Tragedy in the Allagash: One Year Later Mending Broken Lives

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Relatives and friends of the 14 foreign workers who drowned in the Allagash Wilderness Waterway a year ago next Friday say little has been done in the last year to change the adverse working conditions that may have contributed to the worst traffic accident in terms of fatalities in Maine’s history.

Hundreds of foreign workers arrived again in April or May in trucks or passenger vans to take jobs that Mainers don’t want to do. The men, mostly from Central American countries, came to plant or thin trees on rough, bug-infested terrain and likely will be in the state through October.

The men are still renting apartments more than an hour away from the remote locations where they work. In some cases, nine or more men share living quarters because they want to save money or because their strong cultural background emphasizes togetherness and a sense of family.

Most of the woods workers also have to pay fees to their employers to travel in the company vans and to use company tools.

Six out of the seven days of a week the men thin trees from well before sunup to well after sundown. The federally set wage remains $10.13 per hour for 40 hours a week, but most crews still prefer to be paid a piecemeal rate for each acre they thin, because they expect to earn more that way.

On Sept. 12 a year ago, 15 men from Honduras and Guatemala were in a 15-passenger van that was loaded with saws, blades, gasoline-filled cans and lunch pails. Their vehicle, being driven at an “imprudent speed,” according to a police report, flipped off John’s Bridge and into the Allagash Wilderness Waterway. Fourteen men drowned. The 15th passenger survived by pushing out a back window and swimming to shore.

The accident’s only survivor, Edilberto Morales-Luis of Guatemala, told police that the men were under pressure to make up for lost time and to get their tree thinning work completed.

The accident prompted calls for a review of the working conditions of foreign woods workers and highlighted differences between laws governing foreign woods workers and foreigners employed in the agriculture and hospitality industries in Maine. Migrant workers who pick apples and rake blueberries or who change bedsheets in hotels by law must have housing and transportation provided to them.

Greg Reed, an advocate for foreign woods workers in the Caribou area, calls the men’s working situations “free slavery that’s backed by Congress.”

“It’s a nightmare, a never-ending nightmare,” said Reed in a recent interview. “I thought after September 12 this was going to be put to rest. But it hasn’t.”

Changes in the woods

In the last year, some efforts to enact change have been undertaken.

Most of the private landowners and an insurance company have sponsored a few first aid courses and a van safety class for workers and their supervisors.

About two-thirds of the nearly 400 foreign tree thinners hired this spring attended first aid safety classes, according to the Forestry Resources Association, a landowner trade group. Plans are under way to expand the program and eventually make it mandatory for everyone working in the woods, according to the association’s director.

The U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the department’s Wage and Hour Division have subjected contractors who hire the foreign workers to spot inspections this summer. Their findings aren’t available, however, because the case files are considered open and their contents are classified as confidential.

The 15-passenger vans, such as the one the men were in when it rolled off the bridge, also are being scrutinized. In Oklahoma, an attorney for the accident victims’ 71 survivors filed a lawsuit against Chrysler Corp., the manufacturer of the 2002 Dodge van, and Thrifty Rental Corp., the company that leased the van to the workers’ employer, alleging that the vehicle is unsafe and needs to be retrofitted. Chrysler and Thrifty deny the allegations.

On the federal level, Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe is pushing legislation that would apply federal safety regulations to the operation of 15-passenger vans, including the implementation of mandatory vehicle rollover testing. Snowe’s Passenger Van Safety Act recently was passed in committee and awaits review by the full U.S. Senate.

Yet these efforts, and the accident itself, have not stopped the use of the controversial vans by some of the 15 contractors who hire the foreign workers for jobs in Maine. Witnesses have seen the vans, loaded with men and supplies, travel throughout the state. The witnesses said they cringe, recalling last year’s accident.

“I was so disappointed when the crews started coming back this year and they’re still driving those 15-passenger vans,” said Sherry Izaguirre, a Presque Isle woman whose husband died in the accident. “You’d think that somebody would have [done] something about it by now.”

Evergreen Forestry Services

The men who died were going to thin trees on private timberlands owned by Pingree Associates and managed by Seven Islands Land Co. of Bangor.

Seven Islands contracted with UAP Timberlands of Old Town to handle the tree-thinning operations, and UAP Timberlands contracted with Evergreen Forestry Services of Sandpoint, Idaho, to provide the workers.

The Labor Department fined Evergreen Forestry Services $17,000 in late December for alleged violations of federal regulations, including failing to register an employee with the department, transporting workers without a certification of authorization, and allowing or requiring the operation of the van at excessive speeds.

Evergreen’s owner, Peter Smith III of Sandpoint, Idaho, appealed the fine, and that appeal is pending.

“This is a tragic accident, but in no way was it caused by an employer requiring a driver to exceed any posted speed limits,” said Smith in a response to the Labor Department.

The department also notified Smith in December that it wanted to revoke permanently his farm labor contractor certificate because of the new alleged violations and past infractions.

While he could have renewed his certificate during the appeal process, Smith let it lapse at the end of January. Because he did not renew it, the Labor Department in July dismissed its license revocation case against Smith, according to a department spokesman.

Meanwhile, Smith became 40 percent owner of Progressive Environmental Services, another company that contracts foreign workers to the forestry industry. Progressive, which is based in Idaho, is certified to operate in Maine. It currently employs many of the same supervisors and foreign workers whom Evergreen employed last year.

A Labor Department official said he was unaware of Smith’s new business partnership until he was contacted by the Bangor Daily News in June.

John Chavez, a spokesman for the department, said at the time Smith could not be involved in day-to-day operations of the business, such as the recruiting or hiring of foreign workers, but he could be an investor in the company. He added the department would look into Smith’s relationship with Progressive.

In a statement to the NEWS, Smith said he had been working on formation of the new company before the accident and he was not involved in the day-to-day operations of Progressive.

The Bangor Daily News, under the Freedom of Information Act, is seeking documents pertaining to Smith’s current status as a farm labor contractor and what business activities he can perform. The newspaper filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court to get the documents, and the Labor Department has notified the newspaper the documents should be received by Sept. 12, the anniversary of the accident.

Foreign workers

One night last month, after working in the woods all day, nine foreign workers returned to their Caribou apartment – the same residence of 11 of the 14 men who died last year.

The workers said they have no problem living in the apartment, but mentioned several times they do grieve for the dead men. They recalled playing soccer together. Sometimes, they said through an interpreter, they hear the dead men’s voices behind them and immediately turn around to look for their friends.

“A lot of the times it feels like they’re still here,” one of the men said.

Another three men stopped by the apartment to visit. One of them, Juan Francisco-Velasques, whose cousin Carlos Izaguirre died in the accident, said he was not scared about returning to the woods this year.

He doesn’t think anyone was at fault for the accident.

“I think the bridge was just bad,” Francisco-Velasques said. “He [the driver] wasn’t driving poorly.”

The men said their working conditions are fine and they didn’t understand why Mainers didn’t want their jobs.

A Catholic priest, however, said the foreign workers he has met tell him a slightly different story. The Rev. Mike Hinken of Holy Rosary Catholic Church in Caribou said the men don’t want to criticize how they are paid or their working conditions publicly because, as a culture, Hispanics don’t do that.

Hinken, who has ministered for three years in Honduras, said he has looked at the men’s paychecks and believes they’re being underpaid. The men should be getting at least $10.13 per hour, but “it’s more like $5 an hour,” he said.

“What concerns me is that they’re overworking and not being paid for what they work,” Hinken said. “I want these guys to get paid what they deserve.”

Pending legislation

Landowners and equal rights groups say they have taken steps to improve working conditions and their efforts are a good start. However, the landowners and the equal rights groups still have different opinions about what actually remains to be fixed and whether it should be legislatively mandated.

At the State House, a bill that would have mandated housing and transportation for the foreign woods workers was tabled last spring, but should be considered during the legislative session that starts in January. Equal rights groups that are backing the measure are working with the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Sean Faircloth, D-Bangor, to rewrite certain parts in order to get it passed.

“Next year, something’s going to happen,” Faircloth said.

Mary Henderson of the Maine Equal Justice Project, an Augusta-based nonprofit group, is working with Faircloth on the bill. She said discussion would take place this month on how to make the legislation palatable for passage and to get it past the forestry industry’s strong lobbying voice.

She wishes, though, that the bill could stay in its original form.

“The legislation was for the workers,” Henderson said. “I would like to see it as is.”

A forest industry official counters that Faircloth and the other bill supporters are “using the mantra of the deprived, underpaid, underfed migrant worker” to push the measure through the Legislature.

“They don’t want to see the [woods] program work,” said Patrick Hackley, director of the Forestry Resources Association.

But Mike Guare, an attorney of Pine Tree Legal Services in Bangor, said Hackley’s perception “is just silly.”

“Everybody involved in this process knows that the jobs are a mainstay of Maine’s economy,” Guare said. “The purpose of the bill is to make sure the jobs are not lethal.”

On its own, the forestry industry is looking into placing housing closer to the job sites, Hackley said. The landowners are trying to convince the federal Labor Department that it needs to ease regulations that make it difficult for landowners to provide housing closer to job sites. Requiring plumbing, hot water, electricity and heat in remote areas of the North Woods is cost-prohibitive and impractical, he said. Adequate housing could be provided with lanterns, tanks of water, wood stoves and portable toilets.

Irving Co., one of the state’s largest landowners, soon will be setting up a test house that provides some amenities on its land, Hackley said.

“We’re still looking for a legal solution for safe housing and to reduce the number of hours the men have to commute,” Hackley said.