Samsung Electronics said one of the company's chip factory on Tuesday, a carbon dioxide leak occurred, resulting in the death of a worker, two workers were injured. The three were found unconscious in the basement of its semiconductor plant in Suwon City, Samsung said in a statement.
A 24-year-old male worker was pronounced dead a few hours after being taken to the hospital, while the other two workers, aged 26 and 54, remained unconscious.
Some of the copycat equipment works by spraying carbon dioxide, which reduces the oxygen content of the space and deprives the fire of the oxygen it needs to continue burning. Samsung believes the workers caused the carbon dioxide leak while checking the equipment.
Samsung counts itself as a repeat offender when it comes to toxic leaks.In March 2014, a 52-year-old Samsung contract worker died from a carbon dioxide leak while working at a Samsung Electronics research and development center in Suwon, Gyeonggi Province, also due to a carbon dioxide leak. The investigation at the time concluded that a malfunction in the fire suppression system caused the gas to leak.
In addition, in January 2013, a hydrofluoric acid leak occurred at a Samsung chip factory, also in Suwon, when 10 liters of the intensely corrosive hydrofluoric acid evaporated into the air, killing one worker and injuring four others. Samsung was fined $1,000 after the incident.
Before Samsung Electronics, only "Samsung Sanghoe" existed, a trading company founded by Lee Byung-cheol in 1938 to make dried seafood and noodles.
Business was going well, and in 1948, Lee Byung-chul founded Samsung Mulsan (now Samsung Corporation). The boom was short-lived, and Lee Byung-chul was forced to abandon the Seoul-based company due to the war, leaving him with almost nothing.
At this point, Samsung would have been dead, end of story. Lee Byung-chul traveled to Busan to recoup his losses, and he brought Samsung Mulsan back from the brink of death. The war caused the trading company to go up in flames, and within a few years, Lee Byung-chul was investing the money he made into other sub-businesses.
From there, Samsung's path to plutocracy began. Korean plutocrats are a strange thing: large, diverse business groups with one distinct difference from the likes of General Motors. Leadership is not shared with outsiders, and all power is coopted by family members.