 million — among OSHA’s largest penalties for a single incident in a decade.
“This must stop,” said a senior OSHA official in a press release announcing the fine, echoing the same phrase the agency used in 2010 after Mercer’s death.
The Justice Department launched an investigation into both Vandyke’s and Streetman’s deaths, according to an August 2023 letter from a government attorney to the mill’s managers. A department spokesman declined to comment. Weber said he testified before a federal grand jury over the summer. The results of that inquiry have not been announced.
Phenix City police presented Streetman’s death to a local grand jury, which declined to indict anyone, said Russell County District Attorney Rick Chancey.
Phenix Lumber was free to operate after Streetman’s death. It didn’t need to make any changes while it appealed OSHA’s findings.
But it ran into an unexpected problem: city code officials.
Mayor Eddie Lowe said he struggled to understand how OSHA had allowed Phenix Lumber to stay open despite its years of problems. But when it came to the mill, “I stayed in my lane,” he said.
That changed after city firefighters responding to Streetman’s death noticed a plastic pipe hooked to a yellow fire hydrant on the property, according to city officials. The mill appeared to be illegally tapping city water.
A municipal investigation calculated that the mill owed Phenix City nearly $3.8 million in water and sewage fees — more than what Phenix Lumber had paid OSHA in fines over the years.
City officials then took a step federal regulators couldn’t: They issued a cease-and-desist order that immediately closed down Phenix Lumber. The lumber mill couldn’t reopen until the building and fire code problems — such as the lack of proper permits and a sprinkler system — were fixed and the city was paid for the allegedly stolen water.
Negotiations dragged on for weeks. In December, three months after Streetman’s death, the two sides clashed at a City Council meeting. Bill Finley, an attorney for the mill, said the city’s cease-and-desist letter was “not a pro-business decision.” He said Phenix Lumber had “hired folks that other folks won’t hire.” Now, those people would be out of work, and Christmas was right around the corner. If word got out about what city leaders did to Phenix Lumber, he said, he doubted other companies would come to town.
“I’m just going to be honest and frank,” Mayor Lowe said. “When it comes to safety, that has to be the number one thing for any council. And I’ve heard and seen some disturbing things, and for that reason, I can’t table it.”
The mayor and City Council voted unanimously to revoke Phenix Lumber’s business license.
The mill closed. Months passed. Dudley’s heirs fought over his estate in court. The legal cases against Phenix Lumber in the workers’ deaths slowly worked their way through the courts. In the meantime, Phenix City officials drove by the lumber mill to make sure the water was still off and no one was working.
Last month, Phenix Lumber filed for bankruptcy. The company painted a dire financial picture, with assets of less than $50,000 and liabilities of more than $50 million. That included $2.47 million in OSHA penalties in Streetman’s death and $3.78 million for its unpaid municipal water and sewer bill.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2025/osha-workplace-deaths-safety-sawmill/?pwapi_token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJyZWFzb24iOiJnaWZ0IiwibmJmIjoxNzM5NjgyMDAwLCJpc3MiOiJzdWJzY3JpcHRpb25zIiwiZXhwIjoxNzQxMDY0Mzk5LCJpYXQiOjE3Mzk2ODIwMDAsImp0aSI6Ijg4ZGU5ODg1LWRlYjctNDY3Mi1hZjE2LWFhZGQ5OTRiM2JmNSIsInVybCI6Imh0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lndhc2hpbmd0b25wb3N0LmNvbS9idXNpbmVzcy9pbnRlcmFjdGl2ZS8yMDI1L29zaGEtd29ya3BsYWNlLWRlYXRocy1zYWZldHktc2F3bWlsbC8ifQ.CueeN7OrwNtClM4_nuQXqOMDkTng0xzd8FicRKla8WI&itid=gfta
