While 2018 has been a banner year so far for equipment manufacturers, the long-term future of the industry and the markets it serves is – and likely will remain – far less certain.

The variety of hazards for which a Miami, Florida bakery was cited may be surprising to some, but it illustrates the range of dangers to which workers in a large commercial bakery operations may be exposed.

People employed in farming, fishing, and forestry and construction and extraction – among the most hazardous occupations in the U.S. - have the highest prevalences of not having health insurance.

That the opioid crisis is wreaking havoc on individuals’ lives, tearing families apart and straining municipal emergency response resources is well documented. What is getting less attention is the effects opioid use and misuse may have in the workplace – and the role of work-related injuries in making a person susceptible to opioid addiction.

A fatigue crack was the probable cause of a 2017 pipeline rupture in South Dakota that spilled thousands of gallons of crude oil, according to a pipeline accident brief released by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB).

The statistics are shocking. On average, one child dies from heatstroke in a vehicle nearly every 10 days in the United States. Since 1998, there have been 760 pediatric vehicular heatstroke deaths – including 18 already this year.

OSHA recently issued several new publications providing solutions to hazards in specific occupations and industries:

"MARLEY was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge’s name was good upon ‘Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to."

After a six-month investigation, OSHA has issued citations to the employer of an Ohio man killed in a trench collapse last December – and they weren’t the first for the company. In the most recent fatality, JK Excavating & Utilities, Inc. employee Zach Hess died when a trench he was working in collapsed.

I took a week off compiling this list. No change in the deadly work that American workers do, except that workers have fewer rights than they did two weeks ago — especially public employees. In other news, the Senate Appropriations Committee passed an appropriations bill requiring OSHA to start listing names of workers killed on their homepage again, but we will continue with the Weekly Toll here at Confined Space.