After six months of investigating, federal officials said the company that was building a hangar at the Boise Airport engaged in an “appalling disregard of safety standards” before the hangar collapsed, killing three men.
Occupational Safety and Health Administration inspectors found that Big D Builders, the Meridian contractor, “ignored standard safety procedures and visible warning signs during construction,” the U.S. Department of Labor, which includes OSHA, said in a news release Monday.
“The tragic loss and pain suffered by so many is compounded by the fact that Big D Builders could have prevented all of this from happening,” David Kearns, Boise’s OSHA area director, said in the release. “We cannot put a value on the loss of life, but we will use all our resources to hold employers accountable when they willfully ignore safety regulations and expose workers to serious and fatal injuries.”
The hangar collapsed Jan. 31 while crews were building a 43-foot tall, 39,000-square-foot engineered steel hangar for the Jackson Jet Center. Three people were killed: Big D Builders co-founder Craig Durrant and two construction workers, Mario Sontay Tzi and Mariano “Alex” Coc Och. Another eight workers were injured in the incident, according to OSHA.
From the first day of hangar construction, red flags presented themselves about the lack of the structure’s stability that the contractor should not have ignored or overlooked, Kearns told the Idaho Statesman in a phone interview Monday morning.
“As soon as they put in the first bay, there were issues,” he said. “They appeared to have some waves, there was at least one cable that snapped on the first day, and throughout subsequent days as they continued to erect it, the bends increased and it got worse. It became more evident, and more cables were snapping.”
As a result, OSHA recommended fines totaling nearly $200,000 for Big D for four violations — one willful and three serious — of federal safety regulations. In addition, the regulatory agency also proposed that Inland Crane, the Boise contractor used by Big D, pay more than $10,000 in fines for a serious violation that entailed “failures to ensure stability during the hangar erection process.”
The two workers’ families have filed a lawsuit naming Big D, Inland and others.
“Given the pending lawsuit, we have no comment on the report or its findings,” Big D Builders said in an emailed statement to the Statesman.
Inland Crane, in an email to the Statesman, again extended its condolences to those impacted in the incident. The crane company said OSHA’s findings align with its own “initial impression” that neither the company nor its equipment “contributed to the tragic collapse of the hangar,” though the assertion seemed to conflict with OSHA’s report and recommended fines.
“They were out there, they were involved, they were very familiar with the bending and the waving, the issues with the structure,” Kearns said. “They did express concerns, but they did not take steps to remove workers from the hazard. In the end, they were very fortunate that they did not injure or lose any of their own workers.”
Inland Crane followed up on its initial statement to the Statesman saying that “the Proposed Citation for Inland Crane relates to worker exposure, not causation.”
Big D Builders began the hangar at 4049 W. Wright St. without “sufficient bracing or tensioned guy wires” and “ignored numerous indications that the structure was unstable as workers continued to add 150-foot-long bays” during construction, OSHA said. The ignored warning signs included “visibly curved, bent and wavy structural I-beams, unbalanced columns and several snapped wire rope cables.”
“OSHA found the bays were visibly not straight and that the contractor left many critical connecting bolts loose and, rather than installing additional bracing or temporary guy lines per steel erection industry standards, used straps to straighten the additional spans,” the release said.
Additional findings in the federal workplace safety investigation indicated that Big D Builders risked cranes and other construction equipment overturning when it had employees operate them in mud and standing water. Big D also failed to properly train its employees in the construction of steel spans, according to the report, which relied upon as many as 50 post-incident interviews, Kearns said.
“Big D Builders’ blatant disregard for federal safety regulations cost three workers their lives and caused at least eight others to suffer painful injuries,” Kearns said in the release. “The company’s irresponsible construction methods left the aircraft hangar’s structure extremely vulnerable.”
Big D Builders and Inland Crane received OSHA’s findings, as well as the recommended citations and fines, on Friday, Kearns told the Statesman. From then they had 15 days to either comply, request an informal conference with OSHA or contest the agency’s citations to its review commission, and have already scheduled those informal conferences, Kearns said.
Victims’ families say contractors altered documents
In a July lawsuit, the law firm representing the families of two workers killed in the collapse blamed Big D Builders, Steel Building Systems, Inland Crane and Speck Steel for their loved one’s deaths, the Statesman previously reported .
Enrique Serna, the families’ lawyer, accused the companies of modifying building blueprints — and failing to get the city’s approval for the changes — manufacturing their own “rushed” materials for the structure’s bracing, and allowing work at the site to continue on Jan. 31 despite workers’ reports of “bowing beams” and “snapping cables” the day before.
Serna did not mention the city of Boise or its contracted engineering firm, AHJ Engineers, in the lawsuit, though both were named in a tort claim filed against the city in May. After reviewing public records requested from the city, the law firm said it decided no suit against those entities was warranted.
Several hangar employees told police they had noticed bending beams, snapped cables and overall structural failures, and they brought their concerns to Big D Builders owner Durrant, the Statesman previously reported.
Durrant allegedly told an employee that the engineer told him the building’s frame was fine, because the workers had added straps on the beams, according to the prior Statesman reporting.
“There were plenty of warning signs that things were not right,” Enrique Serna, an attorney representing the families, previously told the Statesman by phone. “They clearly knew that something was off.”
A crane operator for Inland Crane told police that the company was at the site to “straighten out the hangar because portions of it were bending” while another alleged that Big D Builders was cutting corners, according to prior Statesman reporting.
Big D Builders began to demolish and deconstruct the collapsed steel-and-concrete structure in June.
“(The) building (is) to be rebuilt using (the) existing building permit, with modifications to be made to structural drawings,” according a city permit filed by Big D Builders.
Prior OSHA safety violations for Big D
Big D Builders has been registered as a company in Idaho since at least 1996, filings with the Idaho secretary of state showed. The company also operates in Arizona, Nevada, Oregon and Washington, according to the company’s website.
Durrant, who listed himself as owner of Big D since 1991, has maintained a contractor registration in Idaho for the company since 2005, according to records of the Idaho Division of Occupational and Professional Licensing. He has no past disciplinary actions against his registration.
Since 2010, Big D Builders has had more than a dozen construction safety violations, most of which were categorized as “serious,” on other projects throughout the Treasure Valley, according to OSHA online enforcement records and previous Statesman reporting.
The two most recent cases prior to Monday’s findings from OSHA came in 2022 and 2023. Each related to other steel erection activities and a lack of proper safety measures in place to protect workers against falls from as high as 2 1/2 stories. Both cases were resolved, and not a factor as repeat violations in OSHA’s recommended citations and fines of almost $200,000 for the hangar collapse, Kearns told the Statesman.
The violation in 2022, investigated after a complaint was filed, led to a negotiated settlement of $4,315. The 2023 case, which resulted from a referral, led to a $21,875 fine.
Big D Builders faced three other prior serious fall-protection violations after an OSHA inspection of a construction project in Boise in 2017, agency records showed. The company reached a $1,540 settlement, and the case was closed. OSHA records showed no record of any safety violations in the other four states in which Big D operates.
“When you have failure to abate citations or multiple repeat citations, the dollars really go up,” Kearns said. “This was not a repeat and not failure to abate. This was a willful violation related to the stability of the structure.”
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