Occupational Health & Safety
cmonforton | April 28, 2011"Pray for the dead. Fight like hell for the living" was the rallying cry of community organizer Mother Jones (a.k.a. Mary Harris Jones, 1837-1930) to fire up workers as they demanded better working conditions and labor rights. The motto still resonates today, especially this week when workers, human rights, and public health advocates commemorate International Worker Memorial Day. Hazards magazine offers a list of events scheduled across the globe and the AFL-CIO provides a list of activities here in the U.S., as does the victims' support group United Support and Memorial for Workplace…
lborkowski | April 27, 2011Those who work to prevent death, disease, and disasters often have a thankless task - if they do their jobs well, people rarely notice. But two OSHA inspectors recently saved workers' lives in a very visible way, and the agency wrote about it on their blog, (Work in Progress).
Trench collapses are an all-too-common occurrence, and workers who are inside trenches when they cave in are often killed -- essentially smothered to death with mud. This is why OSHA requires that trenches (or any construction excavation) deeper than five feet must be protected against collapse. As OSHA notes in its…
lborkowski | April 26, 2011Earlier this month, Yale University student Michele Dufault was killed by lathe equipment at the school's chemistry lab. It appears that she was working alone late at night and her hair got tangled in the machine. Richard Van Noorden of Nature News puts the tragedy in context:
Around the United States, laboratory directors and safety officers immediately checked their own policies on working practices in machine shops. But the accident has also heightened wider concerns about the ever-present tension between research freedom and safe working conditions in academia. And it underscores the slow…
cmonforton | April 22, 2011Earlier this month, in my post "CDC's NIOSH says WHAT about asbestos???" I reported on the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health's (NIOSH) new treatise on asbestos, and my dismay with the agency's characterization of the mineral as a "potential occupational carcinogen." NIOSH's current intelligence bulletins are supposed to convey the most up-to-date scientific information on a hazard and risk of harm from exposure to it. All the leading scientific organizations across the globe, including the World Health Organization's IARC and HHS' National Toxicology Program, recognize…
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…
cmonforton | April 19, 2011[Updated 4/21/2011 below]
[Updated 4/25/2011 below]
Deep in the Bitterroot Mountains of the Idaho panhandle, mine rescue teams are working around the clock to locate Larry "Pete" Marek, 53. Marek and his brother were working in Hecla Mining's Lucky Friday silver mine on Friday afternoon (4/15) when the roof collapsed. His brother Mike escaped, but Larry Marek did not. The "fall of ground" occurred in an area 6,150 feet below the surface in a silver vein that runs 2200 feet, according to information released by the company. Mine rescue teams are using heavy equipment to remove the fallen…
lborkowski | April 15, 2011In much of the reporting I've seen on the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the plant workers are an anonymous, if much-praised, group. The New York Times' Hiroko Tabuchi digs deeper to tell us more about who some of these workers are, and what their experiences can tell us about occupational health and safety in Japan. He begins with the story of 55-year-old Masayuki Ishizawa, who was at the plant when the earthquake struck and had to plead with the security guard to be let out the of the complex to flee the tsunami:
Mr. Ishizawa, who was finally allowed to leave, is not a nuclear specialist; he…
cmonforton | April 12, 2011The practice of posting a notice about meetings between regulated parties and OMB staff began during the GW Bush Administration, not a group known for transparency. Even that very secretive Administration saw the value in informing the public promptly of such meetings. The Obama Administration's OIRA is now 0-2 when it comes to disclosure of meetings about OSHA rules. (Their performance may actually be even worse. For all I know they've had other meetings. We just don't know to look for them on OIRA's website.)
Serious health effects related to overexposure to respirable crystalline…
lborkowski | April 11, 2011Back in August, our New Solutions: The Drawing Board partnership with the journal New Solutions featured a post by Anne Fischel and Lin Nelson about the situation in Cananea, Mexico, where miners have been striking against the Asarco/Grupo Mexico copper operation for more than three years. The miners are demanding improvements not only to unsafe working conditions, but to the local environment.
Fischel and Nelson were part of a group that visited Cananea last year through a tour arranged by the United Association of Labor Education and hosted by an organization of the Mexican Miners Union…
lborkowski | April 8, 2011Last year, psychiatric technician Donna Gross was killed on the job at Napa State Hospital, allegedly by a patient who had a pass that gave him unsupervised access to the grounds. In a two-part series, NPR's Ina Jaffe talks with staff, directors, and patients from two psychiatric hospitals, Napa State Hospital and Atascadero State Hospital, about patient violence.
Both hospitals treat mentally ill patients who arrive through the criminal justice system; Atascadero was designed from the start to treat mentally ill criminal offenders, while Napa had hardly any criminal commitments 20 years ago…
cmonforton | April 5, 2011[Update 4/22/2011: see CDC's NIOSH corrects asbestos statement]
It was almost too much to believe. Here I was attending the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization's (ADAO) annual meeting, mingling and learning from patients and researchers about asbestos-related disease, and I hear that the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has just issued its treatise on asbestos. That document, called a "current intelligence bulletin" is supposed to convey the most up-to-date scientific information on a hazard and risk of harm…
lborkowski | April 5, 2011One year ago, an explosion at Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch Mine in Montcoal, West Virginia killed 29 miners. The Charleston Gazette's Ken Ward Jr., who has covered the disaster and its aftermath extensively, writes today on his Coal Tattoo blog:
Stay tuned today to hear a lot of political leaders talking about coal miners ... They're going to talk about how hard working miners are, and how they put their lives on the line to provide electricity and put food on table for their families. They're going to talk about how we need to remember and honor the dead, and about how these men (well,…
egrossman | April 4, 2011by Elizabeth Grossman
"If I say pollution, the images that first come to mind are likely to be smokestacks, waste pipes, an accident or a disaster. But increasingly, environmental health researchers are focusing on sources that are much closer to home, like toys and beauty products and food packaging and cleaners and furniture. These are now sources of chemicals of interest," said Julia Brody, director of the Silent Spring Institute introducing a session on biomonitoring at this year's American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting held recently in Washington, DC. "The…
lborkowski | April 1, 2011On Black Friday 2008 at a Wal-Mart store in Valley Stream, Long Island, 34-year-old worker Jdimytai Damour was killed by a stampede of shoppers. In a New Yorker article on crowd disasters, Jon Seabrook reports that the official cause of death was asphyxiation, as it often the case in crowd-related deaths. The crowd's force pushed the store's sliding glass doors from their frames; one of them apparently fell on top of Damour, and his co-workers didn't see what happened after that. Damour had been working at the store for about a week, and none of his training addressed security or crowd…
cmonforton | March 30, 2011If you want to keep all your digits and limbs, you probably want to avoid working at Anheuser-Busch's Metal Container Corp., in Arnold, Missouri. That worksite was recently cited by OSHA for hazards related to incidents last fall in which one worker lost fingers in machinery, and another worker had a foot amputated because of a forklift incident. The 13 serious and one willful violation come with a proposed $107,200 penalty. Those two work-related amputations are just two of the estimated 3.9 million cases of injuries and illness that occur each year in U.S. workplaces. About a third of…
cmonforton | March 28, 2011One week from today will mark the first anniversary of the Upper Big Branch coal mine disaster where 29 men lost their lives from an enormous and powerful explosion. Those left behind--the parents, spouses, children and friends---have lives that are changed forever. Ken Ward and Gary Harki of the Charleston (WV) Gazette share a touching story of Ms. Bobbie Pauley, a rare female coal miner who worked at the Upper Big Branch mine. It's a must read story. Bobbie Pauley lost her love, Boone Payne, 53, on that fateful April 5, 2010 afternoon. He was a roof bolter with the 9-man headgate 22…
cmonforton | March 25, 2011The New York Times'' headline read: STREET STREWN WITH BODIES; PILES OF DEAD INSIDE. The article went on this way:
"Nothing like it has been seen in New York since the burning of the General Slocum. The fire was practically all over in half an hour. ...it was the most murderous fire that New York has seen in many years. The victims...were mostly girls of 16 to 23 years of age. They were employed at making shirtwaists by the Traingle Waist Company. ...Most of them could barely speak English. Most of them came from Brooklyn. Almost all were the main support of their hard-working…
lborkowski | March 24, 2011Mitsuru Obe reports in today's Wall Street Journal that three workers at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant have been exposed to moderately high levels of radiation, due to contact with radiactive water on the ground. Their reported exposures of 170 to 180 millisieverts are less than the new emergency limit of 250 millisieverts, but more than the usual limit of 100 millisieverts for workers' exposure during recovery efforts.
This follows an earlier report from the New York Times that five workers have died since the quake and 22 more injured, 11 of those in a hydrogen explosion. Those…
cmonforton | March 21, 2011Monique Harper, 41, had a beautiful smile that family and friends will never forget. "Monique was the most hilarious and free-spirited person you will ever meet," said one of her sisters. "She was a mother that loved her children, family and friends." Monique Harper's contagious smile and free spirit are now only memories. She was one of the 26 U.S. workers killed in 2010 after being engulfed in grain at storage facilities that hold billions of bushels of harvested corn, soybeans, wheat, barley, and rice. Another 25 workers in 2010 were trapped in grain, but were rescued.
Entrapments and…
cmonforton | March 18, 2011Imagine testifying before a congressional committee as the head of the FDIC and you're asked "do the vast majority of banks care deeply and passionately about their customers?" Or as the head of the FAA and you're asked "do you think the vast majority of airlines care deeply and passionately about their passengers?" Or the head of a State Insurance Bureau and you're asked "do you think the vast majority of HMO's care deeply and passionately about their policy holders?" That's one of the odd questions posed to OSHA chief David Michaels,PhD, MPH at a hearing on March 16 before a subcommittee…