A worker for a company that does contract work for Perdue Farms died from electrocution on August 8 at a Perdue plant in Perry, Georgia.
Antonio Ramirez, 23, was doing sanitation work in what employees refer to as the “hot room” of the facility, when his supervisor entered the room around 5:30 a.m. and found Ramirez kneeling on the ground. When the supervisor checked on him, he noticed that Ramirez was wet and he felt a shock, Houston County Deputy Coroner David Gabbard told 41NBC.
Attempts by the supervisor to revive Ramirez by using CPR were unsuccessful. He was transported to the Perry Hospital by ambulance, but he was never resuscitated and was pronounced dead at the hospital around 6:30 a.m.
“We are deeply saddened by the death of a contractor working for a company that cleans our production equipment who was fatally injured in an accident Sunday morning at our Prepared Foods facility in Perry, Georgia,” a Perdue Farms spokesman said in a statement emailed to WATT Global Media. “The safety of our workers and facilities is always Perdue’s top priority, and we are taking the matter very seriously. We are in communication with local authorities and the contracting company, and our deepest condolences go out to his family, friends and co-workers.”
Ramirez was an employee of QSI, a division of The Vincit Group, which provides plant sanitation services.
QSI also lost an employee in an accident in 2015 at the Tyson Foods poultry plant in Shelbyville, Tennessee. In that incident, an employee had apparently fell into a piece of machinery.
Perdue Farms’ broiler operations, according to the WATTPoultry.com Top Companies Database, operates 11 slaughter plants, three further processing plants, 15 hatcheries and 12 feed mills. In 2020, Perdue processed 61.26 million pounds of ready-to-cook chicken on a weekly basis. Perdue also slaughtered 300 million pounds of live turkeys in 2020.
