OSHA State Plans: love ’em or hate ’em, but we have to live with them.
The Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting, Ohio Valley ReSource and the Center for Public Integrity have just put out a devastating series of articles and audio reports about serious flaws in Kentucky’s state run OSHA program, and raised serious questions about the ability of many of OSHA’s other twenty-seven state plans to protect workers effectively.
Holland Township, MN — A man tiling a field in central Minnesota died on Friday morning in a workplace accident. The construction company employee was installing drainage tile in the field near 60th Street SW and 150th Avenue SW in Holland Township when the accident was reported just before noon.
OSHA has cited Northeast Framing Inc. – based in Lunenberg, Massachusetts – for exposing workers to falls and other hazards following an employee’s fatal fall at an East Boston, Massachusetts, worksite in May 2018. The company faces $311,330 in penalties, the maximum allowed by law.
Personal flotation devices (PFDs) save lives – especially in the commercial fishing industry, one of the most dangerous occupations, with a fatality rate in the U.S. 29 times higher than the national average.
A federal grand jury in the Northern District of Ohio has indicted two managers at Extrudex Aluminum Inc. in Ohio for conspiracy to obstruct justice during a 2012 workplace fatality investigation by OSHA. The agency inspected the aluminum extrusion manufacturer after an employee suffered fatal injuries when a rack containing hot aluminum parts tipped over and pinned him. A second employee suffered severe burns.
Just before a deadly train collision in Granite Canyon, Wyoming, the crew of one of the trains involved radioed the company dispatch center to tell them that due to problems with the train’s airbrake system, they’d accelerated to 50 mph and were unable to stop.
The engineer and conductor of that UP freight train would both die a short time later, when their train collided with the rear of a stationary UP freight train.
Following the death of an employee in a trench collapse, Arrow Plumbing LLC has admitted to willfully violating OSHA safety standards by failing to require and enforce the use of trench boxes or other trench protection techniques at a home construction site in Belton, Missouri.
Extreme weather appears to be a factor in the fatal collapse of a wall Friday night at an Amazon warehouse in Baltimore. Two workers were killed in the incident at the online retailer’s southeast Baltimore fulfillment center, which occurred during a severe storm that tore roofs of apartment buildings in the area and caused a ceiling to collapse at a store, injuring three people.
In the oil and gas industry the higher the rig count shows good signs of an oil boom, but that also means there could be more people in the oil field that lack experience.
“Have accidents increased in West Texas and in the nation as a whole for oil and gas? Yeah, absolutely but so has the workload. We have over 1,000 rigs operating in the US," said Chantell Schneider, Pro Mainland Safety.
The rural plains of North Dakota are lonely and unforgiving. This is the flattened, semi-industrial part of the state, where the infrastructure of oil production—oil and natural gas holding tanks connected to pipelines and nearby pump jacks – is omnipresent.
