The Pineros: Men of the Pines by The Sacramento Bee
The Pineros: Hidden hazards
Although Congress has expressed its outrage at the treatment of forest workers, the government has done little to improve conditions. For those who toil deep in the woods, the threat of being injured or killed is an everyday reality.
Stories by Tom Knudson and Hector Amezcua -- The Sacramento Bee
Published Monday, November 14, 2005 -- 2 of 3 parts
Eliseo Domínguez, who has worked in U.S. forests for seven years, bleeds from a cut he had received just seconds before as he took down a tree in Montana's Bitterroot National Forest in September. His foreman sent him to a hospital for treatment, but accidents involving forest workers often go unreported.
Sacramento Bee/Hector Amezcua
With a whoosh, the branch whipped through the air, striking Carlos Valdez in the face. He heard a popping sound in his right eye. The pain was electrifying.
The biggest jolt was yet to come. When the young laborer in the Tahoe National Forest opened his eye and tried to see, his vision was gone. "I started to shake," Valdez recalled. "I began to throw up out of fear. I didn't want to lose my eye."
Three years later, Valdez squints into the amber-colored evening light of California's San Joaquin Valley. The accident on a federal job thinning brush and dead trees near Camptonville not only blinded his eye, it sowed a long spell of depression and chronic head and eye pain. But it left no mark on the government.
By law, all serious job injuries in the United States must be reported to authorities. Valdez's wasn't. The Tahoe National Forest said it wasn't responsible. Valdez's employer, Redding Tree Growers of Exeter - which gained the government contract for the work - said it wasn't aware of the law. As a result, there was no investigation by the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health and no fine, even though Valdez said the firm failed to provide him with safety goggles.
First in 1980 and again in 1993, Congress expressed shock at the abuse of Latino forest workers in America's woods and the hypocrisy of undocumented workers doing government work. Today, despite the influx of thousands of legal guest workers into reforestation, much of the work force remains undocumented. And the abject living conditions and wage exploitation that outraged Congress endure.
But at neither time did Congress examine the most pressing danger to Latino forest workers: the threat of being injured or killed on the job.
A nine-month Bee investigation has found that reforestation work, the thinning and planting that keeps both public and private forests healthy, is one of the most hazardous occupations in America - and one of the most overlooked by state and federal regulators.
On Forest Service and national park jobs visited by The Bee this year, peril was paramount. Slashing away at dense tangles of trees with chain saws, the pineros - Spanish for pine workers - scrambled through the woods in a chaos of cutting and noise. One gashed his knee: eight stitches. Another toppled a tree that tore into his face: six stitches. Others slipped and slid across steep slopes in cheap work boots that lacked treads. Protective gear was optional. Safety goggles and non-slip boots, required by law for most work, were rarely used.
Government inspectors see the danger, too.
"Crew drove up and informed me that one of them was hurt," one federal reforestation inspector for the Shasta-Trinity National Forest in California wrote last year. "Crew member had a rag covering his head and left eye."
Like foremen, Forest Service inspectors oversee the work pineros do in the national forests. They distribute tools, hand out seedlings, watch pineros toil in pounding rain, sleet and hot sun, tell them to slam their heavy planting tools into rocky ground. They jot down the wretched working conditions in their work diaries. In most cases, they are the only government officials who even know where the crews are laboring.
Yet most Forest Service inspection notes are studies in indifference. They reflect not concern for workers but frustration with the pace of the job.
"More folks just standing around," one federal tree planting inspector for the Clearwater National Forest in Idaho wrote last year.
Document excerpt
Diary of Jerry Branning, U.S. Forest Service contracting officers representative
FRIDAY, MAY 14, 2004 - CLEARWATER NATIONAL FOREST
More folks just standing around. I asked Wilfredo to distribute trees. Not much happened. I passed trees out and still people standing around. I finally screamed at Wilfredo to "not have 15-min. discussion about it," just plant "god damned things." He was somewhat taken aback. Crew started planting.
"I finally screamed at (the foreman) to 'not have 15-min. discussion about it,' just plant 'god damned things.' He was somewhat taken aback. Crew started planting."
On private land, risks are harder to observe. But off the job, the injuries and deaths are remembered with stories, death certificates and grainy photographs. In a small apartment in Medford, Ore., one Latino forest worker reached for the picture of a co-worker killed in California last year.
"I'd known him since he was a little kid," the pinero said of Ricardo Ponce León, an 18-year-old undocumented forest worker run over and killed by a trailer on a dirt road while spraying pesticides for a private land owner outside Redding last year. "His dream was to come here and make a better life, for himself and his family in Mexico. But God did not allow it."
Six federal departments and a constellation of state agencies share responsibility for reforestation workers. But the occupational safety and health officials who inspect work sites rarely visit a reforestation job. Redding Tree Growers, for example, has not been inspected by the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health in more than a decade.
The reason? Workers, most of whom speak no English, rarely complain to authorities. Accidents, which normally trigger an investigation, often go unreported. Crews work in remote locations and move frequently, making them hard to target for random inspections.
In more than two decades of thinning and planting across the West, pinero Santiago Calzada has seen a government safety inspector just once.
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Voices: 'Informing you is the law'
Before they began planting trees in the Stanislaus National Forest two years ago, a group of pineros were handed a card in Spanish by Henry Pedrick, the U.S. Forest Service official who oversees planting in the forest's Groveland Ranger District.
The card was titled: Informese Es La Ley - Informing you is the law. It advised the workers that if they weren't paid $12.74 an hour, they should contact the Stanislaus National Forest.
"We will help you get paid what you deserve," it continued, in Spanish.
The planting went poorly. The pineros' employer, Ace Reforestation, wrote the Forest Service to complain that it had lost $24,166, in part because "the recent rains have made it difficult to complete the job in a timely manner." Pedrick docked Ace $1,180 for poor planting.
Then, one day in April, unexpected visitors showed up at Pedrick's office in Groveland, miles from the work site: a carload of Ace's pineros who hadn't been paid.
"The people came to get a check for work done as planters," Pedrick wrote in his work notes. "They had (the) card written by me with the contract number on it."
Pedrick informed his supervisor in Clovis, Forest Service contracting officer Gilbert Massiatt, who advised Pedrick that the workers themselves should take their problem to the U.S. Department of Labor. "In actuality, it's better for workers" to report problems, Massiatt told The Bee. "They have all the inside information."
Pedrick says he doesn't know whether the workers were ever paid. "I reported it to my contracting officer," he said. "That's what I did."
- Tom Knudson
"Contractors do whatever they want," said Calzada, who lives in Medford. "And there are hardly no witnesses."
The U.S. Forest Service, which spends millions of taxpayer dollars on reforestation of public lands every year, says safety, pay and immigration violations are not its problem. "We're the Forest Service. We're not the INS or the Department of Labor," said Matt Matthes, a Forest Service spokesman in California.
But the INS - known now as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement - hasn't inspected a reforestation job in California in years. Instead, it has shifted its attention to terrorism and national security.
Twelve years ago, a story in The Bee about the poor conditions endured by undocumented forest workers on federal land touched off a flurry of media coverage and a critical congressional report titled: "Look Who's Minding the Forest: Forest Service Reforestation Program Due For a Major Overhaul."
"We cannot tolerate these conditions, or even the perception that we allow such conditions to exist," wrote the chief of the Forest Service in 1993, Dale Robertson. "Let me state this very clearly: It is Forest Service policy to do business only with responsible contractors who obey federal, state and local laws."
The Forest Service has not walked that talk.
Despite calling for tougher law enforcement and assembling a 264-page watch list of troubled contractors, the agency today routinely contracts its work out to reforestation companies that violate state and federal safety, health and labor laws.
Matthes says it's only reasonable. "If somebody gets caught doing something wrong and they fix it, they're good," he said. "How can the federal government punish them? It's like society. If somebody's done their time, they deserve a fair shake again."
But others in the Forest Service said the agency has simply lost interest - again.
"We're not very good at managing things like this anymore," said Stan Bird, a veteran Forest Service contracting officer in John Day, Ore. "Years ago, it was important. But it's gotten lost in the midst of a lot of other priorities."
In the Klamath National Forest in California, federal law enforcement officer Jeff Brown worked a flurry of cases in the mid-'90s involving undocumented workers. Since then, Forest Service reforestation officials have not referred a single case to him. "In my opinion, the problem is still out there," Brown said. "It hasn't gone away."
Interactive: Documents suggest workers not paid for forestry work
These documents tell a tale about reforestation workers, also known as pineros, who say they were not paid for work completed in the Stanislaus National Forest.
Doing business through reforestation contractors allows the government and private timber companies to duck legal responsibility for workers. But the government often pays so little for jobs that contractors are forced to cut corners and put workers at risk, some industry veterans say.
"The forest industry takes reforestation workers for granted," said Dan Robertson, president of the Northwest Reforestation Contractors Association and one of the few insiders calling for reform. "They don't have a lot of concern about whether contractors are complying with all of the laws. As long as they think they are, they pretty much ignore it. And government is by far the worst."
Forests have always been risky places to work. Logging, in fact, is the most dangerous job in America, with a mortality rate of 92 workers per 100,000. Although thinning crowded stands of pine and fir is similar to logging, scant figures are available for Latino reforestation workers. But they are part of a deadly demographic tide: Latino laborers are 33 percent more likely to die on the job than other workers, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
On the west side of Medford, Ore., statistics are more than numbers in a report. They wear blue jeans and baseball caps and go to work in the woods. They speak little or no English, pack lunches of tortillas and beans and cash their paychecks not at banks but at Latino-owned convenience stores.
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Santiago Calzada, who worked in the woods for more than two decades, says complaining about working conditions is pointless. "They say: 'Oh, you chicken. You lazy. You're just a troublemaker.'" Sacramento Bee/Hector Amezcua
Voices: 'They stay out there bleeding'
Few pineros speak openly about injuries and abuse; Santiago Calzada is one who will.
He has nothing to lose - he retired this year after more than two decades working across the West, from Montana to California. He's also tired of people getting hurt.
"I've seen guys get cut and they don't get to the doctor right away. They stay out there bleeding," Calzada said at his home in Medford, Ore. "I've seen people stung by poison oak. They don't get medicine. I've seen people bit up by bumblebees. I saw one guy who got stung 20 times. The foreman was laughing."
Now 49, Calzada has felt plenty of pain. In tree planting, the seedling-filled bags that workers strap to their hips "are so heavy we get blisters," he said. "Our legs get numb."
"Sometimes we are carrying over 100 pounds" because seedlings are wet, he said. "Sometimes we are even bleeding from carrying all that stuff."
For sheer danger, in Calzada's estimation, no job tops the thinning of brush and small trees from government land in the West. And it's not just chain saw cuts and falling trees that afflict that work force.
As pineros bend over to cut trees, gasoline sometimes spills out of the fuel jugs they strap to their waists, and sloshes across their backs.
"It peels your skin," Calzada said. "It happened to me once. You have to keep working."
Some workers expect to find compassion from the Latino foremen who run most of the jobs. Calzada knows otherwise. Complaining to them, he said, is futile. "If you say something, they say: 'Oh, you chicken. You lazy. You're just a troublemaker.' That's how they are."
- Tom Knudson
For a few weeks in 2004, Medford was home to Ricardo Ponce León, who had heard about the fistfuls of dollars that could be earned in America's forests. The son of a poor brick-maker from Michoacán, the 18-year-old hungered for prosperity and prestige.
"He wanted to be a don," said his father, Manuel Ponce. "He wanted the best the U.S. could offer."
It didn't work out that way. One morning, spraying brush-killing chemicals on private land across the border in California, Ponce hopped on a trailer for a ride to a new work site. The dual-axle trailer, carrying a heavy tank of liquid brush-killer, bumped and rattled down a dirt road. Ponce slipped, fell to the ground and was run over.
"I tried to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation," said one of his co-workers, who declined to identify himself out of fear of jeopardizing his job with Total Forestry Inc., the company that employed Ponce. "I could hear a sound coming from his chest, like a gurgling."
Ponce died a few minutes later - at 11:29 a.m. on Aug. 4, 2004. He had earned $13 an hour and been on the job 2 1/2 weeks. On July 31, he had wired $310 from his first paycheck to his mother in Mexico. The cause of death, according to the Shasta County Office of the Coroner, was "blunt force injuries" including "multiple abrasions and contusions of the head, torso and extremities."
The California Division of Occupational Safety and Health fined Total Forestry $9,075. But the company appealed and the fine is still pending. Reached by phone in his Redding office, Jeffrey Webster, the firm's president, declined to comment, then hung up. He did not respond to a written inquiry.
At Total's cramped office in a dreary industrial section of Medford, secretary Daisey Walker was also tight-lipped. "No comment," she told a Bee reporter. Pressed to say something, Walker added tersely, "What happened was horrible."
From his home in the dry hills outside Morelia, Mexico, Ponce's father has plenty to say.
"Nobody has given me any answers about what happened," he said. Growing angry, he exclaimed: "I want to know who killed my son!"
Ricardo Ponce León was covered by the State Compensation Insurance Fund, a quasi-public entity that compensates workers - documented or not - and their families for workplace injuries or death. But more than a year after the accident, Ponce's family has received no compensation - "ni un cinco," - not even five centavos, Manuel Ponce said.
Until The Bee began looking into Ponce's death this spring, even the California Division of Workers Compensation was not aware of it.
"Good Lord!" said Susan Gard, an information officer for the agency that monitors claims and resolves disputes between workers and insurance companies. "It just seems like they would have paid it. I can't explain why it's taken a year."
Now, the State Compensation Insurance Fund is taking a fresh look and - prodded by The Bee's reporting - hopes to make a payment to the Ponce family, according to the fund's spokesman.
Just seven months before Ponce's death, a Canadian panel cited "unacceptably high rates of deaths and serious injuries" among British Columbia's forest workers and called for sweeping changes to reduce them.
"Working in the woods involves inherent risks that cannot be completely eliminated," the Canadian Forest Safety Task Force reported. "This, however, does not justify the acceptance of unsafe behaviors and practices and the inevitability of thousands of injuries and deaths."
The task force's report, which covered reforestation workers as well as loggers, cited a litany of reasons for the crisis, including poor nutrition, inadequate training, fatigue, unsafe work habits, pressure to work quickly and a growing reliance on contractors - all factors documented in the detailed diaries of U.S. Forest Service job inspectors:
Related Graphic
Click image to learn more about required safety gear
* From the Sierra National Forest, California - June 2003: "I noticed the crew was passing the chain saw along to cut brush. None of them were wearing chaps."
* From the Shasta-Trinity National Forest, California - July 2003: "2 guys knew how to thin, but the other three were rank beginners that did not know much about running a chain saw."
Such inexperience can cost workers dearly.
Stepping through the front door of his home in a backwater town in the San Joaquin Valley, Odilio Castro doesn't walk. He hobbles.
New to forest work, Castro took a job in the Sequoia National Forest last year, working for a forest contractor called Patty's Farm Labor of Strathmore.
"They never told me about the dangers of working around dead trees," Castro said.
Cutting through a small tree with a chain saw, he heard a rush of air as a larger dead tree, propped up by the small one, crashed to the ground, crushing him.
Face down in the dirt, he cried out for help. As co-workers rushed to his side and cut the tree into pieces to free him, he kept thinking: "I hope it's not bad. I hope it's not bad."
But it was. The calamity, Castro said, did more than crush his shoulder and mangle his leg. It shortchanged his future. "I can't do anything," he said. "I can't work. I can't bend over. I can't walk very much, not even to the corner."
Related Document
Click image to see California Division of Occupational Safety and Health documents outlining penalties against Patty's Farm Labor Service related to the injury of Odilio Castro
The California Division of Occupational Safety and Health fined Patty's Farm Labor $20,845 for six violations of workplace safety law, including the failure to develop an injury prevention program.
Nonetheless, owner Patricia Soto said her company is committed to safety. "We provide training," she said. "We have safety meetings once a month."
Even a history of safety problems does not bar a company from getting government work, state and federal records show. Since 1995, 3 J Reforestation has been inspected three times by the Oregon Occupational Safety and Health Division, cited for more than a dozen violations and fined repeatedly. Four workers have been hurt, including one in California.
Over the same period, the company was awarded government reforestation contracts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars for work across Oregon and California. On one of those jobs, 3 J's owner, José Quezada, called up the Forest Service, worried about the safety of his workers.
As Chuck Sallander - a contracting officer's representative for the Siskiyou National Forest in Oregon - wrote in his work notes in 2004: "Contractor called me at home yesterday evening (and) had a concern voiced by his foreman. ... He said cutting material 12 inches (in diameter) was too dangerous for his crew. They weren't qualified. I agreed that I didn't want anybody hurt."
Sallander passed the concerns along to his supervisor, but they were rejected. "Contracting officer's decision is that contractor is required to cut trees up to 12 inches," Sallander noted.
Recently, Sallander explained the decision, saying that because the company's workers had been certified to work on forest fires - where big trees are cut - they could topple foot-thick timber, too. "It didn't wash," he said of Quezada's concerns. "He agreed and finished the contract."
The greatest dangers for pineros are not always the obvious ones. One of the riskiest jobs isn't cutting trees down - it's planting them in the ground, another Canadian report found.
"Planters typically cover 16 kilometers (9.6 miles) per day over difficult terrain," said the study published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine in 2002. "In the process of planting, 20 percent will suffer a debilitating injury, a rate far in excess of the all-industry norm of five percent. ... Long-term implications for degeneration of the musculoskeletal system cannot be ignored."
Eladio Hernandez, a former Oregon tree planter, calls it "probably the hardest job in the world."
"Slopes are slippery," he said. "There's poison oak and ivy. Every day, you come back with a fever. It's that difficult. You either get used to it or quit."
Document excerpt
Diary of Kathi Stilwell, U.S. Forest Service inspector
MARCH 25, 2003 - STANISLAUS NATIONAL FOREST
Crew is very new. Halfway through bag up (300 each), one crew man became physically ill. I informed the foreman, Jorge, about this. He checked out the planter and stated he was dizzy and vomiting from drinking too much water @ the break.... Approx. 30 min later the planter became sick again. Jorge checked him out and stated he [the planter] was starting to feel better. I let him continue to plant, taking Jorge's word for it.
The travails of tree planters are also spelled out in Forest Service work notes. "Very, very rocky. Planters seem to hit rocks with every swing," wrote one inspector for the Idaho Panhandle National Forest in 2003. Last year, weather was a problem. "It's pouring rain," the inspector wrote. "This may affect planting quality as it's quite miserable out."
Pressure is built into the job. If seedlings get too hot or dry, they die. If they're planted improperly, contractors are penalized financially, pineros are reprimanded and sometimes fired. Most planting is done in the spring when temperature swings are extreme.
"Most of the time you are going to be either cold and wet - or hot," said Larry Dawson, supervisor of the Clearwater National Forest in Idaho. "And you are going to be tired. Very often it's raining. Sometimes it's sleeting."
One morning in June, Modesto Alvarez, an undocumented tree planter from Honduras, pulled on work boots before dawn at the Budget Inn motel in Oroville and stepped into a van crowded with 13 other forest workers. Their destination: a tree-planting job in part of the Tahoe National Forest logged in the 1980s. But Alvarez was also headed for trouble.
Not far from Lake Spaulding, Alvarez strapped a bulging sack of seedlings to his hips and trudged across a gray, crumbly slope just below the snow line. Every few feet, he would stop, lift a silver-gray digging tool called a "hoedad" high into the air and slam it to the ground. Stooping over, he would take a seedling from his bag, plant it, tamp the dirt and move on.
Lift, slam, stoop, plant. Alvarez worked his way through puddles of shade and sun. Lift, slam, stoop, plant. A metallic clinking filled the air - the sound of hoedads striking rocks. Thirsty, Alvarez bent down and sipped from a snowmelt creek. The work was tough. But a Forest Service inspector watching the crew was making it tougher.
"She would just start yelling at us," Alvarez recounted during an interview in his home near Fresno. "Sometimes we'd pull a tree out of our bag - and accidentally drop one - and she would start yelling at us."
Document excerpt
Diary of Joyce Tausch, U.S. Forest Service contracting officers representative
JULY 14-15, 2003, SHASTA - TRINITY NATIONAL FOREST
They got set up and started. 2 guys knew how to thin, but the other three were rank beginners that did not know much about running a chain saw. After a little while of them trying to get them to learn all at once, a decision was made by Jose Luis and Antonio the foreman to have them just cut up the slash behind the good cutters and that worked well.... The next morning Jose Luis and Antonio again worked with these 3 guys, 2 sort of picked it up but the third was very slow.... The foreman said they were young and didn't want to listen, even though he was working with them.
The inspector pressured the crew to plant in areas littered with rocks, something Alvarez considered risky. "To do what they tell us to do, that is how we get hurt," he said.
Swinging his hoedad one day around noon, Alvarez felt it come to a sudden stop on a rock torpedoed in the soil. The shock ricocheted up his arms. Arriving at the motel that evening, "I couldn't even step out of the van, I had to roll out," he said. "It was hard to breathe. It's a pain that won't go away."
Reached at her office, the Forest Service inspector, Carla Kempen, said she was not aware Alvarez had been hurt. She declined further comment.
"Carla is very demanding," said Oscar "William" Iraheta, foreman for Central Valley Forestry, the Exeter company that contracted with the government to plant the trees. "She insists the job be done exactly the way she wants it done. That's good for them. But for us - it's a lot more work."
Since that day, Alvarez has not worked in the woods. Nor has he received any compensation for the injury. Indeed he never submitted a claim, erroneously believing that because he is undocumented he would not qualify. He is now working in pain, his wife said, picking broccoli in the San Joaquin Valley.
"Up in the mountains, they rush us to do everything," Alvarez said. "But when we are hurt, they don't rush to help us."
Nowhere is the lack of enforcement more obvious than in the laissez-faire attitude toward safety gear on the job - a dramatic contrast from most liability conscious American work sites.
State and federal laws require pineros to wear hard hats, cut-resistant chaps and boots, earplugs and face protection when they're thinning with chain saws. In the woods, the laws of the land are optional.
No one was paying attention to OSHA rules at a thinning job in the Bitterroot National Forest in Montana this fall where pineros scrambled across rugged mountain slopes, slashing away with chain saws and gathering trees and limbs into piles.
Most wore no eye or face protection, no earplugs. Several struggled for solid footing in the cheap boots they brought with them from Mexico. On slopes steep enough for skiing, they slipped. They slid. They stumbled.
"This company is not taking safety equipment seriously," said Gustavo Ferman Domínguez, one of the workers. "We have to buy our own gloves. They don't give us goggles for the chain saws. They don't give us boots."
Ferman pulled his own boots off to make a point. "Look at this!" he said, pointing to the soft toes, traction-free soles and a chain saw nick. He had just decided to quit. "It's not worth breaking a leg."
Manuel Burac, Universal's foreman, agreed the workers needed better footwear. "My view is the company should buy them boots," he said.
But safety goggles pose a problem because they fog up. "I haven't been using them myself," Burac said.
What about training? "There was no training," said Luis Andres Molina Hernández, a pinero working for Burac. "They just asked: 'Which one of you guys know how to use a chain saw?' "
Burac was sympathetic, but added that his company routinely hires inexperienced forest workers, making his job more difficult. "I feel the company should be better training all the workers when they get here," he said.
Emergency medical gear was missing, too. When Eliseo Domínguez was hurt one morning, struck below the eye by a branch while cutting a tree without safety goggles, there was no first aid within miles.
The van used to rush the worker to a hospital was littered with empty soda bottles, yogurt cups, a canteen, a deck of cards, a bandana, a rain slicker - everything, it seemed, but a first-aid kit. "Someone cleaned the van out one day," said Felix Rodriguez, the Universal employee who drove to the emergency room that day. "And they took it."
The morning Carlos Valdez was blinded in his right eye in the Tahoe National Forest in 2002, safety gear was an issue, too. "He was not wearing his goggles," said Francisco Acevedo, owner of the company doing the work, Redding Tree Growers.
Valdez, though, remembers it differently. "They did not have goggles," he said. "They were not available to me."
Rosie Lopez, who manages safety matters for the company, said ensuring workers wear safety gear is the foreman's job. But she added:
"Some workers decline to use it. They have their rights, too, you know. They have the option and the right to decline what to wear and not to wear."
By law, all serious injuries must be reported to the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health within eight hours. But Valdez's wasn't.
"We have no record of it," said Dean Fryer, a spokesman for the agency. "Without doubt, we should have been notified."
In Oregon, Dan Robertson, the reforestation contractor association president, said underreporting of injuries is widespread. He sees the proof when his own injured workers come to him for advice.
"A lot of guys who come here have never been through a workers' compensation claim," said Robertson, the owner of Professional Reforestation Inc. on the Oregon coast. "And they've been hurt before. You have to explain everything."
Reforestation contractors "aren't reporting their injuries," he said. "They will report the bad ones, you see, because they don't want to pay for it. And they will pay for the minor ones out of their pocket to keep their (insurance) rates down."
Carlos Valdez lost the sight in his right eye when he was injured while clearing brush in the Tahoe National Forest in 2002. The company says Valdez wasn't wearing safety goggles; he says the company never provided them. Sacramento Bee/Hector Amezcua
Redding Tree Growers did inform its insurance company about Valdez, who is receiving a disability payment of $371 per week from the insurer. But Rosie Lopez said she didn't know she was required to tell the state. "I was not aware I was supposed to report it," she said.
Tahoe forest officials weren't notified, either. "Unless we see it or someone informs us, there's not any reason we would know," said Henry Hansen, a contracting officer for the Tahoe National Forest. "It's the contractor's worker and the contractor's responsibility."
After the accident, Valdez prayed often. "I'd get down on my knees and say, 'Please God. I don't want to lose my eye. Please, save my eye.' " At night, asleep, he'd dream he could see.
Twenty-three when he was hurt - now 26 - Valdez said those dreams have faded. But the consequences of living with one eye have not. He lives by himself in a trailer, working as a janitor for a local church, where he also sings in the choir.
"I'm scared," he said. "There are things I'd like to do that I am not able to. I'd like to work in construction - but I can't. I'd like to play ball, but I can't catch the ball the way I used to. Nothing, not even $100,000, can replace an eye."
About the writer:
- The Bee's Tom Knudson can be reached at (530) 582-5336 or tknudson@sacbee.com.