Forestry firm confirms earlier crash

PORTLAND – Evergreen Forestry Services, the company that employed 14 migrant workers killed when their van veered off a remote bridge, confirmed Monday that another employee was injured two months earlier under similar circumstances.

Hugo Bonilla, a native of Honduras who now lives in Caribou, said Saturday that he quit his brush-cutting job with the Sandpoint, Idaho-based company after the July accident, partly because of safety concerns.

Andrew Ketterer, a Norridgewock lawyer hired by Evergreen, confirmed Monday that the firm’s president, Peter Smith, was aware of the earlier crash.

Bonilla was driving home from work in July when his Subaru station wagon hit a rut in the road and plunged off a bridge that did not have a guardrail, he said.

Bonilla injured his shoulder in the crash, but his two passengers were unhurt. Both passengers, Dionisio Funez-Diaz and Sebastian Garcia-Garcia, drowned two months later when their van went off John’s Bridge, a larger bridge that also did not have a guardrail, into the Allagash Wilderness Waterway. Excessive speed was blamed in that crash.

In 1998, two Mexican laborers employed by another company were killed in northern Maine when their van went out of control because of a flat tire.

The crashes have raised concerns about the safety of commutes by logging workers on remote private, unpaved roads. They sometimes spend six hours a day in transit, only getting paid once they reach the job site and begin work.

Road conditions, long driving distances and the migrant workers’ relative unfamiliarity with the area are all hazards, said Jose Soto, organizer and program director with the Maine Rural Workers Coalition in Lewiston.

Soto met last week with Gov. Angus King, who said Monday he has directed the state Department of Labor to investigate whether any factors besides excessive speed contributed to the accident. Officials from the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration are also investigating, he said.

“Clearly, if there’s some systemic change that can be made to keep this from happening again, I want to do it,” King said in an interview.

Ketterer, Maine’s former attorney general, said Evergreen will consider the various government reports on the Allagash accident before deciding whether to change any of its safety policies.

Because Bonilla was driving home in his own station wagon when he crashed, “it’s hard to see how it’s the responsibility of the employer,” Ketterer said.

“The company policy, which has been the same throughout, is that the employees are responsible to get to the job themselves,” he said.