- One of the employees killed in the Illinois Amazon collapse told his girlfriend that he was barred from leaving the warehouse before the tornado hit.
- “He always tells me when he is filling up the Amazon truck when he is getting ready to go back … I was like ‘OK, I love you.’ He’s like, ‘well Amazon won’t let me leave until after the storm blows over,'” Cherie explained.
- “It’s that what-if situation: what if they would have let him leave? He could have made it home,” she lamented, saying later that their children were not coping well with the loss.
Sophia Ankel from Insider writes:
“An Amazon worker who was killed in the Edwardsville, Illinois, warehouse collapse wasn’t allowed to leave as a tornado was approaching, his girlfriend told the New York Post.
Larry Virden, who started working for Amazon five months ago, was among the six employees who died in the destruction. A large wall in the warehouse and a section of roof collapsed.
Virden’s girlfriend, Cherie Jones, told the Post in an article published Sunday that she was texting him shortly before.
“He always tells me when he is filling up the Amazon truck when he is getting ready to go back … I was like ‘OK, I love you.’ He’s like, ‘well Amazon won’t let me leave until after the storm blows over,'” she told the Post.
Jones told the Post that Virden texted her 16 minutes before the tornado was said to have touched down. She said this was enough time to get back to their house in nearby Collinsville, which she said was a 13-minute drive away.
“We heard the tornado didn’t touch down until 8:39 so he had 20 minutes to get home,” she told the Post…”
See full story here.
Categories: Business, Economy, Infrastructure, Labor
Economic Left 
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