By noon, the 52-year-old container checker was dead.

There are several conflicting versions of what happened to Holst that day last year. But each account ends the same way: Holst's co-workers found his body pinned under a 20-ton container.

His widow, Jean Holst, and her attorneys allege in a lawsuit that equipment owned by the State Ports Authority was ill-designed and, as a result, dangerous. They say the crane operator who lowered the container on top of Ed Holst couldn't see clearly around the machine and hadn't been trained properly.

In its defense, the State Ports Authority maintains that Holst was walking around among a stack of moving containers and hadn't used his radio to notify the crane operator of his location.

The state Department of Labor, in its investigation of the accident, determined Holst was killed because he wasn't wearing a reflective safety vest. His employer that day, the stevedoring firm APM Terminals, was cited for the safety violation.

Holst, who had spent 30 years on the waterfront, worked hard, his family and co-workers say. His workdays frequently stretched to 12 hours or more, and his workweeks often were as long as 80 hours.

He was one of the thousands of men and women who have become accustomed to the often hard (and well-paid) work on the waterfront, where containers keep coming off ships even through pounding rain and wind, where the workday is never 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and where danger lurks around every container edge.

Holst was one of three people who died during the past year while doing that job. They were the first deaths at South Carolina ports in four years.

With cargo shipments flooding in from around the globe, 2004 was a record year for S.C. ports. But it also was a year marked by an unprecedented number of deaths and serious injuries on the docks.

The string of accidents reveals a system over which the State Ports Authority has little control, despite its role as terminal manager. A lot of that power resides, instead, in the hands of the union that represents dockworkers and the private stevedoring firms that hire them.

The events of the past year have put the state at the center of a heated debate over whether injuries on America's docks are getting more severe as port terminals get busier.

Specifically, that debate has called into question whether safety training, employee screening and equipment checks at the Port of Charleston, the fourth-largest container port in the country, are adequate, or whether the welfare of dockworkers is increasingly left at risk at the expense of commerce.

While various training requirements are in place, the level and type of training that workers receive depend on whether they are employees of the State Ports Authority or union laborers.

Enforcement of existing safety rules also is an issue, as is oversight of the waterfront, with unions, stevedoring firms and the SPA each involved, though often without full coordination.

In short, safety at the port appears to be a point of contention rather than a shared goal.

Some say workers themselves bear part of the responsibility, given their willingness to push their own physical limits to collect as much pay as possible in jobs where earnings for seasoned hands can top six figures. That said, some workers say the fast pace of port activity often makes it difficult to turn down high-pressure requests from management to stay on the job. Federal and state regulators have set no restrictions on the number of back-to-back hours maritime employees can work.

The issue of excess overtime for SPA crane operators came up during a ports board meeting last week, when executives debated whether to hire more crane operators to keep up with increased cargo moving across the docks.

While the number of containers has increased rapidly in the past three years, staffing for crane operators has remained relatively stable. Shipping schedules also often coincide at the Port of Charleston so that several ships arrive at the same time or right after one another, usually on the weekends.

"We've seen a lot of cases of people working back-to-back shifts," said Bill McLean, vice president of operations for the SPA. "Instead of working eight hours and going home for eight, they're working 16, they're working 24. We're starting to get a little concerned about it."

Hoping to address these issues, the SPA and the labor groups that represent most of the port workers started holding formal safety talks for the first time late last year. Those conversations began only after several accidents shook up the port community.

Thus far, the talks have yielded little in terms of developing a uniform approach to safety policies that can spell the difference between life and death.

The divide between the various groups running the show on the docks and the differences in their policies have been blamed for many of the problems identified in the wake of the accidents.

Union labor tends to point the finger at everyone else.

"The stevedoring companies have had the ability to do something," said union checker Stephen Hayes. "They put the unions in a bad spot because even if we know one of our guys isn't up to par, it's up to us to stand up for him. The state ports (authority) has no clue what really goes on out there. They're making an attempt and I've got to give them credit, but (some of the accidents) never should have been allowed to happen."

Management, meanwhile, blames labor leaders for insisting on doing things their way on the docks.

Some accidents might have been unavoidable despite the rules. Port officials point out the inherent danger of work at the port and the relatively good safety record the state-run terminals have had during the past few decades.

In some accidents, equipment failed. In one, a longshoreman who wasn't wearing a safety vest was crushed under a container. One union dockworker, who has a long criminal history and no driver's license, was arrested and charged with reckless homicide after driving a cargo truck over a stevedore supervisor, instantly killing him.

The accidents happened at different locations within different terminals, and they involved different segments of the work force and different kinds of equipment. No company or agency has escaped scrutiny.

The authority and two stevedoring firms that coordinate the loading and unloading of ships have been cited in three incidents for breaking federal and state rules that govern safety on the docks. The authority is disputing the citation.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which monitors port accidents, still is investigating a November incident that left two men critically injured.

"What I've seen happen here in the last few months has been the most freak thing I've ever seen," said Marshall Stone, operations safety manager for the SPA. "I hope it's an anomaly. I haven't seen anything like it. Ever."

Additional Stories

Danger on the Docks

Who's who on the waterfront

Labor, SPA relations marked by tension