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In 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil tragedy struck and took the nation’s attention for months. Two-hundred million gallons of oil spilled, 16,000 miles is the range it spread across the coastline from Florida to Texas, 8,000 animals were killed, and 11 workers were killed due to the explosion. Communities around the Gulf of Mexico came to a halt, but lurking underneath this disaster was an older spill spewing from an oil platform that was damaged six years earlier.

A lockout tagout safety center, dust and fume collectors and hard hits that fit were among the top occupational safety and health products featured on ISHN.com this week.

Robotics pose safety challenges in the workplace, Tennessee ash coal cleanup workers win a legal victory and an air traffic controller starts slurring her words while on duty. These were among the top occupational safety and health stories featured on ISHN.com this week.

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.

Errors made in the design of a 174-foot-long pedestrian bridge in Miami contributed to the fatal collapse of the structure on March 15, 2018, according to an investigative update issued today by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). The bridge was intended to let Florida International University students cross safely over a busy highway.

Robots are becoming increasingly popular in workplaces around the globe, especially cobots, the machines designed to work next to humans. But when considering implementing any technology, it's essential to keep safety at the forefront. What possibilities exist for robots malfunctioning and hurting people or otherwise compromising worker well-being?

Without saying why, federal traffic safety officials have quietly altered crash data, revealing that more than three times as many people die in wrecks linked to tire failures than previously acknowledged. For several years, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) stated that the annual death toll from tire-related crashes was 200. Then last year NHTSA abruptly ramped up the estimate, stating on its website that 719 people had died in 2015 in such crashes.

How confident are you that a costly, serious safety event isn’t just around the next corner? If your organization has ever been surprised or caught off-guard by a sudden deterioration in its safety performance, it may be that you’re simply not getting the whole picture when it comes to operational risk.

Was it drugs or alcohol? A medical emergency? Federal officials aren’t saying, but an air traffic controller at the Las Vegas tower had to be removed from her position last week after she began slurring her words and giving incoherent commands to pilots – then stopped talking altogether.

Private industry employers reported nearly 45,800 fewer nonfatal injury and illness cases in 2017 compared to a year earlier, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data released last week. The BLS’ Survey of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses (SOII) tallied approximately 2.8 million nonfatal workplace injuries and illnesses reported by private industry employers in 2017, which occurred at a rate of 2.8 cases per 100 full-time equivalent (FTE) workers.