Criminal charges have been dropped against Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway (MMA), according to Quebec’s Director of Criminal and Penal Prosecutions (DPCP), for causing the deaths of 47 people when 73 cars of highly combustible crude oil derailed in the small Quebec town of Lac-Mégantic in 2013 turning the downtown into a raging inferno.
In our previous two columns on this subject, developing an actionable safety plan is covered in three parts. First Actions was explained in Part One (October 2017 ISHN) and Core Actions detailed in Part Two (January 2018 ISHN). The rest of this column focuses on Sustaining Actions.
Why are we still talking and writing about confined space training a quarter century after OSHA issued its confined space standard for general industry in 1993?
Internal audits are a fact of life for many environment, health and safety professionals -- especially those working for large companies. I recently had a discussion with a long-time Phylmar client about internal safety audits. There is a lot of guidance and advice available on how to prepare for such audits and how to create corrective action plans to respond to audit findings.
Recently, I did some health and safety “due diligence” consulting work for a client who wanted to acquire a small, 65-employee business. I thoroughly enjoyed meeting with supervisors and employees and touring the facility and was struck by two important findings: this small company didn’t have much by way of written programs that supported health and safety regulatory compliance AND it had a remarkably good safety record -- one that much larger companies would envy.
If there’s a workplace fatality, or if injury/illness rates are too high, or workplace hazards and risks are perceived to be great, employers, disgruntled workers and outside interested parties, such as OSHA, often seek an EHS revolution -- rapid fundamental change.
Owens Corning has a unique safety-centric relationship with an art museum, the Toledo Museum of Art. Toledo is the home to Owens Corning, a $5.2 billion manufacturer of insulation, roofing and fiberglass composites with 17,000 employees in 33 countries.
Expectations drive both the leader and follower. Various forms of research suggest that when leaders have higher types of expectations for their followers, those followers often live up to the expectations.
A best practice is often not what everyone else is doing, but is what is possible to achieve. Convincing someone of what is possible to achieve requires persuasive techniques that rely more on appeals rather than force.
We live, we love, we learn, and we leave a legacy.” This profound quotation from Stephen R. Covey has fueled my motivation to keep teaching at Virginia Tech well beyond retirement age and a comfortable pension.
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