Firefighters found a dead woman entangled in machinery Thursday in a non-public baggage-processing area at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago.
Larry Langford, a spokesperson for the Chicago Fire Department, said firefighters were called to the airport around 7:45 a.m. for a report of a person pinned in machinery used to move baggage. He said they discovered the woman entangled in a conveyer belt system in a baggage room.
Police said she was 57 years old but have not released her name.
The baggage room wasn’t publicly accessible, Langford said, and it’s not clear how she found her way into it. Scott Allen, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Labor, said an official with the Occupational Health and Safety Administration visited the scene and learned the woman was not an airport employee.
They can only really include sensors for weight and stuckage without an expensive retrofit. You can have something that could potentially stop and inappropriate object, probably use it x-rays and computer recognition (or some guy at a monitor) but you see all of that costs money. They don’t want to spend that money. Especially on such a fringe case. And let’s be honest, nobody wants to spend millions of dollars trying to protect the dumbest possible people from themselves. I mean, they say you can’t put a value on human life, but we all know that everybody does anyway. Especially when they’re rich and in a position of any kind of authority.