The estate of an Intel contractor sued the company Wednesday, alleging its negligence resulted in him being crushed to death inside a manufacturing tool last year.
The suit, filed in Multnomah County Circuit Court by the contractor’s mother and daughter, seeks $995,000, plus unspecified medical and burial services from Intel and an Intel employee.
Jay Elwell, 49, died on July 12, 2017. He worked for an Intel contractor, Raymond Handling Concepts Corp., and was performing scheduled maintenance on a manufacturing tool at the company’s Ronler Acres campus.
Semiconductor manufacturing is Oregon’s largest industry. Intel employs 20,000 in Oregon, more than any other business and more than anywhere else the company operates.
Often depicted as clean and antiseptic, chip production is actually an industrial process that involves huge manufacturing tools and hazardous chemicals.
Regional chip manufacturers have reported several accidents over the decades — some of them severe, resulting in hospitalization and ground contamination. Still, public officials have said they have no record of any deaths before Elwell’s.
A Hillsboro police report on the incident said Elwell and a colleague ran into a problem with the machine, so Elwell went inside the large tool to fix it. His colleague, outside the machine, pressed controls to move a carousel inside in one direction.
The tray rotated in the opposite direction instead, moving Elwell over the top of the machinery and down the other side, crushing him in the process.
Investigators reached no conclusion on why the tray inside the machine rotated in the wrong direction. But Oregon’s Occupational Safety and Health Division levied a $17,400 penalty against Raymond Handling in January, concluding the contractor had failed to use a safety procedure that would have prevented it from starting while a worker inside was in a hazardous position.
Wednesday’s suit does not name Raymond Handling as a defendant. The Elwell family’s attorney did not immediately respond to an inquiry Thursday seeking additional detail.
Though OSHA did not cite Intel, it issued a “hazard letter” to the company in January for failing to inform employees of the precautions they need to take before working in confined spaces during projects that require work permits.
The lawsuit also names an Intel employee, Seungwoo Lee, as a defendant, though it does not identify what role he might have played in the incident. The state investigative report identifies Lee as a senior process engineer.
