cleanup
lborkowski | November 8, 2012Cleanup and recovery from Sandy's devastation is a daunting task, and presents several hazards. Laura Walter at EHS Today describes several hazards in the cleanup work and ways to avoid them. The hazards include musculoskeletal injuries from lifting heavy watersoaked items, contaminated standing water, mold and mildew, electrical wires, and stress. An OSHA Hurricane Sandy Cleanup and Recovery page offers detailed fact sheets and quick cards on these and other hazards, with most offered in both English and Spanish.
Stephen Lee reports in Bloomberg BNA that labor and business groups have…
lborkowski | August 10, 2011Jim Salter of the Associated Press reports that many law enforcement agencies are reducing their attempts to shut down methamphetamine manufacturing because they can no longer afford to clean up the labs.
Brian Freskos of North Carolina's Star News reported back in May that Congress has generally appropriated $10 million for meth lab cleanup annually, and the Druge Enforcement Agency has administered the funds - but this year, the money ran out in February. Freskos writes:
For decades, when police found a meth lab, the federal government funded what was essentially hazardous waste removal.…
egrossman | April 20, 2011by Elizabeth Grossman
When the BP/Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded on April 20, 2010, killing 11 of the 126 workers on board and critically injuring three, the ruptured Macondo well - located nearly a mile beneath the sea surface about 50 miles southeast of Venice, Louisiana - unleashed what has been called the largest accidental release of oil in history. By the time the well was capped on July 15th, an estimated five million barrels of oil had flowed into the Gulf of Mexico, affecting more than 350 miles of Gulf Coast, from Louisiana to Florida.
The clean-up response launched has also…
egrossman | July 8, 2010By Elizabeth Grossman
"I've never seen anything like it," says David Willman, who has nearly 15 years' experience captaining supply boats that support oil rigs and drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. "We're seeing pods of whales and dolphins out in the oil and lots of dead things," he tells me. "Things I've never seen before coming up from the deep that look like sea cucumbers floating dead. Man o' wars floating dead with shriveled tentacles." Willman is captain of the Noonie G., an 111-foot supply boat owned by Guilbeau Marine, a company based in Cut Off, LA. He's been working out of…