Workers stay off job after death at Port

The Port of Seattle's container terminals were effectively shut down Thursday night and most of Friday following the death of 42-year-old longshoreman Joseph Aliseo.

The 827 members of the Port's local longshore union elected not to work for about 24 hours after the 8 p.m. death of Aliseo, who was crushed while working at the railway tracks at Terminal 5. Aliseo was helping to lock down containers as they were being loaded two-high onto a rail car.

The closure affected seven ships — three were at berth and four were expected to arrive in Seattle on Friday, said Port spokesman Mick Shultz.

Members of Local 19 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union returned to work at 6 p.m. Friday. Their decision to stop working was out of solidarity for the dead longshoreman, Shultz said. It's custom for longshore workers to walk off the job when a fatality occurs. The union did not return calls for comment Friday.

Longshore workers load and unload cargo as ships are brought into port. According to Port of Seattle statistics, incoming container cargo at the port was 55,742 TEUs (20-foot equivalent units, a standard industry measure for containers) brought into the Port last month, and 54,757 shipped out.

This is the first closure at the port since all West Coast ports were shut down in 2002 for about two weeks as a result of a contract dispute between dockworkers and shipping companies. The Pacific Maritime Association locked out dockworkers in response to what it believed was a coordinated union slowdown that amounted to a "strike with pay."

The Washington State Department of Labor and Industries is conducting an investigation into Aliseo's death and the company involved, Eagle Marine Services, said department spokeswoman Elaine Fischer. Eagle Marine provides terminal operations for cargo shipping in Oakland, Los Angeles and Seattle.

The investigation could last a couple of months. There haven't been any significant safety investigations at the Port of Seattle in the last year and Eagle Marine Services hasn't had any serious incidents since 2002, Fischer said.

The last time a longshoreman died at the Port of Seattle was in 1994, when Terry Keith Ebel, 45, was hit by part of a crane used for handling cargo containers, according to Seattle Times research. That accident also happened at Eagle Marine and closed the Port down.

"We want to know what went wrong — clearly something went wrong and we need to know what happened and why," Fischer said.

Seattle Times researchers David Turim and Miyoko Wolf contributed to this report.

Kirsten Orsini-Meinhard: 206-464-2391 or kmeinhard@seattletimes.com