The American Industrial Hygiene Association (AIHA®) is pleased to announce they have received two dotCOMM awards, a Platinum award in for their second IH Heroes comic On the Fly and a gold award for AIHA's Annual Report.

Organizations who want help paying for mine safety education and training have until August 23rd to apply for a Brookwood-Sago grant. The Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) has announced the availability of up to $250,000 in funding through the program, which supports training to help miners identify, avoid, and prevent unsafe working conditions in their workspaces.

The captain of a tourist duck boat that sank near Branson, Missouri July 19 briefed his passengers about how to use life jackets before the amphibious vehicle entered the water, according to National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) technicians, who’ve been studying a recording from “Stretch Boat 7.” Seventeen people died when the amphibious vehicle sank in Table Rock Lake during a severe storm.

A 28-year-old man who died July 12 was the fifth construction worker killed on the job in New York City in 2018, according to news sources. Angel Espinoza was killed when he was hit on the head by a beam that fell 12 stories from a scaffold that was being dismantled on the roof of a building in the city’s Morningside Heights neighborhood. Espinoza was part of a crew working on a residential building affiliated with Columbia University.

The Indiana Occupational Safety and Health Administration found five serious safety violations at the ArcelorMittal Indiana Harbor steel mill in East Chicago after the death of a steelworker there in a Taylor Dunn buggy accident in December.

OSHA has announced that it will issue a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that will remove provisions of the "Improve Tracking of Workplace Injuries and Illnesses" rule requiring companies with 250 or more workers to electronically submit data from the OSHA 300 Log of Work-Related Injuries and Illnesses and OSHA 301 Injury and Illness Incident Report.

After reaching a low point in the late 1990s, the national prevalence of coal worker’s pneumoconiosis (black lung) in miners with 25 years or more of tenure now exceeds 10 percent and in some areas is much higher than that, according to a study published in the American Public Health Association’s American Journal of Public Health.

Companies with higher 'culture of health' assessment scores (CHAS) show more progress toward controlling health care costs, reports a study in the June Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. "Higher CHAS scores are generally correlated with lower health care cost trend," according to the new research by Sharon Glave Frazee, PhD, MPH, of Frazee Research & Consulting, LLC, Beaufort, N.C. "As culture of health scores improve, healthcare cost trends moderate."

An explosion onboard a towboat that killed three workers has resulted in OSHA issuing a total of 55 violations to five companies. The January 2018 incident in Calvert City, Kentucky shipyard occurred when employees were cutting and welding in an atmosphere containing flammable gases. In addition to the fatalities, three workers were critically injured.

Battery energy storage and solar systems are revolutionizing the nation’s electrical infrastructure and creating a strong commercial and consumer interest, with the number of residential battery energy storage system (ESS) installs during the first quarter of 2018 increasing nine-fold over 2017 Q1 figures, according to PV Magazine. That number equaled totals from the previous three quarters.