Abstract: At approximately 11:50 a.m. on December 17, 2005, Employee #1 was working as a truck driver for the Food Express, Inc., at the flour unloading area of the Mission Foods, Inc., facility in Rancho Cucamonga, CA. His employer is a trucking company primarily engaged in the transportation of flour for commercial outfits. Employee #1 was a regular employee of the employer. He was cleaning a mixture of dirt and flour from inside a 9.5 inch long section of a receiving pipe of an automatically operated Salina Vortex overflow valve. This connected to silos for loading flour from the tank trailer. As he was cleaning the mixture with his left hand, the slide plate of the gate valve suddenly came down on his index and middle fingers, amputating those two fingers. Employee #1 was taken to the Loma Linda University Medical Center in Loma Linda, CA, for treatment. Surgery was performed, and Employee #1 was hospitalized for three days.