BY EARNEST WINSTON and CAMERON McWHIRTER
The Cincinnati Enquirer
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Erlanger Asst. Fire Chief Todd Schulkers rests with other rescue workers who were searching for Michael Sanzere's body.
(Glenn Hartong photo)
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CARNTOWN, Ky. -- Searchers located the body of a 45-year-old Dayton, Ky., chemist at 10:25 p.m. Tuesday at the bottom of tons of limestone and metal at a Pendleton County lime company.
The body of Michael Sanzere, a quality-control chemist at the Dravo Lime Co.'s Black River Division in northeastern Pendleton County, was found after a two-day search.
Rescue workers believe the 22-year employee was on the ground floor of a building underneath a limestone storage silo when the bottom of the 60-foot-high silo collapsed about 9:30 a.m. Monday. The collapse of the bin forcefully discharged a pile of limestone weighing an estimated 600 tons into the building in which Mr. Sanzere was working.
"We have a family of employees here and this death is like a death in the family," said Ronald Sommer, vice president of corporate communications at the company's Pittsburgh headquarters.
He said Mr. Sanzere, manager of the quality control lab at Black River, was a "highly skilled chemist."
The quality-control chemist was on the ground-level of the sunken building picking up samples of lime from a conveyor belt to be tested at an on-site lab.
"He was a stand-out. This fella is as fine a person you'd ever want to work with," Mr. Sommer said.
Mr. Sanzere's family decided not to visit the search site Monday and Tuesday, choosing to wait at Dravo's main offices several hundred feet from the plant. There, family members and friends were tended to by chaplains and human-resource employees at Dravo.
Mr. Sommer said the family's strong religious background is helping them to cope.
They were notified shortly after the body was found, said Craig Peoples, manager of Pendleton County Disaster Emergency Services, the organization overseeing the rescue effort.
Mr. Sanzere is survived by his parents, Janine and Anthony Sanzere, three sisters and a brother.
Among the tools rescue workers used to search for the missing worker were blowtorches to help cut the steel from the bin's fallen cone; shovels, backhoes, a vacuum truck and a front-end loader to remove debris. Search dogs were also used.
A Dravo spokesman said officials do not think that noticeable rusting inside the bin was solely responsible for the accident. Meanwhile, two officials from the U.S. Department of Labor's Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) in Arlington, Va., are at the company waiting to begin their investigation.
Mr. Sommer said the silo component that failed was so major, "there will definitely be changes."
The accident is the latest of several incidents at the company over the past year or so.
On July 11, 1997, a mine worker was killed, said Rodney Brown, spokesman for MSHA.
The worker, John A. Miller, 42, a mine mechanic who was repairing a pressure washer, was electrocuted.
Earlier this year, a worker was burned on the lower half of his body as he worked in an area that contained limestone and water. When the two entities mixed, they caused the burns, said Ronald Sommer, vice president of corporate communications at the company's Pittsburgh headquarters.
Mr. Brown said Dravo's Black River plant has been cited for 133 violations in the past 24 months. Asked whether that was considered high, Mr. Brown said, "not really" but added he was still gathering information on the exact nature of the violations.
The administration's injury-rate statistics show that the plant's rate was lower than the national average. There were no reported fatalities in recent years.
The nearby Dravo Black River mine had 118 violations in the same 24-month period.
Dravo Lime Co. a subsidiary of Dravo Corp., is the largest publicly owned producer of lime in the United States.
The company has quarries across the United States and three plants: the Black River Facility in Carntown, Ky.; the Maysville Facility in Maysville, and the Longview Facility in Longview, Ala.
The company sells much of its lime to utility companies that use lime to control the creation of acid rain through a special lime-based production of energy.
The Carntown facility has recently expanded its production by 700,000 tons per year to meet increased demand. Enquirer reporter John Hopkins contributed to this story.
Grim search ends
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