Contractors Paid the Fines After Georgia Korean Plant Deaths

OSHA closed a forklift death file at Hyundai’s Georgia battery plant with the citation gone and the penalty at $0.

That December 2025 settlement is the quiet end of a bloody stretch. On two consecutive days in May 2025, a contractor died in oxygen-poor air at Hanwha Qcells’s solar works in Bartow County, and a 27-year-old from Michigan was crushed by a falling load at the Hyundai-LG battery site near Savannah. The dead men were contractors. The firms on the federal citations were contractors too.

Firefighters Found Him on Top of a Tank

Around 7:15 p.m. on Monday, May 19, 2025, Cartersville firefighters were called to the Qcells manufacturing site for a medical emergency. They found a man unresponsive on top of a storage tank, with no pulse and not breathing. Oxygen at the top of the tank measured about 15 percent, too low to keep a person alive. Crews used air tanks and monitors to get him down. A deputy coroner pronounced him dead at the scene.

THE QCELLS TANK CALL

• The victim: Marion Jose Rugama, 33, of Norcross, identified by the Bartow County Coroner’s Office.
• The reading: About 15 percent oxygen on top of the tank, with a nitrogen leak treated as the likely cause.
• The place: Hanwha Q Cells Georgia’s plant in White, near Cartersville, on a portion of the works still under construction.

Nitrogen is colorless and odorless. It does not burn and it does not sting. It pushes breathable air out of a space, and a worker can pass out before he knows he is in trouble. An OSHA technical bulletin on the gas is blunt: nitrogen cannot be detected by human senses.

Qcells itself was not cited. On December 4, 2025, the Labor Department named the contractor, Hyoungwon E&C America Inc., and issued two serious citations for failing to protect workers from nitrogen asphyxiation and for failing to train them on nitrogen and oxygen-poor air. Proposed penalties were $20,522. A Qcells spokesperson said the company had worked with investigators and that the loss of life at the Cartersville facility had weighed heavily on everyone involved.

Allen Kowalski Tried to Drain the Load

The next morning, Tuesday, May 20, the Bryan County Sheriff’s Office was dispatched at 10:54 a.m. to the HL-GA Battery Company yard on the Hyundai megasite in Ellabell. Deputies were there by 11:02 a.m. They found 27-year-old Allen Kowalski of Rothbury, Michigan, on the ground near a truck, with a tan metal frame on top of him.

A forklift operator told deputies he had been unloading a metal frame covered in plastic. Water had pooled on the covering and the load had shifted. He and Kowalski started cutting the plastic to drain it. The frame moved again and fell. The operator yelled for Kowalski to get clear. Kowalski could not.

HL-GA Battery is a Hyundai Motor Group and LG Energy Solution joint venture. It sits on the Bryan County megasite beside Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant America, but it is not run by the vehicle plant. Phil Lienert, LG Energy Solution’s lead communications and government affairs manager, said HL-GA was deeply saddened by the death of a subcontractor employee on May 20, 2025, and was supporting an investigation with the subcontractor and with authorities. LG Energy Solution and Hyundai Motor Group issued a joint statement in the same language, calling safety their highest priority. Kowalski’s employer was never named in the public files.

The Bryan County Coroner’s Office confirmed his identity the next day. Deputy Coroner Audie Powell said the cause of death was still pending and that the body was going to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. No foul play was suspected.

OSHA’s Citations Hit the Subcontractors

By late 2025 the May deaths, and the forklift killing that came two months earlier on the same battery site, had turned into a short stack of OSHA files. The pattern is the same in each one. The factory owners talk about safety culture. The citations name someone else.

OSHA PENALTIES ON THE GEORGIA FILES

OSHA opened a forklift accident inspection of HL-GA Battery on June 4, 2025, after Kowalski died. The file carried a $9,268 serious citation. In an informal settlement that citation was deleted. The case closed on December 16, 2025, with a current penalty of $0, the citation deleted in an informal settlement.

The You investigation is the other HL-GA line in that table. OSHA opened it on March 21, 2025, the day he died, and closed it on September 15, 2025. The battery company was cited for failing to send in required injury reports, not for the forklift itself. That penalty started at $1,125 and settled at $675. Beyond Iron, whose driver was on the machine, took the largest You-case fine. SBY America, You’s own firm, took the next one.

A worksite built on layers of subcontractors is a worksite where the name on the factory gate is rarely the name on the death certificate. It is also rarely the name on the OSHA docket. That is how a $7.6 billion campus and a federally financed solar plant can log fatal accidents and still watch the paper land on smaller firms, one of them a 13-person steel crew far from home.

A 60-Foot Fall Came First

Kowalski was the third worker to die on the Hyundai campus since vertical construction began. The first death was not a forklift.

THE DEATHS ON THE GEORGIA KOREAN SITES

1. April 29, 2023: Victor Javier Gamboa Cagiga, 34, a steelworker for Eastern Constructors Inc., falls 60 feet from the paint building at the Hyundai vehicle plant after a sharp beam cuts his safety line.
2. March 21, 2025: Sunbok You, 45, chief executive of subcontractor SBY America, is struck by a forklift at HL-GA Battery around 4:45 p.m., days before the Metaplant’s grand opening.
3. May 19, 2025: Marion Jose Rugama is found dead on a tank at the Qcells site in White.
4. May 20, 2025: Allen Kowalski is crushed by a falling forklift load at HL-GA Battery.

Gamboa was walking the top of the paint building’s steel frame, guiding an I-beam, when he lost his balance. OSHA said the company failed to give workers fall gear that could stand up to sharp edges and failed to pull worn, damaged gear out of service. Eastern Constructors, based in Geismar, Louisiana, had 13 people on the Ellabell site. Since 2016 the firm had already been inspected over four other worker deaths. OSHA cited one willful and one serious violation, proposed $160,724, and placed the contractor in the Severe Violator program.

The risks of serious and fatal injuries for people working at these heights are well-known and no step should ever be overlooked during the process of inspecting the worksite for hazards. Eastern Constructors’ failure to protect its employees from the leading cause of death in the construction industry are inexcusable and resulted in tragic consequences.

Jessica Bookman, OSHA Acting Area Office Director in Savannah, U.S. Department of Labor

Hyundai said it was closing out Eastern’s remaining jobs and expected that work done by December 2023. The campus kept growing. Ground broke in late 2022 on a $7.6 billion, 11-facility complex. The vehicle factory started production in October 2024. OSHA has opened at least 15 investigations on the site, including a pipe explosion that sent a worker to the hospital in March 2025 and other cases of workers hit by moving objects, falls, and an electrocution.

You died 60 days before Kowalski, on the same battery job. A sheriff’s report described him lying behind the forklift with a blood trail about 10 to 15 feet long. An OSHA file later said he had on a black vest and an eye patch over his right eye, not the high-visibility green vest HL-GA required. A safety manager told OSHA the forklift driver, who worked for Beyond Iron, was talking on the phone and ran away without checking on You. Four of the companies in those OSHA files were among the firms named when federal immigration agents raided the battery site on September 4, 2025.

Federal Money Arrived Five Months Before the Death

Rugama died on a construction job that Washington had just finished underwriting. On December 19, 2024, the Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office closed a $1.45 billion loan guarantee to Hanwha Q Cells Georgia, Inc. The money was meant to finish a Cartersville supply-chain plant that would make ingots, wafers, cells, and finished panels under one roof, the first fully integrated silicon solar factory built in the United States in more than a decade.

WHAT THE ENERGY DEPARTMENT FINANCED

• The loan: A $1.45 billion Title 17 guarantee, the federal loan for Georgia solar expansion closed in December 2024.
• The jobs promise: About 1,200 construction jobs and 1,650 full-time operations jobs in Cartersville, plus nearly 6,800 indirect jobs in Bartow and Whitfield counties.
• The output: 3.3 gigawatts of panels a year, enough for half a million households, and a claimed cut of more than 5 million tons of carbon dioxide a year.
• The local share: About 40 to 50 percent of the construction work awarded to contractors from Atlanta and Chattanooga.

Qcells already ran a Dalton, Georgia, factory expanded to 5.1 gigawatts a year. The Cartersville plant was sold as good-paying work next to communities the government’s screening tool flags for poverty, housing, and health burdens. Five months after the loan closed, firefighters were measuring 15 percent oxygen on a tank on that same expansion job, and the citation that followed named Hyoungwon, not Qcells.

Hyundai and Qcells Were Not on the Citations

Hyundai and LG Energy Solution put out condolences and pledged to work with “the subcontractor and relevant authorities.” Qcells said contractor safety was its first concern. None of those parent names appear on the serious citations for the May deaths. Hyoungwon took the nitrogen case. Beyond Iron and SBY America took the You forklift case. HL-GA Battery took a paperwork citation on that file and then watched a $9,268 forklift citation after Kowalski’s death get erased.

The vehicle plant’s first fatality followed the same map. Eastern Constructors, not Hyundai Motor Group, went on the Severe Violator list. Hyundai cut that contractor loose. The campus stayed. The loan stayed. The jobs numbers stayed in the Energy Department’s press release.

What did not stay was the penalty on the Kowalski-era forklift inspection. OSHA issued the citation, sat down with HL-GA Battery, and deleted it. The current penalty on that file is $0.