OSHA
cmonforton | August 27, 2010A classic tool used in public relations is a news release. Companies and other organizations craft these statements to announce new products, activities or accomplishments. Well-written news releases offer the what, where, when, who and why, and are often used "as-is" in trade publications and other print media. A collection of an organization's news release might also reveal its state-of-mind, its priorities and focus. In a sense, a historical record of the issues the organization's leaders believed were deserving of (or needing) public attention.
My interest in news releases stems…
egrossman | August 23, 2010By Elizabeth Grossman
On August 17th the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) held the first public discussion of plans for its Gulf Worker Study - also called the Gulf Long Term Follow-up Study - designed to assess short and long-term health effects associated with BP/Deepwater Horizon oil disaster clean-up work. "Since the spill," said NIEHS director Linda Birnbaum opening the meeting, "NIEHS has assisted with safety training for more than 100,000 workers with courses taught in English, Spanish and Vietnamese. But now it's time to turn our attention to the potential…
cmonforton | August 19, 2010Earlier this month, Labor Secretary Solis proposed more than $16 million in penalties to 17 employers involved in the construction of the Kleen Energy Systems power plant in Middletown, Connecticut. The construction site was the scene of a massive explosion on the morning of February 7 in which Peter Chetulis, Ronald J Crabb, 42, Raymond Dobratz, 58, Chris Walters, 42, and Roy Rushton, 37 were killed; Kenneth Haskell, 37, later died from his injuries. More than 50 other individuals were injured and residents as far as 20 miles away felt the blast.
Investigations by the U.S. Chemical Safety…
lborkowski | August 16, 2010Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health David Michaels has sent a letter to Occupational Safety and Health Administration staff laying out a vision for how OSHA can do a better job of protecting worker health and safety over the coming years. In "OSHA at Forty: New Challenges and New Directions," Michaels gives a quick overview of where the agency stands four decades after its founding:
OSHA has had a huge, positive impact on the country. Fatality and injury rates have dropped markedly since OSHA began in 1971. Enforcement of OSHA's standards for asbestos, benzene,…
lborkowski | August 6, 2010Back in February, an explosion at the Kleen Energy Systems plant in Middletown, Connecticut killed six workers and injured others. Workers had been finishing construction on the natural gas power plant, and natural gas under high pressure was being pumped through new fuel lines to remove debris. Much of this gas was vented into areas where it couldn't disperse properly, and welding was occurring at the same time. Gas contacted an ignition source, and the resulting explosion killed Peter Chetulis, Ronald J. Crabb, Raymond Dobratz, Kenneth Haskell, Roy Rushton, and Chris Walters.
Yesterday,…
lborkowski | August 4, 2010Last week, two workers were killed in an Illinois grain elevator. Alejandro Pacas, 19, and Wyatt Whitebread, 14, were engulfed by shelled corn in the Mount Carroll grain facility, which is owned by Haasbach, LLC. A third victim, Will Piper, 20, was trapped for approximately six hours before responders were able to remove him from the grain bin and transport him by helicopter to a hospital. According to one report, the tragedy occurred when one worker fell into the bin and four others went in to try and help. Two of those workers were able to escape, but the others were not. Far too often,…
lborkowski | July 29, 2010If you've got four minutes, go watch OSHA's video of Diane Lillicrap speaking on crane safety. Diane's son Steven Lillicrap, 21, was killed by a crane at a Missouri construction site in 2009. I wrote yesterday about the importance of OSHA's new crane rule, but Diane conveys it in a much more powerful way.
lborkowski | July 28, 2010Earlier today, OSHA published its long-awaited final rule on cranes and derricks in construction. We've been following this rule's slow progress for two years now, since a March 2008 crane collapse at a New York construction site killed six workers and a tourist. At the time, Celeste pointed out, "OSHA acknowledges that as many as 82 workers are killed each year in crane 'accidents,' and that the 1971-based crane safety standard is outdated."
OSHA actually looked like it was addressing this issue back in 2003, when it established a negotiated rulemaking committee (which included…
lborkowski | July 20, 2010by Elizabeth Grossman
"I want this seafood to be safe. But I want those workers to be as safe as those shrimp and I'm not just going for funny one-liner," said Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) at the conclusion of the July 15th Senate Appropriations Committee's Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies subcommittee hearing on the use of chemical oil dispersants in the Gulf.
"One might say, 'Well, what's Commerce-Justice doing with public health?'" Mikulski asked rhetorically. "Well, we think [about] water quality, the impact on marine life and seafood and what these dispersants mean to…
cmonforton | July 18, 2010Congressman Tom Price MD (R-GA) is apparently offended by the suggestion that some companies are not model employers. During last week's hearing in the House Education and Labor Committee on a bill to modernize a few provisions of the OSHA and MSHA statutes, he seemed annoyed that asst. secretary of labor for OSHA, David Michaels, has characterized some employers as "unscrupulous." The Congressman said:"Secretary Michaels, you have talked a number of times about [quote] unscrupulouos employers [unquote]. Do you want to name any?"
Dr. Michaels responded with one example:"a certain oil…
cmonforton | July 14, 2010Thanks to Frank Gallagher blogging at FireDogLake for providing us the quote of the day courtesy of WYMT-TV in eastern Kentucky. In "US Chamber of Commerce goes astroturfing to sink miner safety bill," he writes about the front-group sponsored by the Chamber and other business groups to oppose legislation to improve federal worker safety laws. (I blogged yesterday about the goup.) Gallagher writes:
WYMT-TV, out of Kentucky...covered the proceedings and featured Mr. Snare in their story, identifying him as not as a representative of the Coalition For Workplace Safety, but instead as a…
cmonforton | July 13, 2010I happened upon a statement issued last week by the Labor Department saying that OSHA was seeking a first-ever "enterprise-wide" remedy to compel the US Postal Service (USPS) to fix electrical hazards in its 350 processing and distribution (P&D) centers. Twenty-nine of the 350 P&D facilities are designated as OSHA VPP sites, but we don't know if any of those sites are plagued with these electrical hazards. In the statement, OSHA Asst. Secretary David Michaels said:"Even though it was aware of the hazards, USPS failed to institute the necessary measures to protect its workers. The…
cmonforton | July 13, 2010The web address is "working for safety.com" but the Coalition for Workplace Safety is just another well-funded attempt by the National Association of Manufacturers, the US Chamber of Commerce, and more than 20 other industry groups to oppose fundamental improvements to the 40 year old OSHA law. Despite their catchy web address, I was hard pressed to find any information about actual workplace safety. For example, descriptions of hazards and how employers should correct them. It's the law, after all, for employers to provide a workplace free of recognized hazards.
The Coalition takes…
cmonforton | July 5, 2010Last fall, acting OSHA chief Jordan Barab said the agency would be beefing up oversight of the 27 State programs that operate their own worker health and safety regulatory and enforcement systems. The OSHA State Plans, as they are known, are typically subject to annual reviews by federal OSHA, but after major lapses in the Nevada OSHA program were exposed, orders came down for more robust evaluations.
At an October 29, 2009 hearing before the House Education and Labor Committee, Barab testified that the results of his agency's review of the Nevada program"convinced me that significant…
lborkowski | July 5, 2010by Eileen Senn, MS
In their new respirator recommendations discussed in my July 1 post, OSHA and NIOSH allow, but do not recommend, the voluntary use of filtering facepiece respirators (dust masks) for Gulf spill workers "when an individual is bothered by non-hazardous levels of hydrocarbon odor and cannot be relocated to another work area." Such hydrocarbon odors are most likely offshore near the leaking oil, burning oil, and dispersant and other chemical applications.
BP has had such a policy on the voluntary offshore use of respirators since the oil spill began. The BP policy states: "3M…
lborkowski | July 1, 2010by Eileen Senn, MS
OSHA and NIOSH have now officially recommended the use of respirators by the offshore Gulf cleanup workers closest to the crude oil, including those drilling relief wells, applying dispersant, and providing support and supplies. While respirators are not generally recommended for onshore and nearshore workers, there are exceptions for workers if they are near to or downwind of burning oil, far from shore, performing high pressure washing, cleaning fresh crude oil from wildlife, or experiencing symptoms or health problems. Recommendations are also given for the care of…
cmonforton | July 1, 2010Cong. George Miller (D-CA) is a man of tough talk and swift action. Today, along with 15 other House members, he introduced H.R. 5663 a bill to upgrade provisions of our nation's key federal workplace health and safety laws. Every year, tens of thousands of workers are killed and made ill because of on-the-job hazards, and this year the toll of death made headline news. The Deepwater Horizon disaster and the Upper Big Branch mine explosion alone cut short the lives of 40 workers, with their coworkers' and families' lives changed forever.
H.R. 5663 will modernize whistleblower protections…
lborkowski | June 29, 2010by Eula Bingham & Anthony Robbins
On April 20th, when the Deepwater Horizon offshore oil rig exploded, eleven workers died. Since then thousands of Gulf Coast citizens have responded to the disaster. Few are professional clean-up workers, but these responders stepped forward rapidly to protect their communities from the consequences of the man-made catastrophe. Health damage to these "workers" may persist long after the booms, berms, and dispersants are gone. They are beginning to report acute symptoms. Obviously they must be protected now, and the protection must also prevent long-…
cmonforton | June 23, 2010When President Obama nominated Prof. Cass Sunstein to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) many of us in the public health community were worried. He was, afterall, an academic who authored a paper entitled, "Is OSHA unconstitutional?" and another "Is the Clean Air Act unconstitutional?" Our colleagues at the Center for Progressive Reform have tried their best to keep an eye on happenings at OIRA under this regulatory czar's leadership. This includes excellent analysis by CPR's James Goodwin on OIRA's meddling in EPA's policy on coal ash waste.
Here are two new…
cmonforton | June 21, 2010When one of the nation's largest mobile cranes--the Versa TC 36000---collapsed on July 18, 2008 at the LyondellBasell refinery in Pasadena, TX, four workers lost their lives:
Marion "Scooter" Hubert Odom III, 41; John D. Henry, 33; Daniel "DJ" Lee Johnson; Rocky Dale Strength, 30. I wrote about this terrible crane disaster at the time, and used the incident to comment on OSHA's failure to issue a more protective rule for cranes and derricks. (A new rule has been in the making at OSHA since at least 2003, and it may be issued in a few months.*)
At the time of the incident, their…