Workers allege ‘flagrant indifference’ in lawsuit against Kentucky candle factory

A lawsuit filed on Wednesday alleges that a candle company in Kentucky demonstrated “flagrant indifference” during last week’s devastating tornadoes. 

After eight workers were killed, surviving employees of Mayfield Consumer Products said in their lawsuit that the company violated occupational safety and health workplace standards by not permitting employees to leave work early as the storm approached, according to The Associated Press.

Specifically, the lawsuit alleges that the company had “up to three and half hours before the tornado hit its place of business to allow its employees to leave its worksite as safety precautions,” but instead showed “flagrant indifference to the rights” of employees who were at risk, the AP reported. 

“This is one of those speaks-for-itself cases,” Amos Jones, an attorney representing the employees, told The Hill, adding that “the lawsuit is very straightforward.”

“Our investigation is indicating from what people who were trapped saw that the toll from that site is bound to be greater than eight,” he added, noting that “a large number of people” who may have been working on-site but were technically employed by another company “could plausibly not be counted in an MCP death toll.”

“We’re still investigating, and we will continue investigating as people come forward and give us more and more information,” Jones added.

A spokesperson for the company, Bob Ferguson, previously said that employees were free to go home anytime and said they would not have faced consequences for doing so, and CEO Troy Propes said that “an independent expert team” was reviewing the actions that managers and employees took during the storm, per the AP.

“We’re confident that our team leaders acted entirely appropriately and were, in fact, heroic in their efforts to shelter our employees,” Propes added. “We are hearing accounts from a few employees that our procedures were not followed. We’re going to do a thorough review of what happened.”

In the initial aftermath of the deadly storm, many feared that workers who were without phone service were missing. Since then, all of the company’s employees have been accounted for, and Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear (D) announced that the state’s workplace safety agency would conduct an investigation into the eight deaths that occurred on site, the AP noted.

— Updated at 4:04 p.m.