Originally published at: Two people rescued after falling into vat of Dove chocolate at factory | Boing Boing
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The urge to post a Willie Wonka meme is strong, but if the chocolate in the vat was liquid, I’m assuming the workers got burned. So out of respect for them, I won’t make light of it. The fine seems awfully lenient for an incident considered “serious.”
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Should be “Augustus Gloop” in the post copy. FYI. 
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Unfortunately weaksauce fines are consistent with even quite serious matters. My (layman’s) understanding is that in some cases of workplace injury and death people have ended up deliberately sidestepping occupational safety related rules in favor of going with the relevant generic flavor of negligence or manslaughter because the OSHA specific penalties are weak enough that negligence effectively becomes more legal if someone is on payroll.
https://www.osha.gov/memos/2022-12-20/2023-annual-adjustments-osha-civil-penalties
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Unfortunately most of them were just there to gawk and body-shame the victims.
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But did they ask to be rescued?
Well, it did take a lot longer because they kept going back into the vat for more. (/s)
(And in all seriousness, I hope the workers come out of this ok and well compensated.)
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They had better get tested for lead poisoning.
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Unless you’re making tropical chocolate, it actually melts at quite a low temperature (60-97 degrees F.) and is usually held just above the melting point or at a tempering point (110-115F), so think warm to hot bath temp, not scalding or even burning temps. Still probably terrifying, what with not being able to get back out – too slippery for a ladder?
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Well, if I MUST die, this is one of my top three ways to go, so there’s that.
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Despite fighting off the rescuers bravely, both were removed from the vat.
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Two people rescued after falling into vat of Dove chocolate at factory
That’s almost certainly not what happened. The workers fell into a chocolate vat (i.e. a vat designed to hold chocolate) which they were to clean, so it’s very unlikely there was substantial chocolate present. Given that these industrial vats are quite large, I’d guess they fell entering or exiting the vat from a hatch at the top and the injuries were from the fall. This is supported by the fact that they cut open the vat to remove them, most likely because they needed to removed while stabilized, e.g. on a backboard.
You can’t rail MSM for being shallow and sensational and then do it yourself, BB.
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That had occurred to me, too - how do you cut a hole in a vat full of choccy? That’s gonna be hugely messy!
I was wondering if the density or consistency of chocolate makes it more dangerous to fall into than water, but this sounds like a more reasonable explanation.
Which would make this a standard case of people getting injured at work and not really compensated for it, which we’re only hearing about because it can be (mis)represented as a colorful fun tale of willy wonkery.
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At least the headline did not say that they “dove” into that vat.
(I’ll get my hat.)
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The violation detail isn’t very detailed; but if the problem was a fall the writeup is really burying the lede(or stuck with regulatory authority that forces them to focus on a specific detail):
An employee participated in the control of hazardous energy for the Dove chocolate batching 20 micron tank. The employer did not ensure that the employee had the knowledge of the type and magnitude of the energy for the task, on or about June 8, 2022. b) Mars Wrigley Confectionary US, LLC, 295 Brown Street, Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania ? Employees of an outside employer, I.K. Stoltzfus Service Corp., cleaned tanks, including the Dove chocolate batching 20 micron tank, owned by the onsite/host employer, Mars Wrigley. The host employer did not provide the outside employer with the correct energy control procedure or work authorization permit that included verification of flowable material isolation given the permitted entry
I’m not sure why cutting them out of the bottom of the tank was the chosen strategy; but the writeup very much looks like the story of an inadequately trained employee not shutting the chocolate bulkheads(yes, bulkheads is definitely the technical term for what controls chocolate flow…it’s just science) correctly on the 8th and a subsequent failure of ‘flowable material isolation’ when they sent the contractor in on the 9th.
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They had to cut a hole in the bottom to get them out because they kept diving deeper.
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A lifetime supply of Dove chocolate? 
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