A death that occurred this week at Tesla’s Gigafactory in Texas has sparked an investigation from a federal agency, after one patient was confirmed deceased following a cardiac event.
Austin-Travis County EMS told KVUE on Thursday that it had been dispatched to Tesla’s Gigafactory in Austin, Texas, where they say a person was in cardiac arrest before being rushed to the hospital. The patient was in criticial condition, and the Travis County Sheriff’s Department also said deputies were deployed to Giga Texas after being notified of a “deceased person.”
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has opened an investigation into the incident, and details are still limited at the time of writing. The agency has also said it will not be sharing any more details until the investigation has been completed in its entirety.
It’s not clear whether the individual was an employee of Tesla or if they were a contractor, and there is currently no known cause of death.
At the time of writing, Tesla has not responded to Teslarati’s request for comment on the matter.
Drone pilots and site observers Joe Tegtmeyer and Brad Sloan noted on Thursday that the news could be related to a temporary work stoppage on the site’s South extension, which is eventually expected to house a massive supercomputer cluster that will be used to train Tesla’s neural network for Full Self-Driving (FSD).
Reports in early April suggest that Tesla was the largest private employer in Austin, with the company employing around 22,777 workers in the Texas state capitol. Tesla also launched multiple rounds of layoffs across its global workforce in late April and May, with the company thought to have let go of between 10 and 20 percent of workers before re-hiring some of them in the subsequent weeks.
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