Mining
sb admin | January 22, 2009Last week The Pump Handle featured an article by Carole Bass entitled Why is Black Lung back? In response, a former coal miner offers his views on why coal miners in the U.S. continue to develop and suffer from this occupational lung disease that is 100% preventable. He writes:
Thank you for your article on the resurrection of black lung disease. As a former coal miner and someone who has worked in the field of workplace health and safety most of my life, I have a few insights that you should consider:
1. NIOSHâs Dr. Petsnok and team have identified a sentinel event regarding the…
sb admin | January 9, 2009The Washington Post reported yesterday that President-elect Obama wants Harvard law professor Cass R. Sunstein to serve as the head of OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs ( OIRA).  I'm not prepared at this point to tangle intellectually with a  magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School, who was a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and a law professor for 27 years.  I am seriously worried, however, by some of what I've read of Professor Sunstein's abundant writings, and how his views may influence efforts to protect public health and the…
sb admin | January 9, 2009Senator Edward Kennedy's Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP Committee) held a hearing today to consider the nomination of Hilda Solis to be the nation's 25 Secretary of Labor. A webcast replay of the proceedings is available (here), as is a copy of Ms. Solis' written testimony. Here are a few highlights from her written remarks:
"The Labor Department just assure that American workers get the pay they have earned working in safe, healthy and fair workplaces. The Labor Department is charged with assuring compliance with dozens of employment laws. I believe…
sb admin | January 8, 2009Mr. Martimiano Torres, 37, was finishing up his 12-hour shift at about 5:30 am at the  Hallett Materials aggregate operation on Oct 1, 2008, when his pick-up truck curved off the road into a dredge pond. He drowned. The surface mine is located in Porter, Texas, outside of Houston, and owned by the multi-national corporation CRH.   MSHA released today its investigation report of the fatality involving Mr. Torres, asserting:
"...the accident occurred because the victim did not maintain control of the pickup truck";Â and
"Root Cause: the victim did not maintain control of the…
sb admin | January 7, 2009What do the Alaska Community Action on Toxics, the Migrant Clinicians Network, Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment, and 65 other organizations have in common? They've all endorsed the "Protecting Workers on the Job Agenda", a collaborative product of the American Public Health Association's Occupational Health and Safety Section and the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health. The platform, released just in time for Labor Secretary-Designee Hilda Solis' confirmation hearing on Friday, outlines seven goals for improving our nationâs programs for preventing work-…
sb admin | January 6, 2009by Carole Bass (posted with permission from the On-Line Journalism Project, New Haven (CT) Independent)
Black lung disease used to be nearly as common as dirty fingernails among American coal miners. Roughly a third of them got the fatal illness. Starting in the 1970s, a federal law slashed that rate by 90 percent. But now it's back.
When Anita Wolfe and her co-workers discovered that the rate of black lung has doubled among U.S. coal miners in recent years, she took it personally. The daughter and granddaughter of West Virginia miners, Wolfe watched her father die of black lung disease…
sb admin | January 5, 2009Like her boss President G.W. Bush, Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao is offering her version of Labor Department history over the last 8 years. She posts prominently on the Department's homepage her "accomplishing milestones for American workers" including the claim:Â
"the current workplace injury and illness rate is at its lowest level in history having dropped 21% since 2002."
I suppose she and those at OSHA who drank the Kool-Aid choose to ignore the empirical evidence that suggests that this substantial decline "corresponds directly with changes in OSHA recordkeeping rules."Â Â […
sb admin | December 23, 2008Updated below ( 12/24/2008 )
Here are just some of the reports coming out of Harriman, Tennessee:
"Millions of yards of ashy sludge broke through a dike at the TVA's (Tennessee Valley Authority) Kingston coal-fired plant, covering hundreds of acres, knocking one home off its foundation, and putting environmentalists on edge about toxic chemicals that might be seeping into the ground and flowing downriver. One neighborhing family said the disaster was no surprise because they have watched the 1960's era ash pond's mini-blowouts off-and-on for years."  [The Tennesseean, here]
Jim Bruggers…
sb admin | December 19, 2008The National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (National COSH) is thrilled by President-elect Obama's selection of Cong. Hilda Solis to serve as Secretary of Labor.
"Rep. Solis has been a leader in fighting for healthier communities, a cleaner environment, and economic justice for the most vulnerable in society. We believe that she will have the vision and political will to oversee a much needed overhaul of the nation's system for ensuring worker safety, which has failed to provide adequate protections to America's workers over the past eight years." (See full News Release)
There…
sb admin | December 5, 2008The Charleston Gazette's Ken Ward amazes me with his tenacious attention to worker safety, his watchdog instincts, and his exceptional commitment to follow-up.  One of Ward's practices that I especially appreciate is his detailed reporting of worker fatalities in West Virginia. Take for example, the death in March 2008 of Ricky Collins Sr., 44, a truck driver for a subsidiary of Massey Energy.  Ward reported initially on Mr. Collins' death explaining:
"...he was killed Thursday [March 27] when he tried to help free a trailer that was stuck on a steep...or 'humpbacked,' railroad…
sb admin | December 3, 2008From the President who brought you "Clean Skies (cough)" and "Healthy Forests (not)" comes a slashing of the "Buffer Zone" rule which is supposed to prohibit mining companies from dumping waste rock---created by mountaintop removal to extract coal---within 100 feet of streams. As we all know from 3rd grade science class, these small streams flow into larger streams, then creeks and rivers. They are the underpinning of the natural ecosystem---locally and regionally.  Clogging up the headwaters with boulders, rocks and soil, ruins the local ecology and creates havoc downstream.…
sb admin | November 24, 2008Labor Secretary Chao issued her semi-annual regulatory today, listing allegedly the Department's "regulations that have been selected for review or development during the coming year." It all might seem kind of pointless (given that she won't have a say after Jan 20) but the document is in fact enlightening for what it doesn't mention. There's no peep about Asst. Secretary Leon Sequeira's pet project to change the way the MSHA and OSHA assess workers' risk to health hazards, YET on RegInfo.gov, Secretary Chao indicates that the risk assessment rule will be completed by 11/00/08---…
sb admin | November 21, 2008An underground coal miner who works in eastern Kentucky took the next step in his legal battle to force the Secretary of Labor to reduce respirable dust levels in our nation's coal mines. It started in March 2008 when Scott Howard of Lechter County, KY filed a lawsuit in federal court (Howard v. Chao) against the Secretary of Labor and the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) asking the Court to compel the Labor Department to issue a more protective health standard to prevent coal miners from developing black lung.  On Monday, Mr. Howard's attorneys, Nathan Fetty and…
sb admin | November 17, 2008The Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) is under a congressional deadline to complete final rules by December 31 on safety refuges and on conveyor belt flammability and ventilation practices. MSHA sent those documents to OMB on Friday, Nov 14 for final White House review.  Deaths of underground coal miners in 2006 led Congress to pass the MINER Act which included provisions "to study" safety refuges and so-called belt-air practices, and subsequent congressional directives ordered MSHA to complete these two rules by Dec 31, 2008.Â
For more information on the Safety…
sb admin | November 13, 2008Last night, I read a bunch of posts in the blogosphere and then watched a segment on MSNBC's Keith Olberman talking about the Congressional Review Act of 1996 (CRA) and how it could be used to undue regulations issued in these final weeks of the Bush Administration. Some people seem to be chomping at the bit thinking that the CRA is the answer to their disdain for Bush's policies. In the short term, they may be satisfied, but in the long term, the CRA is bad public policy. That's the debate that I wish was taking place.Â
Back to Basic Civics 101. The Congressional Branch…
sb admin | November 11, 2008A wrongful-death lawsuit related to Massey Energy's Aracoma Alma coal mine commenced yesterday in West Virginia courthouse. Mr. Donald Bragg, 33, and Mr. Elvis Hatfield, 46, died in a mine fire on January 19, 2006. According to an Associated Press account (here) the widows' attorney Bruce Stanley told the jury that Massey Energy's CEO, Don Blankenship urged the mine's managers to focus on production, instead of maintenance, dust control or other non-production matters.
"They died over money," Stanley said.
Ken Ward of the Charleston Gazette reports here that the company's…
sb admin | November 10, 2008A former Department of Labor career employee who is expert in administrative law offers three simple steps for the Obama Administration to revitalize the federal rulemaking system. Pete Galvin's open letter to President-elect Obama provides thoughtful insight and recommendations that, if implemented, would go a long way to get our public health agencies (OSHA, MSHA, EPA) back on track for the common good. One in particular might be most difficult for the Obama team to swallow is:
"...trust your appointees to do their jobs without direct oversight by the White House staff.  …
sb admin | November 7, 2008by Bob Snashall, retired Labor Dept employee (Op-Ed Charleston Gazette, Nov 7, 2008)
George W. Bush & Company did one thing well - it bagged a lot of public information and taxidermied it into secrets. The shroud of secrecy even spread over mine safety. Mine safety? The law envisions everybody chipping in to protect miners from the perils of fire, water, gas and roof falls. So it helps the public to know what is going on. My federal legal career spanning 30 years embraced both mine safety and freedom of information.
In a democracy - you know, in a government of, by and for the…
sb admin | November 6, 2008In 1966 when the original Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) became law, President Lyndon B. Johnson said he "signed this measure with a deep sense of pride that the U.S. is an open society in which the peopleâs right to know is cherished and guarded.â The law's purpose is âto establish a general philosophy of full agency disclosure," and records will only be withheld unless they fall into narrow categories, such as national security (i.e., FOIA exemptions).
In my own personal experience with the G.W. Bush Administration, principles of openness and the people's right-to-know have been…
sb admin | October 27, 2008Remember back in early May, when White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten sent a memorandum to all agency heads warning them:
"to resist the historical tendency of administrations to increase regulatory activity in their final months" and
directed, except in extraordinary circumstances, that regulations needed to be proposed by 6/1/08. Well it seems that pretty much everybody in the Administration is ignoring the Bolten memo, with both bad rules (MSHA's mandatory worker drug-testing proposal) and good ones (OSHA's crane safety standard).
Scholars at NYU's Institute for Policy Integrity…