![\"\"](\"http:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/Homero-Levario-Juarez-300x258.jpg\" "\\"Homero")
<\/a>Homero Levario Juarez from Lehigh Acres, who fell to his death this week at a St. Petersburg water treatment plant, had always worked with his hands. For decades, he took construction jobs all over the country.<\/p>\n
But when Juarez met his wife about 20 years ago, he wanted to stay close. He got a job at Spectrum Contracting in Naples, eventually taking a supervisor position and working mainly in Lee County.<\/p>\n
A few weeks ago, he accepted a rare assignment that would take him away from his family for an extended period of time. He and his crew were contracted to do maintenance work at the city of St. Petersburg’s Northwest Water Reclamation Treatment Facility at 7500 26th Ave. N. His family was expecting him to return home for the holiday weekend.<\/p>\n
Something went wrong about 11:15 a.m. Thursday. Juarez, authorities said, fell off a platform and dropped 30 feet to the concrete bottom of a 5 million-gallon water tank.<\/p>\n
Officials initially said Juarez, who was doing maintenance on the wall of the tank, did not appear to be wearing a safety harness.<\/p>\n
But police on Friday said Juarez was wearing a harness \u2014 but it wasn’t tethered to anything. Investigators said Juarez was inside the basket of a scissor lift and was working with a pressurized liquid concrete hose. They believe that once the hose was charged, it caused a recoil at the nozzle, which Juarez was holding.<\/p>\n
The jolt propelled Juarez backward and out of the basket.<\/p>\n
The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration is investigating.<\/p>\n
About 4:30 a.m. Thursday, he called his wife to make sure she was awake for her part-time cleaning job. He told her he loved her, and called her Sweetie Pie.<\/p>\n
Several hours later, Juarez’s bosses told his family he was dead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Homero Levario Juarez from Lehigh Acres, who fell to his death this week at a St. Petersburg water treatment plant, had always worked with his hands. For decades, he took… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":21781,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,32],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21780"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21780"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21780\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}