Ada Gabi Gutierrez Castañeda, 18, took a job this summer at Pacific Seafood in Warrenton to help support her family after her mother’s hours at another seafood processor were cut amid the coronavirus pandemic.
When the virus then infected nearly 100 workers from Pacific Seafood’s Warrenton facility, including Gutierrez, the company publicly blamed a Labor Day party some employees attended. But Gutierrez, who didn’t go to that party, thinks she got the virus on the job. The company’s own internal emails show that most of those infected live in off-site housing that Pacific Seafood arranged, and that only eight initial cases were linked to the party.
Oregon farms and food processing facilities have been linked to more than 50 coronavirus outbreaks since March, infecting more than 1,500 workers and close contacts, according to an analysis by The Oregonian/OregonLive. Those infections have had profound effects on small communities from Hermiston to Newport, which have suffered some of Oregon’s biggest outbreaks despite their size and relative isolation.
The circumstances behind Pacific Seafood’s Warrenton outbreak illustrate how complicated these incidents are, and may shed a light on why Oregon has been unable to prevent a number of similar outbreaks around the state.
HOW THE VIRUS SPREAD
Pacific Seafood’s Warrenton outbreak has infected 95 employees since early September, marking the third-largest outbreak at a food processing plant in Oregon to date. No employees have been hospitalized, according to the company.
It is the second outbreak linked to Pacific Seafood’s Warrenton facility following an outbreak that infected 15 people in May. Additionally, one worker tested positive before starting work at the facility in June. Another outbreak at Pacific Seafood’s facilities in Newport in June infected 187 people and remains the second-largest workplace outbreak in the state, outside of the prison system. Additional small outbreaks occurred at Pacific Seafood’s facilities in Clackamas and Charleston.
After learning early last month that eight workers from the Warrenton facility had tested positive for the virus, Pacific Seafood tested an additional 295 employees, starting with night shift employees and seasonal workers who live in off-site housing arranged by Pacific Seafood. Those tests revealed an additional 87 positive cases.
Pacific Seafood quickly tied the outbreak to a Labor Day celebration that took place outside of work and was not organized by the company. But in an email obtained by The Oregonian/OregonLive, Bill Hueffner, senior director of marketing and development at Pacific Seafood, said that only the eight early cases could be clearly traced to the Labor Day gathering.
According to the email sent by Hueffner, “the vast majority of workers who subsequently tested positive reside in the off-site seasonal housing at an area hotel.” A spokesman for Pacific Seafood said the eight workers who initially tested positive live in the off-site hotel.
Pacific Seafood works with local hotel operators and short-term accommodation provides to coordinate and subsidize housing for seasonal employees brought in from elsewhere in the United States and foreign workers on temporary H2-B visas. The housing sites are not owned or managed by Pacific Seafood.
It’s not clear whether infections first spread among workers who attended the party, or if they first spread at worker housing or perhaps at Pacific Seafood itself. And the long incubation period of the virus and limitations of contact tracing mean it may be impossible to ever know for sure.
However, Gutierrez, who lives with her family in Astoria, believes she contracted COVID-19 during the night shift at Pacific Seafood.
She credits Pacific Seafood with taking steps to protect workers, including implementing daily temperature checks and providing masks. Pacific Seafood’s coronavirus safety plan also includes measures around social distancing, maintaining heightened cleaning procedures and ensuring adequate ventilation within facilities, among other things.
But Gutierrez said employees -- and even supervisors -- at the Warrenton facility would take their masks off during their shifts and that certain tasks required workers to stand shoulder-to-shoulder without any barriers separating them. She said she didn’t know of any workers who complained about possible breaches in safety measures, but also said supervisors would often refuse to talk to workers who didn’t speak English.
Gutierrez worked at Pacific Seafood from June until September when she left the job to return to school. She clocked out for the last time on the morning of Sept. 6, the day before Labor Day. Later that week, she started having trouble breathing. After a coworker from Pacific Seafood informed her that he had tested positive for COVID-19, Gutierrez decided to get tested and soon learned she had the virus. She has since recovered.
“That’s the only logical place I could have caught it because all I would do is work and then come home and sleep and come back to work,” Gutierrez said.
Oregon Health Authority director Patrick Allen said in a town hall with community members last week that tracking how a workplace outbreak originated and spread can be difficult. The agency organized the town hall after U.S. Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, D-Oregon, expressed concerns that the community lacked information about the outbreak.
“Outbreaks like this are complicated,” Allen said. “They can involve things like social events, people who have contact with other members of their household as well as employment. So, all of these things can work together to cause the number of cases to build up. It’s not so simple to point to just a particular event or a particular place and say that was the cause of the outbreak.”
OREGON OSHA’S RESPONSE
Brandie Hogg, director of team members services at Pacific Seafood, said the company has implemented stringent safety measures at their facilities since the start of the pandemic and has asked employees to adhere to similar safety measures at home and at off-site housing.
Additionally, she said the company ensured that no more than two workers were assigned to any given room at off-site hotels. She said the company also took steps to ensure there was additional spacing and mandatory mask wearing in private transportation that Pacific Seafood provided to bring employees to work.
Since the outbreak, Pacific Seafood has worked with the Oregon Health Authority to have staff on-site at the hotel to ensure that quarantine requirements are followed and help deliver food and supplies to workers.
“We really care about our team members and this community that we’ve been a part of since 1983,” Hogg said. “We have always rallied around our team in tough times. … During this pandemic, we continue that promise to do everything we can to support our team and the community, keeping each other safe.”
But Oregon’s Occupational Safety and Health division (Oregon OSHA), which is tasked with enforcing the state’s workplace safety and health rules, has never conducted a formal enforceable inspection at Pacific Seafood’s facilities to ensure that pandemic-related safety measures are being followed as reported. At least 317 cases have been linked to the company from five outbreaks across four locations.
Oregon OSHA also doesn’t have the jurisdiction to inspect the off-site housing facilities where Pacific Seafood workers stay. The agency adopted a temporary rule in June at the urging of worker advocates meant to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 within employer-provided housing. It has since inspected just three labor housing facilities, issuing one citation. But the labor housing must be employer-owned and operated to fall under Oregon OSHA’s jurisdiction.
“This is a lodging facility that the employer has arranged to house people at,” said OSHA Administrator Michael Wood. “That’s different from employer-provided and operated labor housing. The only jurisdiction we would have over the hotel would be in regard to the employees of the hotel.”
Oregon is currently in the process of adopting new temporary rules to beef up workplace standards in an attempt to stop the spread of the virus. And the state already initiated an emphasis program for the food processing industry after a spate of outbreaks early in the pandemic, allowing more resources to be put toward proactively inspecting food processors. Oregon OSHA has also responded to workplace inspection requests from the Oregon Health Authority.
But the vast majority of inspections conducted by Oregon OSHA this year have been in response to the more than 11,000 complaints the agency has received regarding concerns related to workplace conditions amid the pandemic. Wood acknowledged there are concerns that agricultural and food processing workers, in particular, may not file complaints because of fear that they could lose their paycheck or face retaliation.
The majority of workplaces will never be inspected, even if there are complaints. Even in a typical year when it isn’t inundated with complaints, the agency only has the resources to inspect 2.5% of workplaces.
“The threshold that it would take to get an inspection initiated in normal times would probably be lower,” Wood said. “But as we make those decisions, we have to consider the rest of the workload and the complaint volume, including sites where we’ve had multiple complaints from workers about exposures and we haven’t necessarily inspected yet.”
OUTBREAKS AT PACIFIC SEAFOOD
That state’s response doesn’t change, even if a company has been linked to multiple outbreaks.
Wood said that Oregon OSHA does not initiate an inspection solely in response to an outbreak because the state doesn’t want to deter employers from testing workers. The state has not required mandatory coronavirus testing for food processing workers, something workers advocates and Clatsop County have sought.
Oregon OSHA has received seven complaints since March relating to Pacific Seafood facilities, four of which had to do with processing operations.
The only complaint related to the Warrenton facility was resolved without an inspection. The anonymous complaint claimed that Pacific Seafood workers were being required to return to work in May after testing positive for COVID-19. Oregon OSHA couldn’t reach the complainant and resolved the complaint after being told by Pacific Seafood and local health authorities that no employees were being told to come to work after testing positive.
Pacific Seafood’s safety plan requires workers to quarantine after testing positive for COVID-19, but allows for close contacts who test negative and aren’t exhibiting symptoms to return to work immediately.
That appears to have become a point of contention between Pacific Seafood and Clatsop County after a worker from Moldova tested positive upon arrival in Warrenton in June, according to emails reviewed by The Oregonian/OregonLive. County officials wanted close contacts who traveled with the worker to quarantine but Pacific Seafood pointed to the state’s investigative guidelines, which allow for asymptomatic exposed workers in essential industries to return to work during the quarantine period if accommodations are made to prevent possible exposure to other staff.
According to The Daily Astorian, the Oregon Health Authority took over contact tracing among Pacific Seafood workers after the dispute and took the lead following the outbreak at the Warrenton facility in September.
A spokesman for the Oregon Health Authority said the agency stepped in to provide assistance at the request of the county following the September outbreak, but the Daily Astorian reported that Clatsop County wants to be the lead agency responding to any future coronavirus outbreaks at Pacific Seafood in Warrenton.
Following the September outbreak, Pacific Seafood had both workers who tested positive and their close contacts quarantine, according to the Oregon Health Authority.
The September outbreak in Warrenton led Gov. Kate Brown to put Clatsop County on the state’s coronavirus watch list. It also prompted the Warrenton-Hammond School District to close schools for in-person instruction.
Pacific Seafood voluntarily suspended all operations on Sept. 24 after the extent of the outbreak became clear. The company began reopening on Sept. 30, bringing back a group of workers who had tested negative and had not been deemed close contacts. An additional group of workers who had previously tested positive but had completed their quarantine periods and been symptom-free for three days were brought back to work last weekend.
“We are quickly approaching the end of our first testing group’s quarantine periods and will continue to work with the Oregon Health Authority to create a plan to safely return them back to work in a phased reopening of our operation,” Hogg said.
-- Jamie Goldberg | jgoldberg@oregonian.com | @jamiebgoldberg