safety
cmonforton | July 23, 2014[Updated below (9/5/14)]
Jose Alfredo Isagirrez-Mejia, 29, suffered fatal traumatic injuries on Monday, July 21 while working at a construction site in Fort Lauderdale, FL. The incident occurred on a $15 million project managed by Miller Construction Company. It’s the future site of a BMW/MINI dealership and service complex.
Local10.com reports the following about the incident:
a ceiling roof beam “came crashing down”
three workers were lowering the beam in place with a crane. “Something went wrong and it struck all three workers.”
The Sun-Sentinel reports:
a carpenter who was an eye-witness…
kkrisberg | July 18, 2014When Bethany Boggess first debuted her online mapping project, she didn’t expect it to attract so much attention. But within just six months of its launch, people from all over the world are sending in reports and helping her build a dynamic picture of the lives and deaths of workers.
The project is called the Global Worker Watch and it’s quite literally a living map of worker fatalities and catastrophes from around the globe. When you go to the site, you’ll see a world map speckled with blue dots, each representing a reported occupational death, illness or disaster. Here are just a few I…
cmonforton | July 17, 2014Flashback to February 2009. The economy was in the tank. President Obama was marking his second month in office. Congress passed and the President signed H.R. 1, the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009,” which authorized $800 billion in government spending to stimulate the economy. $800 Billion is not chump change, and who would get the money was on people’s minds. The President understood
“It’s your money. You deserve to know where it’s going and how it’s spent.”
His answer: the Recovery.gov website, which launched on February 17, 2009.
I never had a reason to visit the site…
cmonforton | July 10, 2014[Update below]
Chandler Warren, 19, suffered fatal traumatic injuries on Wednesday, July 2, 2014 while working at FedEx’s World Hub in Memphis, Tennessee.
WAFF reports that the Memphis Fire Department received a call at about 2:53 a.m. about the incident.
WREG reports “a loader that lifts containers onto aircraft came crashing down.”
FOX13 reports Warren was new on the job and was working as a material handler at the facility. He underwent emergency surgery for injuries that his father said were "worse than he could have ever imagined." The 19 year old survived the surgery, but succumbed to…
cmonforton | July 9, 2014Testing to make sure a train’s brakes work properly shouldn’t be controversial. But some railroad employees have lost their jobs because they insisted on the safety checks. Oregon Public Broadcasting's Tony Schick explains the situation in “Rail workers raise doubts about safety culture as oil trains roll on.”
Schick profiles the experience of Curtis Rookaird, a BNSF train conductor. Rookaird was fired in 2010 after he raised safety complaints, including about the need to conduct air brake testing on a set of railcars. OSHA investigated Rookaird’s whistleblower complaint. The agency agreed…
kkrisberg | July 8, 2014Vaccine safety is one of those topics that has become so tragically mired in misinformation and myth that there can never be enough supporting evidence. So, here’s some more.
In a systematic review of the scientific literature on childhood immunizations that will be published in the August issue of Pediatrics, researchers found that vaccine-related adverse events are “extremely rare” and that — once again — the measles/mumps/rubella vaccine (MMR) is not associated with autism.
Overall, the study found that while the risks associated with childhood vaccines are not zero, the evidence shows…
kkrisberg | July 3, 2014Crystalline silica, hydrofluoric acid and formaldehyde. Those are just three of the dozens of air toxic chemicals that oil companies have used thousands of times in southern California in just the past year.
The data has come to light thanks to new reporting rules adopted in 2013 by the South Coast Air Quality Management District, which now requires oil and gas well operators to disclose the chemicals they use in oil and gas operations. According to a recently released analysis of the first year’s worth of reported data, oil companies used 44 different air toxic chemicals more than 5,000…
gregladen | July 2, 2014Earlier this week a dude driving a truck while texting meandered off the road and ran over a woman, killing her. More horrifically, she was on a bike towing a child trailer occupied by her two children, one and four years of age, so they got to watch their mom die. The man who apparently killed this woman, on a road in southern Minnesota, is Christopher Weber of Madison, South Dakota. Apparently he was texting. Assuming this happened as reported, we have here a case of someone being a complete moron and a lot of other people paying a terrible price. "A person who ... causes the death of…
oracknows | July 2, 2014Can we just say that vaccines are safe, already? Can we just say that, of all the medical interventions ever conceived by the minds of humans, vaccines have almost certainly saved more lives and prevented more illness? Can we finally say that vaccines do not cause autism?
Of course not, unfortunately. I ask the same question about whether we can finally say that the earth isn’t 6,000 years old, but rather billions of years old, and there are still people out there who believe that evolution is a sham and the earth really is only 6,000 years old. Truly, the irrationality of humans is without…
kkrisberg | July 1, 2014The U.S. Supreme Court released two big decisions yesterday. The first, which you’ve probably heard about, ruled that for-profit companies can deny female employees insurance coverage for birth control if it conflicts with their religious beliefs. (For more on the potential consequences of this outrageous and offensive decision, read this great piece in Slate. Also, since this is the Occupational Health News Roundup, it bears mentioning that in her dissent, Justice Ginsburg noted that the cost of an IUD is about a month’s full-time pay for a worker earning minimum wage.) But in addition to…
cmonforton | June 26, 2014Luis Castaneda Gomez, 34 and Jesus Martinez Benitez, 32 were asphyxiated in June 2011 when they were doing repairs inside a manhole. Their employer, Triangle Grading and Paving, was hired by the City of Durham, NC to make water line repairs. The firm had a history of violating worker safety regulations. Worse yet, it was not the first time an employee of Triangle Grading was killed on-the-job.
Durham, like most municipalities, did not have effective policies in place to guard against giving business to safety scofflaws. But that changed in Durham when it adopted a policy in 2012 requiring all…
egrossman | June 25, 2014When a widely used chemical is identified as an environmental health hazard and targeted for phase-out and elimination, among the most challenging questions for those involved with using and making such a chemical are: What to use instead? and Will the replacement be safe? The US Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) report identifying alternatives to the flame retardant hexabromocyclododecane (HBCD) illustrates how difficult those questions can be to answer. It also highlights how important it is to consider the entire life-cycle of finished products when looking for hazardous chemical…
cmonforton | June 24, 2014Jason Nolte, 31, suffered fatal traumatic injuries on Saturday, June 21 while working at a window company in Aurora, Colorado. Local stations KMGH, KDVR and KUSA provides some initial information on Nolte’s death:
The incident occurred at about 8:30 a.m. at Manko Window Systems
Nolte was helping to unload two crates of glass
Nolte was crushed by the 4,000 pound load
A former employee of the facility said it wasn't the first time that glass fell on a worker at the plant. He said he'd give their safety program a D-minus grade.
OSHA will conduct a post-fatality inspection of the plant. If the…
cmonforton | June 23, 2014The June 2014 news on UCLA chemistry professor Patrick G. Harran’s website announces his lab’s award of an NIH grant. I wonder if it will be updated with his other news for the month?
Last week, Harran settled criminal charges with the Los Angeles County district attorney (DA) for the work-related death of Sheri Sangji, 23. Sangji was a research assistant in Harran’s lab. She'd only been on the job a few months. She was hired primarily to set up lab equipment, but on Dec. 29, 2008 she was assigned to use tert-butyllithium (tBuLi). The highly reactive liquid ignites spontaneously when exposed…
kkrisberg | June 20, 2014Building safe ways for children to bike and walk to school is more than just a way of encouraging kids to go outside and get active. According to a new study, it’s also an investment that reaps millions of dollars in societal gains. In other words, smart walking and biking infrastructures for kids make good economic sense.
Published in the July issue of the American Journal of Public Health, the study examined the cost-effectiveness of Safe Routes to School (SRTS) infrastructure in just one city — New York City. SRTS was initially enacted in 2005 as part of a massive federal transportation…
cmonforton | June 19, 2014Motivational speaker Kina Repp shares a dramatic story when she addresses audiences at occupational health and safety conferences. In 1990, Repp lost her arm in a piece of machinery when she was working at a seafood canning plant in Alaska. She was a college student trying to earn money for college tuition. It was Repp’s first day on the job----only 40 minutes into her shift----when the machine caught her arm. Repp not only lost her arm, her shoulder blade was torn off, she had a broken collarbone, a severe neck injury and a collapsed lung.
Repp was the keynote speaker at a recent conference…
kkrisberg | June 17, 2014Just yesterday, the Obama administration announced it would take executive action to protect certain workers against discrimination based on sexual orientation. The Associated Press reports that the president plans to sign an executive order prohibiting federal contractors from discriminating against workers based on sexual orientation and gender identity. The order is estimated to protect about 14 million workers who are not currently protected against such discrimination. The administration did not say exactly when the president would sign the executive order.
The Associated Press article…
egrossman | June 12, 2014Following the deadly April 17, 2013 explosion at the West, Texas West Fertilizer Company plant that killed fifteen people and injured hundreds – and a series of other catastrophic incidents involving hazardous materials – President Obama issued Executive Order 13650. It directed federal agencies to improve the safety and security of chemical facilities to reduce risks to workers, communities and first responders. To do so it established a working group, led by the Department of Labor, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Department of Homeland Security, that would report back to the…
cmonforton | June 12, 2014Getting to the truth about the 2010 Upper Big Branch disaster (UBB) is what they wanted. The families of the 29 coal miners who were killed in the Massey Energy coal mine in Raleigh County, WV looked to the investigators for the answers. Jim Beck was instrumental in providing them those answers. Beck was part of the six-person Governor’s Independent Investigation Panel, and he was a key player in finding out the truth. Jim Beck died last week at age 61 from metastatic stomach cancer.
“Jim and his team gave me and the other 28 families of UBB the truth of what happened to our loved ones,”…
cmonforton | June 10, 2014Chris Williamson, 39, was electrocuted on Thursday, June 5 while making repairs to restore electrical service in the City of Florence, Alabama. Williamson worked for the city’s Electricity Department. Tom Smith with TimesDaily.com provides some initial information about the lineman’s death:
A storm earlier in the day caused a tree to fall on an electrical line in the Hickory Hills area of Florence.
Mayor Mickey Haddock said tree crews were dispatched to the scene to clear the fallen tree debris. Williamson was called upon to isolate the damaged line from the main feed.
Williamson was working…