What Didion Milling's OSHA Record Reveals

On May 31, 2017, a corn dust explosion at Didion Milling's Cambria, Wisconsin facility killed five workers and injured more than a dozen others. Two Didion executives were later convicted under the Occupational Safety and Health Act — a rare criminal prosecution of corporate officers on workplace-safety charges. In June 2025, a federal appeals court upheld those convictions. This past February, the U.S. Chemical Safety Board renewed its call for a federal combustible dust standard, citing Didion among the reasons.

News coverage treats the explosion as a singular event, but the enforcement record tells a different story.

Before the headline

FastDOL's record for Didion Milling, Inc. (Cambria, WI) shows seven OSHA inspections between January 2010 and April 2014 — before the 2017 explosion.

• Jan 2010 — Referral — 2 serious — $3,640
• Aug 2010 — Follow-up — none — $0
• Aug 2010 — Referral — 18 serious — $20,880
• Oct 2010 — Referral — 1 serious — $3,465
• Apr 2012 — Complaint — none — $0
• Jul 2013 — Follow-up — none — $0
• Apr 2014 — Complaint — 1 serious — $2,524

Three referral inspections in a single year. Eighteen serious violations in one August 2010 inspection. That is the pattern a regulator, an insurer, or a vendor-risk team would have seen seven years before the tragedy.

After the tragedy

The inspection triggered by the explosion itself is the largest enforcement action in the record: 17 willful violations, 5 serious, $1,837,861 in June 2017. Willful is the strongest category OSHA has. The enforcement did not stop there:

• Mar 2020 — Referral — 2 serious — $13,359
• Dec 2020 — Egregious — 4 repeat, 10 serious — $312,509
• May 2022 — Complaint — 1 serious, 1 other — $5,128
• Sep 2024 — Follow-up — 1 other — $0

Six fatalities, seven hospitalizations, 63 violations, OSHA Severe Violator Enforcement Program flag. In August 2025, the federal agency said Didion had failed to implement safety recommendations at the site of the 2017 explosion; Didion disputed the claim.

One company, multiple agencies

OSHA is one dataset. FastDOL aggregates 17; for Didion specifically, three agencies have records on file plus an industry-benchmark comparison from BLS:

• Wage and Hour Division: one case, $175,602 in back wages owed
• Environmental Protection Agency: four inspections, twelve quarters out of compliance, $1,110,000 in penalties, classified as a Significant Violator under the Clean Air Act
• BLS industry context: worse than 100% of peers (32 employers in NAICS 311211 — Flour Milling — in Wisconsin)

A single agency's record is a snapshot. Stacked, they show a company repeatedly cited across safety, labor, and environmental domains for fifteen years.

Why this matters

News outlets report what happens. That is their job. Enforcement data shows what happened before what happens — the 18 serious violations in one inspection, the repeat follow-ups, the pattern accumulating quietly, year after year.

Insurance underwriters pricing workers' comp. Staffing compliance officers vetting contractors. Investors doing pre-acquisition diligence. The data is available, but it lives across more than a dozen federal agencies, dozens of APIs, and decades of inconsistent formatting. Finding all the right data to make an informed decision is hard.

What FastDOL does about this

Every number in this post — the twelve inspections, the 18 serious violations in a single 2010 inspection, the $1.1M EPA tally, the peer comparison — came from one search on fastdol.com. The records themselves are all public; FastDOL's job is to aggregate them cleanly so that assembling a picture isn't a multi-day research project. Search by employer name or EIN; data is refreshed nightly. Look up Didion Milling or any US employer.