Articles Tagged with ''first responder safety''

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency must consider tightening its corrosive dust limits, after a lawsuit filed on behalf of the World Trade Center first responders who sustained lung damage after toiling in heavily polluted air in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has determined that the March 30, 2013 crash of an Alaska Department of Public Safety helicopter was caused by the pilot’s decision to continue flying into deteriorating weather conditions as well as the department’s “punitive culture and inadequate safety management.”

The federal government must help train emergency personnel and provide updated safety guidelines so the workers are better protected against hazards such as they faced at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, according to a public health workshop report by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, a component of the federal National Institutes of Health.

OSHA has just published a new booklet that outlines safe procedures for emergency responders who may face fires and explosions caused by combustible dust. "Firefighting Precautions at Facilities with Combustible Dust"describes how combustible dust explosions occur and uses historic incidents to illustrate how firefighting operations can prevent combustible dust explosions.

The lessons learned from the deadly 2013 West, Texas explosion and fire are not being passed along to emergency responders in other communities with facilities that store ammonium nitrate (AN), according to the U.S. Chemical Safety Board (CSB).

The traditional occupational safety and health programs of the twentieth century were designed, by and large, to prevent work-related injury, illness, and death in workplaces where hazards usually were recognizable and predictable. In the twenty-first century, scientists and decision-makers have had to develop additional skills and strategies to address another type of hazard: the risks that emergency responders face in the line of duty from unpredictable, uncontrolled conditions encountered in large-scale disasters.