Occupational Health & Safety
lborkowski | July 22, 2010The Oregonian's Julie Sullivan has been following the story of the National Guard troops who were exposed to the carcinogen hexavalent chromium at the Qarmat Ali water plant in Iraq - which contracting giant KBR was tasked with rebuilding. (Oregonian stories are here; also see our past posts on the subject here, here, and here.) Now, Sullivan reports, US Representative Earl Blumenauer of Oregon has sent a "sharply worded" letter to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates asking for details about an immunity deal that KBR reportedly struck with the Department of Defense. Twenty-six Oregon Army…
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 16, 2010In an amazing and comprehensive report entitled "Picked Apart," the Centro de los Derechos del Migrante and the International Human Rights Law Clinic of American University College of Law reveal the ugly, dark side of the Maryland crab industry. Some employers are skirting the law and exploiting workers hired under the H2-B guestworker program. Many of these workers are women from Mexico who've traveled thousands of miles in a bus to remote villages on Maryland's eastern shore. They'll work during the Blue crab harvesting season, to pick the meat by hand. The H2-B program allows employers…
lborkowski | July 15, 2010Kyle Hopkins of McClatchy follows up on the question of how we learned from the Exxon Valdez disaster about long-term health effects experienced by cleanup workers. In short, we have no peer-reviewed studies on this important topic, even though occupational health experts called for long-term monitoring of workers. Hopkins writes:
Exxon has consistently maintained that there's no evidence spill workers experienced any adverse health effects as a result of the cleanup. Spokeswoman Cynthia Bergman said she isn't aware of any long-term study the company conducted on its own.
"The challenge is…
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…
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…
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…
cmonforton | July 2, 2010The Mine Safety and Health Administration took an important step yesterday to meet a goal set in the Labor Secretary's regulatory agenda: proposing a rule to prevent black lung disease. According to data on RegInfo.gov MSHA submitted yesterday a proposed rule entitled "Lowering Miners' Exposure to Coal Mine Dust Including Continuous Personal Dust Monitors"to OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). Typically, OIRA will take 60-90 days to complete their review.
Mine workers in the U.S. continue to develop debilitating lung diseases from exposure to respirable coal and…
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 30, 2010Mine explosions in China and Columbia in recent weeks have killed a total of 120 mineworkers.
An explosion in a coal mine in Antioquia, Colombia, killed 73 mineworkers; a total of 160 were in the mine at the time of the blast, and 90 escaped. Gas accumulations prevented rescue and recovery teams from entering the mine immediately. RCN Radio reports that in the previous five years, 71 miners were killed and another 4 left missing from 18 explosions in Colombian mines.
Explosives stored in a mine shaft went off and killed 47 miners in the Xingdong No. 2 coal mine in China's Henan province on…
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-…
egrossman | June 28, 2010By Elizabeth Grossman
"This is my place. This is my peace. This is where I come to pray. Now it's damaged for years to come," Dauphin Islander Angela Bonner tells me as we stand on the pier that stretches out over the beach. This fine white sand beach on Alabama's Gulf Coast is nearly empty save for clean-up crews finishing the day's work and several pairs of beach goers. The beach is open but there's a double red-flag advisory warning against going in the water. Regardless, a father and son with boogey-boards leave their bicycles at the end of the pier and head for the water.
"When the oil…
lborkowski | June 25, 2010
New Solutions: The Drawing Board is a monthly feature produced by the journal New Solutions. Read more about it here.
By Richard Clapp
The President's Cancer Panel report released on May 6 had some strong findings and recommendations on ways to reduce the cancer burden caused by workplace exposures. This is welcome news to U.S. workers and trade unions, who have been largely left out of the cancer prevention conversation for the past few decades. Notably, the panel members wrote in their cover letter to President Obama, "With the growing body of evidence linking environmental exposures to…
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…
lborkowski | June 19, 2010by Eileen Senn, MS
It seems obvious to many that respirators are needed to protect cleanup workers in the Gulf from inhaling air contaminants that are making some sick now and may make many more chronically ill in the future. I will describe a combination of political and scientific issues conspiring to prevent the needed respirators from being provided. They include:
*Lack of focus on the adverse health effects of airborne contaminants
*Limited air sampling
*Outdated exposure limits
*Oil company protocols for limiting respirator use
*Concerns that respirators will worsen heat stress to…
lborkowski | June 17, 2010It's appropriate for BP to dedicate $20 billion to an escrow fund for oil-spill claims, and I hope the fund's independent administration will allow for quick payment of claims. Nicholas Beaudrot points out that the fund's structure means BP has an incentive to resolve claims quickly - in contrast to the 20 years that it took ExxonMobil to pay claims related to the Valdez oil spill.
Though the process of compensating financial losses will be complicated, it's far easier to quantify lost income than to tally the costs to Gulf residents' mental health. The New York Times' Mireya Navarro focuses…