popular logistics

Celeste Monforton, one of the core people that make The Pump Handle such an outstanding source of public health information, puts recent deaths related to cranes in context. We’ve had nine this year in New York, and locals may think the only reason is lax and corrupt local enforcement. Read Four dead, seven injured in Houston crane collapse.

In the meantime, some data points to consider:

1. OSHA’s own crane-regulation rules committee has written to the Secretary of Labor, expressing their unhappiness that the Department of Labor hasn’t yet enacted a rule that they’d expected to be promulgated in 2006.
2. In that year, 2006, 72 people died in crane-related accidents.
3. Secretary Chao is creating with her risk assessment proposal. a distraction - rather than going ahead and publishing the proposed rule which is ready to go.

When a subcontracting firm - the “John Galt Corporation” - is named for the protagonist in an anti-union, anti-government-regulator novel (Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead) it is to be hoped that at least one decision-maker would have thought it disturbing to put such a firm in charge of safety. (See David W. Dunlap’s “A Literary Footnote to a Fire: John Galt,” on the Times’s City Room Blog.

John Galt Corporation and Bovis Lend-Lease are accused of safety violations which led to the deaths of two firefighters. William K. Rashbaum and Charles V. Bagli, “Bank Tower Contractors Accused of 44 Violations,” The New York Times, February 20th, 2008. Rashbaum and Bagli report that the staff of the New York County District Attorney’s Office have been presentign evidence to a grand jury.

Celeste Monforton of The Pump Handle has a disturbing account of the current status of the Crandall Canyon disaster: Congress has cancelled scheduled hearings; even more disturbing, there’s an emerging record of failure(s)  to report hazards  as required - and  what appears to  have been the  willful destruction of evidence. 

Disturbing any way you look at it - assuming that you think workplaces ought to be safe. (If you don’t think that, I’m afraid my advocacy skills may not be up to the challenge).

Link to Dr. Monforton’s piece at The Pump Handle.  We’ll try to follow up.

Celeste Monforton reminds us that at year’s end, the Secretary of Labor is required to make public certain filings:

It’s that time of year—time for the Secretary of Labor to issue her semi-annual regulatory agenda. Look for its publication in the Federal Register around the second week of December.I’ll be curious to see OSHA’s timetable for action on diacetyl, the butter-flavoring agent associated with severe lung disease in exposed workers.

* Will OSHA list diacetyl on its reg agenda?
* Will it provide a target date for publishing a proposed rule?

I’ll also be eager to see OSHA’s latest schedule for proposed rules to address:

* Hearing conservation for construction workers (who are not included in OSHA’s 1983 noise-control rule)
o Current target date: Undetermined. Will OSHA provide a date for proposing a rule?
* Hazards related to cranes and derricks (responsible for 80 U.S. worker deaths annually)
o Target date was October 2007. OSHA’s federal advisory committee on construction safety and health (ACCSH) recommended in October 2006 that the draft rule be published in order to keep the regulatory process moving forward. What date will OSHA offer for publishing the proposal?
* Diseases related to exposure to respirable crystalline silica
o Target date to complete peer review of risk assessment: September 2007. Asst. Secretary Foulke missed that deadline; will he give us a new one for early 2008?
o The SBREFA report* was completed in December 2003. Will the anti-regulatory, anti-worker forces clamour for a new SBREFA panel since the previous one was completed more than 4 years ago?
* Diseases related to exposure to beryllium
o Target date to complete SBREFA report* was September 2007. The Small Business Administration and OSHA have not yet even convened the required SBREFA panel. I’m predicting that OSHA’s will offer a new target date of April 2008 to complete the SBREFA report. (I further predict that OSHA won’t meet whatever target date they publish in the forthcoming reg agenda for the Beryllium SBREFA report.)

I’ll also be curious to see if OSHA revises its target dates for finalizing safety standards on:

* Vertical tandem lifts used in longshoring and at marine terminals
o Target date for publishing a final rule: December 2007. Will Mr. Foulke get this rule out by June 2008–by the 3 year anniversary of the close of the rulemaking record?
* Hazards related to electric power transmission and generation in post-construction settings (responsible for about 50 U.S. worker deaths per year)
o Target date for final rule: January 2008. Let’s hope that OSHA retains this January 2008 deadline and rings in the New Year by issuing this rule to protect workers from electrocutions. Every month of delay translates to four preventable worker deaths.

At times, I roll my eyes at OSHA’s regulatory agenda and I call it a joke. The target dates seem meaningless because OSHA never meets the deadlines it sets for itself. But, I must remind myself that these schedules aren’t the same as dates for cleaning out a sock drawer or rearranging the jars on the spice rack.

OSHA’s regulatory agenda (and MSHA’s too) address significant hazards that cause disabling injuries, illnesses and deaths among tens of thousands of U.S. workers. The exercise of preparing the agenda must be more than just changing the dates for new supposed deadlines. Every delay in months (and then usually years) can be calculated into actual cases of injuries, diseases and deaths that could have been prevented. The semi-annual revisions to OSHA’s and MSHA’s regulatory agendas demonstrate an Administration’s determination and commitment to the health and safety of U.S. workers. Target dates missed and then delayed reflect poorly on an Administration’s respect for workers’ health and lives.

OSHA’s Reg Agenda Coming Soon « The Pump Handle

Paul Rega at Project Disaster reports:

10/2/07: Five workers at a hydroelectric plant outside Georgetown, Colo., were killed on Tuesday when a chemical fire trapped them in a water tunnel where they were working, officials said.Rescue workers in the mountain town had been in contact with the trapped workers earlier on Tuesday afternoon, and they were initially thought to be alive and uninjured. But afterward contact was lost, and rescue teams from the nearby Henderson Mine discovered the bodies.

“It’s the worst thing that’s ever happened here,” said Kathleen Gaubatz, the director of emergency management for Clear Creek County. “We’ve never had anything happen like this before. This is incredibly disappointing.”

Ms. Gaubatz said the workers were at the bottom of a 3,000-foot-long tunnel that carries water to the hydroelectric plant from a reservoir. They were coating the four-foot-wide tunnel with epoxy sealant when the fire broke out, she said.

From Peter Applebome’s column in last Sunday’s Times:

NORTH HAVEN, Conn.

The first fall should have been the catastrophe.

Dino Ferraro was at a fire in a largely abandoned clock factory in 1989 when he fell from a fully extended aerial ladder 25 feet to the concrete below, landing on his left shoulder. A different angle, he could have been paralyzed or killed. As it was, small miracle, he hit the ground and bounced up like a rubber ball. He separated the shoulder and was out for two and a half months, but lived to fight fires another day.

But you get to dodge only so many bullets. He didn’t dodge any on Sept. 23, 2000, when he came to work a little early and took a call he would have missed had he showed up five minutes later. This time he was on a ladder breaking open second-floor windows at a bedroom fire in a housing project.

The firefighters inside, not seeing him through the smoke, blasted him with a hose shooting out water at 150 pounds per square inch of pressure. He fell only 12 feet, but when a firefighter at the bottom of the ladder tried to break the fall, Mr. Ferraro landed squarely on the heel of his right foot. “When they pulled off the boot, it looked like scrambled eggs,” Mr. Ferraro said. He suffered what is called a pilon fracture. It is also known as a hammer fracture, which tells you all you need to know.

“They looked at the ankle and told me it was all over,” Mr. Ferraro, 48, recalled. “They told me before the surgery, they told me after the surgery, they probably told me during the surgery, that I was all done with fighting fires. They said there was just no way.”

For outstanding coverage of mine safety and the current crises, The Pump Handle is the place to go. Excellent posts by Liz Borkowski and Celeste Monforton and Christina Morgan.

Permit us to suggest a frame of reference. One doesn’t need to be an expert to know that

(1) there are great incentives for mine owners to ignore safety,

(2) this may constitute what economists refer to as “a race to the bottom,”

(3) negligible penalties for ignoring the rules as they exist;

(4) lax enforcement (likelihood of detection)

(5) minimally deterrent punishment structure (if caught, no real possibility of jail time, fines, or civil penalties which outweigh profits

We’re confident that we can  prove these assertions without breaking a sweat. Don’t the same dynamics hold true in other American contexts?

So - canaries are to coal miners as coal miners are to the general population. 

If we don’t care enough as a country about coal miners to make sure they’re safe - people in an exceptionally high-risk occupation - what does it say about the prospects for safety in the nation as a whole?

Why isn’t this an issue - for both parties - in the presidential campaign?