(stirwise)
A postal worker in Florida says a mysterious leaking package coming from Yemen has caused him to be super sick, but the U.S. Postal Service says that package doesn’t even exist, and never has. The man has been to numerous doctors, and none have been able to diagnose his illness.
The Miami Herald has a story from the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting, which says the man claims to have handled a leaking package on Feb. 4, 2011, and that he now suffers from extreme fatigue, tremors, and liver and neurological problems, symptoms consistent with toxic exposure.
However, the USPS says the man was never exposed to a potentially toxic package. It hasn’t offered a comment on the case but a lawyer did acknowledge that a “harmless spill” had happened on Feb. 2, 2011, but not Feb. 4.
“A review of Postal Service records and multiple inquiries at both the Area and District levels has confirmed — as we previously indicated — that there was no hazardous spill on February 4, 2011 at the Orlando” mail processing center, she wrote.
The man’s coworker says she smelled a noxious odor coming from a mailbag, and the man, who was the shift supervisor monitoring sorting from a platform, came over to investigate and said it was a strong chemical stench he couldn’t identify, coming from a bag wet with a brown substance. He says he remembers the return address as coming from Yemen, and in the bag were tubes and wires sticking out of a broken package.
Since two unsuccessful attempts had been made by al-Qaida months earlier to send bombs through the mail from Yemen, workers had been told to watch out for packages coming from there.
The man says he moved 40 postal employees out of the area and opened the large bay doors to ventilate the space, and moved the bag to a cart and pushed it out to a hazmat shed. He then radioed his manager to alert her of the suspicious spill, and she said the next person on duty would handle it.
He claims afterward that his throat burned and the fumes gave him a headache. The FCIR says the postal service didn’t investigate the package, nor report it to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security as is the protocol.
Ill worker fights postal service over toxic mail [Miami Herald]
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If I came across a package that had noxious odors I would tell everyone to get out and then call hazmat, but maybe that is just me.
Wortked in a mail room for a while. We had a HAZMAT bin to use if we got a suspicious package. You, the person who touched it, were supposed to drop it in there and wait for officials to arrive. And by wait I mean stand there with your hands up not touching anything.
I’d say the guy has a case, in particular because they never reported it to H.S. No investigation means they don’t know what was in it, which means a judge/jury gets to make the assumption it was toxic.
He only has a case if the package actually existed. Isn’t that the crux of it? The USPS claims the event never happened and the package never existed. Some judge will have to decide who is lying about what.
That’s basically what he did.
“Lill admitted he didn’t follow protocol for handling a spill. Rushing to protect fellow employees, Lill did not follow the Postal Service rules that required him to put on a protective suit before handling the parcel. Because of that, he said, liquid from the package touched his skin. It was brown, syrupy and difficult to wash off.”
Yeah, I read the article. But I was responding to this particular comment in which Sean said he’d have sent everyone out and then called hazmat. The guy sent the workers out and then called his supervisors to alert hazmat.
The part where he touches the suspicious substance is kind of relevant to the point.
Tell everyone to get out, play with potentially toxic substance, then call hazmat… I would skip one of those steps.
Yes, but which step to skip??? Hmmmm…. so difficult to tell.
Sounds to me like USPS does not want to pay his medical bills.
Or he was scheduled to lose his job or have his hours cut due to post office cuts and figures that he couldn’t lose his job while out on comp.
“A review of Postal Service records and multiple inquiries at both the Area and District levels has confirmed — as we previously indicated — that there was no hazardous spill”
“but a lawyer did acknowledge that a “harmless spill” had happened on Feb. 2, 2011, but not Feb. 4.”
So it seems there was a spill and now this whole situation revolves around the word “harmless” and who actually decided the spill wasn’t harmless.
“Was”, not wasn’t.
“A spill” on a different day does not mean it’s part of a USPS conspiracy to conceal “THE spill the required 40 employees to evacuate the area and the package to be placed in a hazmat shed”.
It could just mean someone dropped a cup of coffee on Feb 2nd and it was recorded in the log as a ‘harmless spill’.
Companies don’t record spills of truly harmless things like coffee. This was a spill of something that was important enough to log in, and yet they are not saying what that spill was. They are basically clamming up for a reason.
If the coffee destroys/damages someone’s letter or other mailpiece then they need to record it, and deal with getting the damaged letter to the appropriate destination, possibly repackaged into a USPS envelope/package.
When this doesn’t pan out we’ll see this mailman pulling a “slip and fall” at a local grocery store.
Oh yeah, clearly he’s just after a quick buck.
The fuck outta here.
Yeah, there had been warning of bombs and this guy happens to notice a toxic smelling package with “wires sticking out” and he doesn’t alert anyone? Not only should he not get the pay day he’s trying to sneak in but he should be fired for gross negligence.
I smell a big cover up.
My team of high priced corporate lawyers told
me to tell you that that smell is also harmless.
So USPS discovers a busted package from Yemen with wires sticking out and leaking a liquid with a chemical smell and no investigation is done? In fact they have no record of handling it or where it was sent? Did they throw it out, dump it in a river, what??
This is so unbelievably ridiculous they need to make a movie out of it. I feel so bad for that man.
You know, when something’s unbelievably ridiculous, sometimes I just don’t believe it. Gossip is the only thing that travels faster than the speed of light, and there’s just no way postal workers wouldn’t gossip about this. The fact that no one is backing up his story is highly suspicious.
Did you read the linked article? There are people backing him up and there are even some records of the incident turning up.
Yeah except there are several other workers backing up his story.
Starring Bruce Willis as an unlikely hero, who risks his own life to single-handedly stop a terrorist attack that could have killed millions.
I get the feeling that this goes above the USPS trying to cover its own behind. The guy admits that he didn’t follow pretty simple protocol (he didn’t put on a protective suit before moving the package and allowed the liquid to touch his skin), so most of the responsibility for his condition is on him.
That being said, whoever is covering this up (Homeland Security?) really should contact his doctors or just take over his treatment. He shouldn’t suffer like this for being a (well-meaning) dumbass.
Did the enemy have a mole in the USPS that made this package disappear before it could be followed up?
And that was how the zombie apocalypse began…
The non-existent package has been sent to Area 51 for testing on the space aliens we keep there.
Let this be a lesson to all of us: never handle someone else’s leaky package.
HAH! ;-D
This is the kind of rampant fake claims at USPS that are typically used as retirement plans. No oversight, no investigation, no recourse, no downside.
And that’s straight from “Postal Points”, the newsletter of the Postmaster General.
So the guy is faking neurological disorders, organ failure, a bleeding ulcer, and a bleeding esophagus?
UPS seems to be having trouble paying lots of bills lately.