Koch Foods of Gainesville, LLC., was cited for exposing employees to amputation hazards; and failing to provide fall protection, identify which employees were using hazardous energy control locks, and train employees exposed to noise hazards. Proposed penalties total $208,977.

The victims include a Bible college student in Iowa who was bicycling home from work, a 13-year-old Michigan boy riding in his older sister’s car and a Minnesota school bus driver picking up the morning newspaper in front of his home. All were killed in recent years by distracted drivers who had been texting or looking at their GPS. Yet none of the drivers responsible for those deaths spent more than a few days behind bars.

The mystery of why two people failed to exit a burning school bus last December in Pottawattamie County, Iowa may never be solved, because the equipment that videotaped the bus’ interior was severely damaged by the fire. That limitation will not stop the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) from forging ahead with its investigation into the early morning Dec. 12, 2017 incident that killed the 74-year-old driver and a 16-year-old student.

A manufacturer of storage tanks and pressure vessels for the petrochemical, paper, and energy industries sharply reduced its recordable injury rate after reaching out to OSHA’s On-Site Consultation Program to help it identify and reduce workplace hazards. James Machine Works, LLC (JMW), which has been family owned for three generations, has grown from three to 160 employees since it was founded in 1927.

An oil and gas industry organization has developed a set of tools intended to help make the business case for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). IPIECA, the oil and gas industry association’s for environmental and social issues, says the tools can also be used to improve internal company due diligence processes for social performance.

A federal jury in Atlanta has convicted a former co-owner of a staffing company of convincing job applicants they needed OSHA training certificates for positions that did not require them – and then selling them the certifications. Erick Powell who operated the National Vocation Group, was convicted of wire fraud. A second defendant and co-owner, Ahmad McCormick, pleaded guilty to wire fraud on August 31, 2017.

In a startling new report released by the CDC, researchers identified 204–389 deaths among adults that occurred annually between 1999 and 2016 that could be attributable to occupational exposures -- and were therefore potentially preventable. The fatality figures cited represent an estimated 11-21 percent of all adult asthma deaths.

The President and CEO of Amtrak is laying the blame for Sunday’s fatal train collision in South Carolina on CSX Corp. Amtrak engineer Michael Kempf, 54 and 36-year-old conductor Michael Cella were killed and more than 100 people were injured – two of them critically - when an Amtrak passenger train slammed into a CSX freight train that was parked on a side track.

Although tobacco control measures have reduced overall smoking rates in the United States (from 42% in 1965 to 15% in 2015), a new report says several vulnerable subpopulations continue to smoke at high rates. The report by American Cancer Society (ACS) investigators calls high rates of smoking among specific subpopulations one of the most pressing challenges facing the tobacco control community.