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Landfill baler is a death machine

This letter is in response to Lisa Roche’s Letter to the editor (Journal, Nov. 11) headlined, “Commissioners do not respect their office.”

Roche is very kind person I worked with Deb Barton, so I know a different Deb than Roche knows.I am sure the commissioners did not have a personal agenda when they fired her. By not using the baler any more, they have saved someone from death. That baler is a death machine.

Funny thing about that baler, when the business end of that machine gets going, I never saw Barton any more. She must have been in her office doing more important work. When those bales come off of that machine everything is in them: deer heads and guts, dead dogs and cats and skunks with their guts smashed out of them and oozing out of the sides of the bales; there are used diapers and hypodermic needlesin the bales.

You could get Hepatitis or AIDS or you could get your head cut off by a garden hose. When a garden hose or electric cord gets in the baler, one end of the hose is in one bale and the other end is in the next bale, as the bales move through the machine they get distance between the bales, so the garden hose gets stretched like a rubber band and it breaks.

When it does, the loose end of the hose comes flying around like a bull whip, with enough force to cut you in half. This baler is so dangerous, it is the only place in my life I ever worked at that has a decontamination chamber.

So I ask what kind of a boss would allow their coworkers to work under these conditions.

I thank the commissioners for no longer using that machine. I hope they sell it to belt salvage and they cut it into little pieces so no one else is ever put in danger.

Louis Szabo

Cortez