A 40-year-old maintenance worker died this Wednesday in a work accident at the industrial technicentre in Bischheim, in Alsace, we learned Thursday from the SNCF and union sources.
A judicial investigation and an internal investigation were launched to shed light on the circumstances of this accident.
These fatal accidents are “rare” on the maintenance site, which employs around 900 people, according to Régis Hoffmann, general secretary CFDT cheminots Grand Est, interviewed by AFP.
“We are on a closed site with fairly low (train) movements,” said the trade unionist, according to whom this death “creates a particular stir within the community”.
However, he assures that there had been “no previous alert on working conditions” in this structure.
Family father
Sud-Rail, for its part, mentions “a coupling maneuver which went badly”, with an agent who gave instructions by radio.
“The agent on the radio having no more news, rushed and saw that the colleague was in bed,” said Alexandre Welsch, regional secretary of SUD-Rail Alsace.
The SNCF confirmed the occurrence of this fatal work accident, without providing further details at this stage.
The agent, father of a family, was neither a temporary worker nor a fixed-term contract, according to Mr. Hoffmann, who mentions an SNCF agent with a seniority of around “fifteen years”, in post for “a year and a half or two” in this industrial site.
SUD-Rail denounced a deterioration in working and safety conditions, which leads to a “multiplication of incidents and non-compliant situations”, in a leaflet distributed Thursday evening.