Albany City Manager addresses 2 employee on–the–job deaths

ALBANY, Ga. – The City of Albany is speaking up after a year in which two city employees died on–the–job.

CBS 44’s Brian Roche joins us LIVE on North Harding Street.

Brian, what did the city say?

Well, Cameron it was just a couple of months ago that Albany city worker, Sebastian Dykes Jr. died on–the–job working on the sewer here on North Harding Street behind me.

And, after concerns from other city employees and families, the city manager is speaking up.

After a year where the Albany community saw the deaths of city employee Darrious Stephens and Sebastian Dykes Jr. city manager Terrell Jacobs says things need to change.

“We have had failures in regards to certain areas. And, the tragedy of failures is sometimes, you don’t know where you have problems until they happen. And, in these two cases, it was an egregious issue incident that happened and lost two lives and injured another. So, we don’t take this lightly,” said City Manager Terrell Jacobs.

That’s why Jacobs and the City of Albany are working on updating their operating procedures as well as other safety measures to protect city employees, such as multi-man crews.

“We’re going to make it a responsibility of that employee and a responsibility of those supervisors to make sure PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) and all equipment and all necessary thing to make sure that they’re safe, is in place,” said Jacobs.

It isn’t just about trying to minimize risk for city employees either.

As the death of Stephens and Dykes has Jacobs trying to make it up to the families.

“Because we owe it to the families. We owe it to this community, and we owe it to the other employees, because we had a lot of employees grieving for this. We had grief counselors out there to try to talk to some of these employees because they were friends to some of these employees who passed away. And, so, once again, we don’t want employees to feel that they’re not going to work in a safe environment,” said Jacobs.

And, Jacobs gave us a timeline for when all city departments are expected to be up to date with these new operating procedures by.

“I’ve requested all the partners, all the partners have SOPS (Standard Operating Procedures) their best practices in place by the end of this fiscal year, which is June 2025,” said Jacobs.

And, Jacobs wants to stress the Albany Police Department (APD) is leading the investigation into the death of Dykes, but that this is an internal investigation, not a criminal one.

Brian Roche reporting.

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