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RINCON, Ga. – A Plymouth man was killed Tuesday when he fell at a Georgia work site.
His death was the third fatality at the site since February, and all three accidents are being investigated by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Agency.
Ryan Mackenzie, 21, who had been living most recently in Newport, fell about 75 feet from scaffolding around 9:30 a.m., Effingham County Sheriff’s Capt. Mike Bohannon told the Savannah Morning News on Tuesday.
MacKenzie was the son of James MacKenzie, 46, of Plymouth, who was killed instantly last July when his vehicle struck a horse on Interstate 95 in Sidney. The elder MacKenzie was on his way to work at the Portland Cianbro oil rig project when the accident happened near Sidney in foggy conditions.
Ryan MacKenzie also had worked at Cianbro Corp. and took the Georgia job earlier this year after he had been laid off by the Pittsfield company.
Ryan MacKenzie’s friends on Wednesday described him as a kind, fun-loving man.
“He was a sweetheart,” said a Pittsfield friend who declined to be identified. “He ended every telephone conversation with ‘I love you’ and every visit with a hug.”
The young woman said she had been friends with MacKenzie for several years and that he had been devastated by his father’s death. “The two of them were unbelievably close,” she said.
MacKenzie had entered the Air Force after his graduation from Nokomis Regional High School in Newport but was released from the service after his father’s death.
The friend said Mackenzie was “such an outdoorsy kind of guy. He had a snowmobile, and he loved to go four-wheeling.”
OSHA investigators were on the construction site on Tuesday, confirmed Savannah regional office spokeswoman Jo Ann Burgoyne, but they would release no information Wednesday.
Bohannon would not disclose to the Savannah News whether Mackenzie was tied to safety lines or if the proper preventative measures were taken by the construction firm.
“Our investigation determined it wasn’t the plant, the machinery or the company’s fault,” Bohannon told the Savannah newspaper. “You can make of that what you want.”
The fall occurred at Southern Co.’s Plant McIntosh near a town called Rincon, just outside Savannah, where general contractor W.G. Yates and Sons Construction of Mississippi is constructing two natural gas-powered electric generating units.
Nate Reens, a reporter at the Savannah Morning News who has reported on all three accidents, said Wednesday that he was “shocked that the work site is still operating” in the wake of the three deaths.
Johnny Boyett, 48, of Florida, died March 10 when a piece of heavy machinery tipped over and tossed him from an elevated basket.
Joe Lynn Bethany, 52, of Mississippi, died in February after falling through an uncovered hole from an elevated construction platform.
“There’s got to be something wrong out there,” Glenn Bethany, Joe Bethany’s brother told Reens after learning of MacKenzie’s death. “I hate to hear about this. I hate it for the family that’s now going through the same thing we did.
“You’d think after the second one they would have shut the job down,” Bethany said. “Maybe this one will do it.”
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