I spend a lot of time in this blog talking about workers who get killed in trench collapses, falls off buildings and chemical plant explosions.

Lost in the "drama" of these fatalities are the hazards that Public employees do some of the most unpleasant, but necessary jobs that the citizens of this country demand to live the life they've become accustomed to. And they face hazards that most of us don't want to think about.

And for all that they get lousy pay.

Take social workers, for example:

Social work can be a risky business.

In February, an angry mother in Woburn slammed a door into a social worker's face during a home visit. In April, a Fitchburg woman threw a potted plant at a social worker's head. In July, a social worker in Lowell was almost run down by a pickup driven by a disgruntled former client.

And overshadowing all of these recent reports is the slaying of Linda Silva, a Department of Social Services worker who was murdered in 1996 by a father who had lost custody of his children.

State social workers say these examples show the potential dangers they face every day, and because of those hazards, they deserve better retirement benefits.

SEIU Local 509 which represents Department of Social Services workers in Massachusetts is pushing for a bill that put them into a higher-paying category of the state retirement system along with employees that include mental health hospital attendants, county elevator maintenance men, municipal electricians, juvenile probation officers, some correction officers, and court officers. The change would allow them to retire a few years earlier and receive a higher pension.

Summer Twyman was the social worker who had a door slammed on her face in February. She was out of work for months. Her injuries included a concussion and nerve damage. While she was out of work, she used up her sick time and received less pay. She also had to cover some medical expenses.

Twyman, 24, returned to her job at the DSS office in Cambridge in June, while following up with physicians and her neurologist.

"I've been out to many homes with police officers during removals. It's because of those situations [police and probation officers] get those benefits . . . we are in those same homes," she said.

"We should get equal benefits," Twyman said.

Meanwhile, let's look at probation officers in Los Angeles who staged a sick-out to protest dangerous working conditions, inadequate staffing and compensation that falls short of what other counties pay.

Some at the demonstration said they had been attacked while transporting repeat juvenile offenders. Others said they had been shot at — while armed only with pepper spray and a cellphone — while trying to visit probationers.

"They want us to go out and do proactive probation work, but they don't want to compensate us properly for the risks we're taking," said Aldin Tatley, who works with a unit of armed probation officers that checks on violent gang members in Lancaster, Palmdale and Altadena. "I have two kids. I want to go home at night."

AFSCME Local 685, which represents 400 Los Angeles County probation officers, has been negotiating a new contract with the county for three years. Almost 1000 called in sick Tuesday and 500 showed up for a rally to demand that the county return to the bargaining table.

Aside from poorly paying dangerous jobs, you may have noticed one advantage these workers have that most American workers don't have: unions. That means the ability to lobby for legislation, to stage collective work actions and stage demonstrations that build attention and support for their issues.

It's a lesson that more workers in this country should be paying attention to.

Labels: Public Employees, Social Workers

Now I haven't read the full articles yet, but these are some of the headlines from the Bureau of National Affairs Environment Reporter that came across my desk today.

Hmmm....

House Votes To Overhaul Key Provisions of Endangered Species Act

House Energy Committee Approves Barton Bill to Construct More Refineries

House Resources Backs Drilling in Arctic, Removes Offshore Drilling Bans

EPA drafts legislation to grant broad power to waive Clean Air Act rules

Bill to help hurricane-damaged refineries would change enforcement program

Bush asks EPA to leave waivers in place

Domenici to target offshore drilling bans

House Resources Committee approves ANWR drilling, removes all offshore bans for natural gas

Inhofe introduces bill to encourage building of oil refineries

Official says agency's regulatory policies will reduce burdens on manufacturers

With eight refineries still shut down as a result of Hurricane Rita and four still down as a result of Katrina, translating into about 20% of U.S. refining capacity, American refiners are facing some tough decisions, according to the Wall St. Journal:

With profit margins soaring and political pressure building to increase gasoline output, the nation's refiners face a dilemma as their fall maintenance season nears.

Going ahead with the maintenance schedule would mean shutting down refinery production, adding to the shortfalls caused by hurricanes Rita and Katrina, and keeping gasoline supplies tight and prices high. But postponing maintenance, needed to keep their refineries in top running condition, could increase the chance of accidents, potentially disrupting even more production.

...disrupting production and, um, also possibly killing a few workers.

But there are bigger things to worry about than disrupted production and dead workers:

There is ample incentive for refiners to get their plants going again as quickly as possible, and to keep them going. In a report Tuesday, Morgan Stanley predicted that Gulf Coast refining profit margins -- the gross difference between what a refiner pays for a barrel of oil and the amount it fetches for refined products -- would hit $10.50 in 2006, up 13.5% over this year and more than double 2003 margins.

Meanwhile, soaring gasoline prices are fueling rumors that refiners are somehow manipulating the market. Tuesday, Democratic senators called on the Senate Commerce Committee to investigate allegations of price gouging in what they said was an effort to "hold oil companies accountable for rising gas prices." The average price for a gallon of unleaded gasoline is $2.80, according to the Energy Information Administration, up nearly 89 cents from this time last year.

But after last week's record fine against BP Amoco for an explosion that killed 15 workers, the cost of these incidents can't even escape the Journal's notice:

Last week, BP PLC agreed to pay workplace-safety regulators $21.4 million in fines for safety violations tied to a deadly March 23 explosion at an octane-boosting processing unit at its Texas City, Texas, plant. Investigators said BP officials were aware that repairs were necessary but had opted to delay them until after the unit's start-up. BP agreed to pay the fines without admitting to the alleged violations.

"You've got to weigh the economic benefits and the pressure to produce against what's prudent and safe," said Doug MacIntyre, an analyst with the EIA.

BP Texas City, however, seems to have learned its lesson:

Officials with BP said Tuesday that the refinery would take advantage of a total refinery shutdown prompted by the Hurricane Rita evacuation to make some needed repairs and retooling of units within the facility. In all, BP’s Texas City refinery has 29 units, five of which were already down following a series of incidents including the March 23 blasts that killed 15 people and injured more than 170.

BP's Texas City refinery produces 3 percent of U.S. gasoline.

Labels: BP

Workers and the citizens of New Jersey who are concerned about the hazards of chemical plants won a victory this week.

The state of New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) issued an administrative order Monday allowing workers to participate in DEP inspections, investigations or audits of chemical facilities where workers can help identify hazards, including those that might lead to catastrophic chemical incidents, whether from industrial accidents or terrorist acts.

"Greater participation by workers to identify and resolve potential threats involving the use of hazardous chemicals in the industrial process will make neighborhoods safer and is good business policy," said Acting Governor Richard J. Codey. "We will work with New Jersey businesses to ensure this initiative improves risk prevention plans for each facility."

The regulations, the first in the country, are based on a little known section of the Clean Air Act which gives workers and their representatives the same rights to participate in inspections conducted by EPA or the Chemical Safety Board as are provided to workers in the Occupational Safety and Health Act. The OSHAct allows employees' "designated representatives" (unions) to accompany OSHA inspectors during their inspections. New Jersey will now allow the designated union representative to participate in an inspection or investigation and to participate in meetings with management about the inspection. Employees and their union representatives will be notified prior to DEP inspections.

The New Jersey Work Environment Council was pleased with the DEP order:

“We applaud the DEP for taking this groundbreaking action to protect workers, communities and the environment," said Rick Engler, Director of the New Jersey Work Environment Council (WEC), a coalition of 70 labor unions and environmental organizations that advocates for safe, secure jobs and a healthy, sustainable environment. "Workers are uniquely positioned to point out chemical hazards to DEP inspectors – and many of these hazards have the potential to cause a chemical disaster."

Engler noted there are seven facilities in New Jersey where a worst-case toxic release could harm more than a million residents – and 33 where such a release could harm more than 10,000 residents.

Industry, on the other hand, was not pleased to see more worker participation:

Hal Bozarth of the Chemistry Council of New Jersey, an industry group, said Campbell should have held public hearings on the worker participation plan.

"I feel like we've been shut out of a very important process, since we care deeply about worker safety," Bozarth said. "I question what this is about. Are we that close to November?"

The order applies to inspections at industrial facilities covered under New Jersey's Toxic Catastrophe Prevention Act (TCPA). TCPA is the New Jersey version of EPA's Risk Management Program which requires facilities that use designated quantities of certain highly hazardous chemicals to develop risk management plans that analyze on-site and off site vulnerabilities, develop emergency response plans and confer with the surrounding community. The New Jersey TCPA also requires facilities to drill their emergency response plans each year with employee participation and requires facilities to evaluate state of the art technologies every five years to reduce the risk of an accident and implement this technology if cost effective.

Meanwhile, DEP also announced that it was abandoning a secret pact that would have let industry groups help set chemical plant security standards without the input of the unions that represent workers at the plants. The pact had generated major opposition from New Jersey unions and environmental groups when it was announced last February. Although the details of the pact were never revealed, Bozarth said that it committed the chemical facilities in the state to comply with "Responsible Care" guidelines developed by the American Chemistry Council which, an association representing the chemical industry.

Engler and labor activists had criticized the pact, calling for public hearings on the precautions that chemical facilities should take to ensure their security from terrorism. The Governor announced that he intended to hold public hearings.

Bozarth said that abandonment of the pact was "a shame."

Labels: Chemical Plant Security

One of my earliest memories is listening to my mother on the phone calling lists of strangers asking them to vote for initiatives that would sell bonds or raise taxes for the public schools. It seems almost quaint now, actually campaigning for a tax increase! It's become almost an eternal truth among many (most) in this country that taxes are bad, government is bad, and the idea of a politician (even a Democrat) campaigning for a tax increase -- no matter how badly its needed -- rates at about as popular as campaigning for child pornography.

I have to explain to my kids when they get their first paychecks what all those deductions are for. But that I can understand. They're kids, not too far beyond believing that ATMs dispense free money.

So if you're one of those (seemingly vanishing) people who wonder how the world has gotten so crazy, how millions are left without medical care, without decent schools, without heat in the winter, drowing (literally) in a crumbling infrastructure -- while Congress hands out huge tax cut after tax cut for those least in need...

For those of you who watch Bush admistration cut taxes for the wealthy and then say we can't afford to fund a basic social needs or maintain a minimum safety net and are reminded of the kid who has killed his parents and then throws himself on the mercy of the court because he's an orphan...read this article by my favorite political analyst and blogger David Sirota in In These Times.

Politicians love to put signs up next to the projects they created saying “your tax dollars at work.” The only way for the United States to have the desperately needed debate over budget priorities is if Democrats find the courage to plant a figurative sign in New Orleans’ flood-drenched streets that says “your tax cuts at work.” Then, and only then, will America’s tax debate transform from a theoretical one that features terrific-sounding promises into a concrete one that highlights the very real consequences of a political system that seeks only to enrich the already rich, no matter what the cost to society.

So sure, we can drown government in a bathtup, or we can sell it all to Halliburton, but before we let that happen, we need to make sure that people know the cost.

The New York Daily News has run a 3-part series (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, editorial) about Mafia domination of the construction business in the New York area and the havoc it wreaks on traffic, building quality, budgets and government.

The whole exposé makes for fascinating reading right out a real-life Sopranos episode, but of particular interest to readers of Confined Space is Part 3, Blood on their hands! which covers the effect of Mafia influence on workplace safety.

By late 2001, the city had already received numerous complaints about unsafe conditions from both workers and neighbors at a job site at the Parkwest Apartments at 323 W. 96th St.

One worker told investigators he'd left after a week because he felt "that the safety issues on the job exposed him to injury," court records state.

At 7:30 a.m. the Tuesday after Thanksgiving 2001, a 7,000-pound slab of precast concrete collapsed on top of 60-year-old carpenter Selma Erey as she prepared plywood safety covers at her workbench.

"She has a permanently disabling, very serious fracture to her foot, a compression fracture to her spine, and traumatic brain injury," said her attorney, Paul Hofmann. "She could have been killed."

The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration shut down the job, and the city slapped the job's general contractor with proposed fines of $4,150.

A union shop steward found pervasive safety issues, including uncovered holes and the absence of safety cables, and registered his complaints. An OSHA inspector found bricks being hoisted over the heads of workers and the absence of safety netting, records show.

That's when the mob stepped in, investigators say.

Richard Gotti - a brother of the late mob boss John Gotti - was a no-show worker for Silo Construction, a subcontractor at the site, according to a report by Walter Mack, an investigator appointed by a judge to monitor the carpenter's union.

In sworn testimony, District Council Carpenters shop steward Peter O'Keefe told Mack that Gotti approached him at the site in early 2002 and warned him to stop reporting safety problems to the union.

Raising his voice and jabbing a finger into O'Keefe's chest, according to O'Keefe, Gotti told him that if he made any more reports, it would be O'Keefe who'd be having safety problems.

Records show that O'Keefe, who told investigators he "did not sleep well for a few nights," stopped complaining.

The article also suggests that Mafia pressure may influence OSHA's fines:

On a windy May morning in 2000, Antonio Pedro, 41, a nonunion Yonkers employee, was blown off a catwalk on the Manhattan Bridge and plunged to his death in the East River.

Yonkers Contracting was cited for allowing Pedro to work without a harness and for not training him properly.

OSHA inspectors proposed fines totalling $12,500 for three serious violations, but settled for only $1,500.

Mafia influence? Maybe, but from my experience, OSHA is perfectly able to impose insignificant citations all by itself.

The International Labor Organization reports that over 2.2 million workers die each year of work-related accidents and injuries -- and that number may be significantly underestimated.

While the number of work-related illnesses and deaths has lessened somewhat in the industrialized countries, the ILO report said the number of accidents - in particular fatal accidents - appear to be increasing, particularly in some Asian countries due to poor reporting, rapid development and strong competitive pressures of globalization.

"Occupational safety and health is vital to the dignity of work", said ILO Director-General Juan Somavia. "Still, every day, on average, some 5,000 or more women and men around the world lose their lives because of work-related accidents and illness. Decent Work must be safe work, and we are a long way from achieving that goal."

What's more, the ILO report, entitled Decent Work - Safe Work, ILO Introductory Report to the XVIIth World Congress on Safety and Health at Work, Orlando, USA, also warns that work-related malaria and other communicable diseases as well as cancers caused by hazardous substances are taking a huge toll, mostly in the developing world. The majority of the global workforce lacks legal or preventive safety or health measures, accident or illness compensation and has no access to occupational health services.

Underestimating workplace injuries and fatalities is critical, particularly in developing countries:

The ILO report said reporting systems and coverage of occupational safety and health in many developing countries are poor and in some cases deteriorating. For example, India reports 222 fatal accidents while the Czech Republic, which has a working population of about 1 per cent of India, reports 231, the ILO said, adding that it has estimated the true number of fatal accidents in India at 40,000. The report said such statistics suggested that only a fraction of the real toll of work-related death and disease is covered in a number of developing countries.

The ILO also reports that:

• Hazardous substances cause the deaths of an estimated 440,000 workers each year
• While work-related diseases are the main problem in industrialized countries, accident hazards are more prevalent in the developing economies where workers are frequently dying in mishaps that occur in such sectors as mining, construction and agriculture. In the industrialized countries
• Younger workers (age 15-24) are more likely to suffer non-fatal occupational accidents than their older colleagues
• Workers over the age of 55 appear to be more likely to suffer fatal accidents and ill-health than others.
• Women suffer much more than men when it comes to work-related communicable diseases, such as agriculture-related malaria and bacterial and viral infections as well as musculo-skeletal disorders.
• Men tend to die as a result of accidents, lung diseases and work-related cancers, such as those caused by asbestos.
• Newly emerging problems such as psychosocial factors, violence, the effects of alcohol and drugs, stress, smoking and HIV/AIDS are rapidly leading to increased morbidity and mortality worldwide.
• Most workers in the world are not covered by legal preventive measures and will never receive compensation in case of accidents and diseases and most have never seen an occupational doctor or a labour inspector.
• This year, some 115 countries organized numerous national activities on 28 April to mark World Day for Safety and Health at Work which was launched by the ILO to build on the original trade union observance of this day as the International Day for the Commemoration of Dead and Injured Workers.

Labels: Asbestos

Survey finds more injuries among Hispanics than reported to OSHA

Well, that's certainly a surprise!

Earlier this month, I wrote a response to a Washington Post column by J. Patrick Boyle, the president of the American Meat Institute, who was criticizing a previous Post column about the plight of meatpacking and poultry workers. In that article, Boyle argued that the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports a 67 percent decline in total injuries and illnesses since 1990. I pointed out the massive underreporting of injuries and illnesses that had been reported.

Now that underreporting has been confirmed in a study by researchers at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, working with Centro Latino of Caldwell County

A survey of Hispanic poultry workers in six Western North Carolina counties shows a high rate of injuries, one that is significantly higher than the number reported to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

The survey of 200 workers found that in the month prior, 60 percent said they had work-related problems with symptoms of respiratory illnesses, skin conditions, injuries or pain to legs, feet, arms, hands, necks or backs. That compares with North Carolina's 9.4 percent injury and illness rate in 2003, based on numbers reported by the plants to OSHA and compiled by the Bureau of Labor.

Many of the problems suffered by the workers were painful disabling musculoskeletal injuries:

"Almost half of the workers reported pain in their hands or arms during the previous month, and one in five of those workers was unable to work for at least a day in the previous year because of the pain," she said.

Forty-seven percent reported poor or fair health.

The assembly-line work and the sheer volume of chickens processed contribute to repetitive-motion injuries.

The process starts with chicken catchers, almost always men, wading into poultry houses among thousands of birds, grabbing them up and putting them in cages for the ride to the plant.

At the plant, workers lift the chickens onto hooks. Men and women who cut and trim may make the same cutting motion up to 40,000 times a shift, according to the study. Floors are often slippery. Steam rises from the cleaning process that sprays hot water onto cold equipment. Workers who handle raw chicken in the damp environment often develop skin conditions.

Contaminants become airborne, resulting in respiratory illnesses.

And why he underreporting?

Researchers say that there are a number of reasons that workers may not report injuries. They might fear for job security or have a language barrier or not know they are entitled to workers' compensation.

Management has to decide whether an injury is work-related.

A cut or other accident might be easy to spot, but it takes a medical exam to diagnose a repetitive-motion injury from making the same cuts hundreds of thousands of times over months.

...and management generally doesn't exactly go out of their way to prove that a injury is work-related if they don't have to.

In addition to the workers working with "worker-advocacy groups and community agencies," the report recommends implementation of OSHA's 2004 ergonomics guidelines for poultry processing plants because there isn't an ergonomics regulations.

Seems to me that the fact that there are ergonomic guidelines instead of an enforceable standard is the problem, not the solution.

Labels: Ergonomics, Recordkeeping

A couple more articles on the possible contamination of the land and air of New Orleans and the effect it may have on citizens and recovery workers.

Wilma Subra, who has worked on several Superfund hazardous-waste sites and has served on advisory groups for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency fears breathing problems caused by a combination of mold and oil from the flooded Murphy Oil Refinery

"Dust is blowing out of the restricted area, and the people being let back in … are breathing highly contaminated particulates," Subra said. "The environmental and health agencies should not have allowed the residents to go back in."

People are returning to homes covered in sediments contaminated by the oil spill, she said. Subra said she has seen "mold growing on walls, ceilings, fabrics, couches … everywhere."

"It is a double insult," she said. "The chemical insult from the sludge and biological insult from the mold."

Even some EPA staffers are not too confident about the health of workers or residents:

"We haven’t even done a damage assessment, let alone an environmental assessment," said Hugh Kaufman, senior policy analyst with the Environmental Protection Agency’s solid waste division.

Kaufman said that if federal, state and local governments had followed the Department of Homeland Security’s National Response Plan, agencies would have coordinated seamlessly to ensure public health and safety. "Obviously, that didn’t happen in terms of getting people out," he said, "and it’s not happening right now in terms of protecting the heroes."

According to EPA tests, the biological threats from the flood include elevated levels of E. coli bacteria and toxic mold. Contamination from industrial facilities pose a more troubling long-term concern, with more than 40 oil spills reported in Louisiana by the Coast Guard last week and thousands of chemical containers spotted bobbing in the region’s floodwaters. The oozing sediment that coats flood-impacted areas may yield an even greater danger in the coming months as the ground dries, releasing airborne contaminants like harmful organic gases and fuel vapors. The potential health effects range from allergic reactions to organ damage.

But, of course, the first response should be prevention:

The watchdog groups OMB Watch and National Environmental Trust have questioned the reliability of the EPA’s environmental sampling data – information that would factor heavily in worker safety determinations.

The released records show that the vast majority of water contaminants tested for have been detected at non-dangerous levels or not at all. However, environmental advocates suspect that the real damage is much deeper, noting that the 2003 EPA Toxic Release Inventory registers thousands of pounds of chemical waste churned out by local facilities. Meanwhile, a treated federal toxic site, the Agriculture Street Landfill, is currently stewed in floodwaters.

The environmental community is demanding that the government go beyond dispensing advice and mandate more public health research on Katrina’s environmental impacts and stronger protections for workers serving in the recovery effort.

Darryl Malek-Wiley, a New Orleans evacuee and Louisiana field organizer for the Sierra Club, said that the government should establish an organized system to track the long-term health effects on exposed New Orleans recovery workers. However, he said, considering that the government has haphazardly fanned refugees across the country, "If that’s the level of record keeping they have for workers, it’s going to be a disaster in the future."

Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have issued a factsheet:Protect Yourself From Chemicals Released During a Natural Disaster

Labels: Katrina

This is the regular Confined Space listing of workers killed over the past two weeks. Because we didn't get some reports in on time, this week's also includes fatalities going back as far as mid-August. Keep in mind, however, that because this list is based on media reports, it only represents a minority of actual workplace deaths.

Trench collapse probed

BUENA VISTA, VA — The Virginia Department of Labor and Industry is conducting an investigation into what went wrong in a trench collapse that killed two Buena Vista city employees Wednesday. The victims, Roger Coleman and David "Peewee" Carter, were installing a sewer line behind a commercial building under construction at Magnolia Avenue and 15th Street about 9 a.m. when the walls caved in, according to City Manager Scott Dadson.


Gaston man killed on Indiana highway

FRANKFORT, Ind. - More than one vehicle might have struck a North Carolina truck driver who was killed while walking along Interstate 65 in the pre-dawn darkness Thursday, police said. Raymond Earl Davis, 65, of Gaston County was hit along the highway's northbound lanes near the Clinton-Boone county line about 20 miles southeast of Lafayette.


Missing Valley H-E-B worker found dead in the Rio Grande

BROWNSVILLE, TX — Right around the time family members and friends were crossing the border to distribute fliers in Matamoros about a missing loved one, Brownsville firefighters spotted a body floating in the Rio Grande. It was Juan Carlos "Charlie" Ramos, a 24-year-old checkout manager at an H-E-B here who had been missing since Saturday morning. It wasn't the kind of news family members had expected to hear.


Construction worker dies in accident - Death is second in three months

Hillsborough, NC- A Hillsborough man was killed early Thursday morning while working near a campus construction site. According to University police reports, David Roy Phillips, 58, an employee of Chandler Concrete in Burlington, parked his concrete truck in the left lane of Pittsboro Street to check his load. He did not set the parking brake or close the driver’s side door. The truck began to roll backwards, and the door caught Phillips, dragging him 65 feet, reports state. He died shortly after being pinned between the truck and a fence at the McCauley Street intersection. Paramedics made unsuccessful attempts to resuscitate Phillips, who had worked with the company for nine and a half years.


Holcombe man dies in industrial accident

Ladysmith, Wi -- A 19-year-old Holcombe man died after an apparent industrial accident in Ladysmith about 2 a.m. Wednesday. Harley J. Hattamer was found trapped under two large bundles of lumber at Weather Shield Manufacturing Co. Ladysmith Police said Hattamer was extracted from the lumber and taken to Rusk County Memorial Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.


OSHA investigating fatal accident

Glenview, IL - Investigators from the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration are looking into the circumstances that left one worker dead and another injured as they worked on the new city parking garage Friday. The men, carpenters for Chicago-based W.E. O'Neil Construction Co., were working near the top of the new garage that is to reach 12 stories, said James A. Sikich, vice president for the company. The men were removing a preassembled concrete form called a gang form on the southwest core of the building, he said, when the form fell to the sixth floor, the building's current height. Paramedics rushed the men to St. Francis Hospital, 355 Ridge Ave. Frank Meenaghan, 43, of Stickney, was pronounced dead of his injuries. Another worker, Juan Ramirez, 36, of Chicago, was treated and later released.


AXED WORKER IS CRUSHED UNDER TRUCK

New York, NY -- After losing his job at a Brooklyn tile company, Nikolai Radchenko went back to his old workplace drunk and sat down beneath one of its trucks — then died when it ran over him, police and colleagues said yesterday. Radchenko, 48, was fired on Tuesday from his job as a shipper for Merola Tile, an East New York firm that makes and markets household ceramic tiles, colleagues said. Later that evening, he went back to Merola, at 819 Williams Ave. "He wanted his job back; that's why he returned," said Mike Demitri, who makes deliveries to the firm.


Farmer dies in tractor accident

ANAMOSA, Iowa - An eastern Iowa dairy farmer has died of injuries suffered in a tractor accident. The Jones County sheriff's office says 39-year-old Eric Ulferts of rural Anamosa was injured on Thursday when his tractor, which was pulling a manure spreader, rolled and pinned him in a creek bed. Authorities say Ulferts was driving across the side of a hill when the tractor lost traction, slid downhill and rolled. Ulferts was taken to a Cedar Rapids hospital, then transferred to University Hospitals in Iowa City. He died yesterday.


Motel Worker In Waldorf Shot, Killed

WALDORF, Md. -- Detectives with the Charles County Sheriff's Office are trying to figure out why an employee at a Days Inn was shot and killed Friday afternoon near the motel's front desk. Someone walked into the motel in the 11300 block of Days Court just before 3 p.m., shot Jerry Alan Wills III, and then fled, said Sheriff's Office spokeswoman Kristen Adkins. Wills, 19, had moved to Waldorf in January from Chambersburg, Pa., she said.


Restaurant reopens after double murder- Patrons come out to support Frankie's owners

Chicago, IL - Frankie Santoro sat, a pained expression on his face, filling out shift schedules Saturday morning. Four names were missing — two employees dead, two others charged with killing them. Frankie's Beef & Pasta reopened Saturday, eight days after two workers at the popular Oak Lawn fast-food joint were gunned down by an employee angry, a prosecutor said, over not being promoted to head fryer. Killed were head fryer Carlos Flores-Lopez, 27, of Alsip, and Jose Alberto Rodriguez, 21, of Worth. More than 1,000 people attended their wake Tuesday.


Construction worker killed on job identified

Ventura county, CA - Authorities have identified a man who was killed Thursday while working at a mall construction site in Simi Valley. Stephen Reitter, 46, of Long Beach, died after a 10-ton sewer pump truck he had been using rolled and drove over him about 12:45 p.m., police said.


Highway worker dies

Spirit Lake, IA - highway worker was killed Thursday afternoon in Spirit Lake, Iowa, when a construction truck hit her as she directed traffic. Joyce Wachter, 49, of Akron, Iowa, was pronounced dead at the scene, according to Spirit Lake police. The truck was owned by Rohlin Construction, which is working on a resurfacing project on Highways 9 and 71 in Spirit Lake. An investigation is continuing.


Victim of construction accident identified as Mesa man

SCOTTSDALE - A 23-year-old Mesa man has been identified as the worker killed Monday in a construction accident at Scottsdale's $250 million Waterfront project. David Junior Schmidt and another man were handling a 6-inch pipe at about 8 a.m. when Schmidt tumbled from a 6- 8-foot ladder, authorities said. A 180-pound pipe then fell and struck Schmidt in the head. He was taken to Scottsdale Healthcare Osborn, where he died.


Worker Dies On Ship In Dry Dock

SEATTLE, WA -- A man working on a ship in dry dock at Harbor Island collapsed in a corridor and died Monday afternoon, KIRO 7 Eyewitness News reported. The man suffered a heart attack and collapsed on the 500-foot Stellar Star, firefighters said. The Seattle Fire Department's high-angle rescue team was first called to rescue the man and firefighters performed C.P.R. on him but he died at the scene.


Detroit Cab Driver Shot and Killed

Detroit, MI - A cab driver was shot and killed early Monday morning, and police are still searching for his killer. Investigators believe the shooting occurred around 1 a.m., in the area of Fenkell and the Southfield Service Drive. Police found Checker Cab #5832 smashed on the northbound side of the Southfield Freeway. Emergency crews initially believed the driver crashed through the fence along the service drive and landed on the freeway after speeding and losing control.But when the 52-year-old driver, Moses Hill from New Baltimore, was transported to the hospital, doctors found that he had been shot several times.


Airborne tire strikes car; deputy sheriff killed

El Paso, TX, - A sheriff's deputy was killed early Saturday morning on Interstate 10 when the wheel of a pickup traveling in the opposite direction flew off and struck the officer's patrol car in what officials are calling a freak accident. Sgt. Ruben Orozco, 51, who was involved in the accident after leaving an assignment at the Sun Bowl, was a 26-year veteran of the El Paso County Sheriff's Office. "This is a very difficult and emotional time for the family. It is also a day in which many hearts in the El Paso County Sheriff's Office are suffering," El Paso County Sheriff Leo Samaniego said in a statement. "My condolences are with the family."


WORKER'S NECK CRUSHED BY CRANE CABLE

New York, NY -- A worker at a Brooklyn storage yard was killed yesterday as he tried to unload a massive concrete pipe off the back of a flatbed truck. Pedro Yaxon, 30, who came to the United States from Guatemala just eight months ago, was inside the pipe, preparing to attach a cable that would allow a crane operator to lift it off the flatbed. Suddenly, the cable tightened, pressing Yaxon's throat against the inside of the pipe. "It pressed right up against his neck," said a witness, who gave his name only as Barry.

The workers at the scene said the accident occurred during what was supposed to be a routine procedure at a company storage facility, near Hart Place and West 16 Street in Coney Island. The object being moved was a concrete dry well. Typically, the workers said, three cables are used to hoist dry wells, which are used for drainage and stand about three feet high and eight feet wide. The accident occurred, the workers added, as dry wells were being stacked on the back of a truck for delivery to a construction site.

A witness at a nearby auto body shop, who would identify himself only as Barry K., 23, said he heard screams and ran over to investigate.

''It sounded like someone was getting cut up, the way he was screaming,'' he said. ''What I saw for sure was the metal cable was on his neck, and I saw blood.''


Police are Searching for the Gunman

New York, NY - A livery cab driver and his brother were shot and killed overnight. Now the hunt is on for the gunman. Eyewitness News reporter Ken Rosato is live at the scene with the latest. The two brothers were both livery cab drivers and one drove with the other for protection. Police say around one o'clock this morning the two brothers were dispatched to and area near South 9th Street and Central Avenue.


Three die in fiery I-75 crash at Micanopy

Gainesville, FL - A fiery crash on Interstate 75 in Micanopy involving two semis and a minivan killed three people and snarled traffic for miles Thursday night. Wreckage from a white minivan and a tractor-trailer lay strewn about the interstate. One semi's cab was ripped apart with tires and parts of the cab laying dozens of feet away from each other. The minivan driven by an unidentified man blew a tire at about 10:15 p.m. on the northbound I-75 overpass at the Micanopy exit, said FHP spokesman Lt. Mike Burroughs. The minivan, which was traveling in the far left inside lane swerved across the interstate and sideswiped a Bobcat semi driven by an unidentified man who lost control of the semi, Burroughs said. The semi veered back across the northbound lanes, through the center guardrail and careened into the southbound lanes, slamming into a tractor-trailer carrying furniture, Burroughs said.


Trucker killed in forklift accident

Carlisle, PA - An out-of-state truck driver was killed Monday after he was run over by a forklift at a business in Middlesex. According to Dauphin County Coroner Graham Hetrick, George Renolds, 42, was delivering steel to Lane Enterprises off of Claremont Road, when he walked behind a tractor-type forklift around 7:30 a.m. Renolds was flown to the Hershey Medical Center where he was pronounced dead, Hetrick says. The coroner says Renolds died of multiple injuries. His death has been ruled accidental.


Crew Member Killed in Texas Train Crash

SHEPHERD, Texas -- A freight train smashed into a second train that was stopped on a siding early Thursday, killing one crew member and derailing more than 20 cars, a company spokesman said. Someone threw a switch that sent the moving train onto the siding, said Mark Davis, a spokesman for Union Pacific, which operated both trains. He said the FBI will help investigate, but criminal action is not believed to be involved.


Worker dies after fall at Popeye's

IN - An autopsy scheduled this morning for a Popeye's worker who died Wednesday after falling from a ladder at the restaurant will help the Lake County coroner determine the cause of death. Gary E. Peterson, 57, of Haynesville, Ill., died after being taken to The Community Hospital in Munster at about 9:30 a.m. Wednesday, a spokesman at the coroner's office said.


Cabdriver dies, lawyer hurt in high-speed crash

Palm Beach, FL - A cabdriver was killed and one of Palm Beach County's most prominent divorce attorneys was critically injured when their taxi veered off the road and smashed into a pole Monday night along Congress Avenue near West Palm Beach. The Yellow Cab driver, Jean Valcin, 58, was pronounced dead soon after the crash. His passenger, Ronald Sales, 71, widely considered one of the county's first and most influential full-time divorce attorneys, was in critical condition Tuesday at St. Mary's Medical Center.


Woman shot to death

VINELAND, NJ -- A female Shop Rite employee was shot to death late Tuesday night in the lobby of the store on South Delsea Drive. The homicide took place shortly after 9 p.m., while shoppers were still in the store, according to witness accounts. A man was seen being taken away in handcuffs by police, who refused to release details about the shooting. They would also not provide any information on the victim.


Authorities: Student dies after killing parents, grandmother

ELKHORN CITY, Ky. -- A 17-year-old high school student who was intoxicated at school went home and shot his parents and grandmother to death, then crashed head-on into a pickup truck driven by a city employee, killing both of them, authorities said.

“He said they had caught him with drugs and weed at school today. They had a drug test and he failed it, and when they tried to arrest him, he ran.” The teen then fled toward Pikeville on U.S. 460 and crashed head-on into a pickup driven by the Elkhorn City employee, killing the student and the worker at about 3:50 p.m. EDT, authorities said. Johnson said state police troopers, responding to the call, located Hackney westbound on U.S. 460 and attempted to stop the vehicle. Hackney lost control and struck a pickup truck, killing himself and Terry A. Taylor, 41, of Elkhorn City.


Calhoun man killed in industrial accident

Calhoun, GA - A Calhoun man was killed on the job Tuesday night at a Wall Street carpet factory, officials said. According to Deputy Gordon County Coroner Bud Owens: Dennis Wayne Jones, 42, was working with a carpet backing roller at Barrier-Bac Inc., 509 S. Wall St., around 6:15 p.m. when his arm was caught up in the roll and he was pulled into the machine. Jones was pronounced dead at the scene at 7 p.m.


Worker killed in plant blast - Texas Eastern plant in Butler County rocked by fire

MONROE, OH - State and local officials are searching for the cause of an explosion that shook the area surrounding the Texas Eastern loading center at Yankee and Todhunter roads late Sunday, igniting a massive fire that resulted in the death of a new employee. While the investigation continued, flames at the Texas Eastern Products Pipeline Co. still burned Monday afternoon as firefighters watched. Kollette F. Meyer, 52, of 8563 Waynesboro Way in Clearcreek Twp., Warren County, had been training as an operator at the center for less than two months at the time of the fatal accident.


Woman Shot, Killed Outside Restaurant - Police Identify Slain Carryout Employee

HYATTSVILLE, Md. -- The search continues for the men responsible for the shooting death of an 18-year-old restaurant employee in Hyattsville, Md., Monday night. Police said 18-year-old Xian Juan Zheng was killed outside the Sunflower Restaurant in the 5600 block of Sergeant Road about 10:30 p.m. They said the victim's father was working inside the carryout and the victim was outside eating some food when she was approached by two suspects.


Man found dead in motel pool on Leopard

Corpus Christi, TX - A 42 year-old man was found dead in a motel pool in the 6000 block of Leopard Street Monday afternoon. Police were called to the location at about 2:34 p.m. and found the man face down in the pool. Police said they suspect the man, who was an employee of the motel, had been dead for some time before his body was found.


Postal Worker Hits, Kills Co-Worker With Truck

Driver Initially Denies Accident, Later Admits Feeling 'Bump'CHICAGO -- A post office vehicle struck and killed a postal employee, who had just finished her shift, in the South Loop neighborhood early Saturday. Killed was Sabrina Young, estimated to be in her 50s, according to a Cook County medical examiner's office spokesman. The accident happened around 3:45 a.m. Saturday outside the Cardiss Collins Post Office, at 433 W. Harrison St., police News Affairs Officer Amina Greer said. The woman was a post office employee who had just finished her shift when she was struck by a semitrailer truck belonging to the post office, Central District Lt. James Sazama said.



Waukesha man killed in explosion - Cause of blast at Lannon Tank Corp. still unknown

Lannon, WI - A 43-year-old Waukesha man died Thursday in an explosion at a tank manufacturing company, authorities said. The explosion and subsequent fire occurred shortly before noon at Lannon Tank Corp., 20134 W. Main St., Waukesha County Sheriff's Department Detective Steve Pederson said. The man was pronounced dead at the scene, Pederson said. Calls to the medical examiner's office were not returned Thursday. The man's name was not released because family members were still being notified late Thursday.


Construction worker dies in rollover crash

Huntington, IN - A 21-year-old Hartford City man died early Wednesday in a single-car crash in southeast Huntington County. Jerod Allen Hicks, of the 2300 block of South Indiana 3, died at the scene from extensive head injuries suffered after he was ejected from a Chevrolet Camaro about 3:40 a.m., officials said. The crash occurred near the intersection of Indiana 3 and Huntington County Road 1000 South, according to a report from the Huntington County Sheriff’s Department.


Post office worker slain in Erie, Pa.

PA - Friends expressed shock and sadness Tuesday as they remembered postal worker Steven Lynton, 53, who was shot and killed in Erie, Pa.


Worker killed in 50-foot fall

WILLIAMSBURG, VA -- Construction on the Yankee Candle complex on Richmond Road came to a halt Tuesday after a worker fell from the roof of the massive building. The 31-year-old victim, a Mexican man living in Richmond, was working on the roof when he fell 45-50 feet, according to Williamsburg EMS Capt. Chuck White. The man's name has not been released pending notification of his family.


Oil Tanker Driver Dies In Crash - Woman In Pickup Truck Suffers Critical Injuries

BARKHAMSTED, CT -- An oil tanker driver was killed and a Torrington mother seriously injured when the tanker and a pickup truck collided on Route 44 Monday morning. According to an initial accident report, a GMC Sonoma pickup driven by Sarah S. Clark veered out of the westbound lanes of Route 44 shortly before 8 a.m. and struck the side of an oncoming fuel truck driven by Randy F. Rosenbeck.


Marshfield man killed by shock

Marshfield, WI - A 61-year-old Marshfield man was electrocuted Monday morning in a logging accident at the Wisconsin River Golf Club in the town of Linwood. Kenneth A. Bertz, 11904 Steffek Road, was operating a logging truck when the boom on top of the truck tangled with power lines, Portage County Coroner Scott Rifleman said. He was pronounced dead at the scene. "His tires actually caught fire from the electricity grounding out through the tires," Rifleman said. "He exited the vehicle at that point and contacted the ground. Once he touched the ground, that's when the electrocution took place." Bertz had been working alone in the woods near the golf course, Rifleman said. He was discovered by a Wisconsin River Golf Club employee who was investigating a power failure at the golf course. At 8:37 a.m. the 911 call was made.


Katrina utility worker dies restoring services

EMPORIA, Kan. - An Emporia man was killed Monday while restoring power to lines damaged by Hurricane Katrina in Kenner, La., authorities said. Nick Buxton, 27, worked for Kansas City, Mo.-based PAR Electrical Contractors Inc., and collapsed while on a utility pole, said Kenner Police Capt. Steve Caraway.


Steen, Minnesota Farmer Killed In Accident

Sioux Falls, SD - We now know the name of the southwest Minnesota farmer who died in a weekend accident. Sixty-five-year-old Harvey Arvin Van Whye was run over Saturday by the tractor he was driving near Steen. The Rock County Sheriff's Department says Van Whye was thrown from the tractor after running into a hay bale. Van Whye was air-lifted to a Sioux Falls hospital where he was pronounced dead.


Atlantic Employee Dead After Chase

OMAHA, Neb. -- Cass County, Iowa, officials are investigating the death of a longtime city employee. Byron Jones, 52, of Atlantic, led law enforcement on a chase through the county on Saturday night. Jones allegedly stole a city dump truck, broke into a gun shop and took off with some weapons. Atlantic police, Cass County deputies and Iowa state troopers helped in the chase. Jones was able to lose the officers and was found on a gravel road dead from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. The Iowa Department of Criminal Investigations is looking into the incident.



Two firetrucks collide, killing one firefighter

Kansas City -- Two firetrucks responding to a brush fire in south-central Kansas collided head-on Wednesday, killing one firefighter.

The accident occurred about 4 p.m. southwest of Hutchinson as the two trucks from Reno County Fire District No. 7 responded to a controlled field burn that had gotten out of hand, the Reno County Sheriff's Office said. The office said poor visibility over the roadway contributed to the crash.

One driver was pronounced dead at the scene and the driver of the other truck was uninjured, the sheriff's office said. The name of the victim was not released. It was unclear if anyone else was on either truck.


Construction worker dies as scaffold falls at site on West Side

Chicago, IL -- A 25-year-old construction worker was killed Monday on Chicago's West Side when a second-floor scaffold gave way, officials said.

Barry Hagas, whose address was not available Tuesday night, was pronounced dead at 5:25 p.m. Monday in Mt. Sinai Hospital, according to the Cook County medical examiner's office.

Hagas had been working on a scaffold on the second floor of a building under construction at 1655 S. St. Louis Ave. when a ladder supporting the scaffold gave way, police spokeswoman JoAnn Taylor said.

Hagas struck his head on a piece of concrete when he fell.


Trucker killed, another jailed in E-470 wreck

Denver, CO -- A crash involving an 18-wheeler and a Mack cement pump truck on E-470 on Tuesday morning killed one driver and put the other in jail, said Trooper Eric Wynn of the Colorado State Patrol.

The driver of the 18-wheeler, Gilbert Vandevoort, 66, of Lynd, Minn., was arrested and booked into Douglas County Jail on a charge of careless driving causing death in connection with the accident.

Wynn said in a prepared statement that Vandevoort was driving a 1999 International east on E-470 at about 10:50 a.m. when he attempted to make an illegal U-turn to go west on the highway.

The cement pump truck, also eastbound, struck the right rear of the semi's trailer and went off the right side of the road, rolling three-quarters of the way over.

The driver of that truck was pronounced dead at the scene, Wynn said. His identity wasn't released pending notification of relatives.




Man killed in farm accident

HOLY CROSS, IA --One man died after he became stuck in a silo, officials with the Dubuque County sheriff's office said.

Patrick Hannan, 37, was found trapped inside a silo at his farm near Holy Cross about 9 p.m. Monday, officials said.

He was freed and taken to a Dubuque hospital where he was pronounced dead, the sheriff's office said.


Firefighter trainee collapses, dies

TAVARES, FL -- Debbie Enfinger touched her son's South Lake High class ring that hung on a thick gold chain around her neck.

"This keeps him close to my heart," she said, holding back tears Monday. Kevin Enfinger, 22, slipped off his ring Saturday morning and left it in his truck before his firefighting class at the Institute of Public Safety on Lane Park Cutoff Road in Tavares.

Shortly after he began jogging for his class warm-up about 9 a.m., the young man called "Dumplin" in high school, collapsed and his heart stopped. An instructor performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation until an ambulance arrived to take him to Florida Hospital Waterman, where he was pronounced dead.

An autopsy revealed an enlarged heart with bad coronary arteries, said Medical Examiner Steven Cogswell.

"This is unusual for a 22-year-old, but it does happen occasionally," he said, adding Enfinger had a history of hypertension. According to medical records, Enfinger -- 6 feet tall and just more than 300 pounds -- was diagnosed with Kawasaki syndrome as a child. That is a disease of the blood vessels that can lead to long-term heart damage, Cogswell said. It's unknown if the physical demands of firefighter school contributed to his death, he said.


Westfield firefighter dies in accident

Westfield, - The black bunting hung from a fire department in mourning. Thirty-six-year-old Chad Hittle, a 14-year veteran of the Westfield-Washington Fire Department, was killed Wednesday night when his truck ran off of a rural Hamilton County road striking a utility pole and flipping. Investigators say Hittle wasn't wearing a seat belt.

"When somebody's not walking in the door, sitting at the table or climbing in this truck, that's when it's really going to hit," says Captain Todd Burtron.

Members of the department were called to the scene of the accident, not knowing Captain Hittle was in the one vehicle accident
.

Gunman sought in deaths of two store workers, teenage girl

REMINGTON, Ind.-- A gunman shot and killed two women working at a northern Indiana convenience store Monday, and police were seeking a man who also was suspected of killing a teenage girl in Ohio.

Lisa Kendall, 29, and Kendora Furr, 38, were found shot about 10 a.m. by a customer who went inside the convenience store because the gasoline pump was not on, The Journal and Courier of Lafayette reported.

One of the women died at the store, while the other was pronounced dead a short time later at a hospital, Chief Deputy Sheriff Terry Risner said. Investigators believe the shootings occurred during an attempted robbery and that something must have scared the gunman, Risner said.


1 killed, 1 wounded in eatery; Oak Lawn police quiz 2 ex-employees

Chicago, IL -- Two gunmen burst into the rear entrance of a fast-food restaurant in Oak Lawn before it opened Friday morning and shot two employees, one fatally, police said.

The shooting occurred about 10:20 a.m. at Frankie's Beef, Pasta & Catering, 5721 W. 95th St., Police Chief Robert Smith said.

At least one suspect had been involved in a quarrel the day before with the victims, who were both cooks at the restaurant, police and witnesses said.

The slain man's identity was not immediately known, according to a Cook County medical examiner's office spokesman. The only identification officials had was that his first name was believed to be Carlos and he was in his early 20s.


DRIVER DIES AFTER RIG CRASHES INTO TREE

Allentown, PA -- A Brooklyn, N.Y., truck driver was fatally injured Wednesday in an accident on Interstate 80 in Warren County, police said.

Victor Delgado, 37, was travelling east in Knowlton Township at 11:37 p.m. when his tractor-trailer went into the center median and hit a tree, police said.
Delgado, who was ejected from the rig, was taken to Pocono Medical Center in East Stroudsburg, where he died at 3:11 a.m. Thursday, New Jersey State Police said.


Accident kills worker at trucking depot

Salt Lake City, UT -- A local trucking depot company employee was killed in a freak accident early Thursday.

Kekumi Feleota, 41, was hooking up a double trailer at Roadway Trucking, 1234 S. 3200 West, about 2:30 a.m. when he was pinned between the tractor, front trailer and the second trailer, according to Salt Lake City police detective Robin Snyder.
It was unclear Thursday why the front trailer and tractor rolled back into Feleota.


LANTA bus driver died from heart problems

Allentown, PA -- The driver of the Lehigh and Northampton Transportation Authority Metro Plus minibus who collapsed at the wheel Wednesday and caused a three-vehicle accident in Allentown died of natural causes.

Lehigh County Coroner Scott Grim on Thursday said Lee Suranofsky, 64, of Bethlehem died of heart problems at Sacred Heart Hospital, Allentown, where he was taken after the 5 p.m. crash on Lehigh Street, just north of Martin Luther King Jr. Drive.

Suranofsky was a driver for the Valley Association for Specialized Transportation, or VAST, which works for LANTA under contract, the past six months.


TRUCK DRIVER DIES IN ALLEGHANY CO. CRASH

Roanoke, VA -- The driver of a tractor-trailer died early Monday morning after the vehicle he was driving went over a bridge in Alleghany County and plunged 125 feet into a creek, Virginia State Police spokesman Sgt. Bob Carpentieri said.

H. Wayne Marquell, 50, of Eaton, Ind., was hauling paper products on eastbound Interstate 64 at approximately 2:30 a.m. when the 2004 Volvo tractor-trailer ran off the right side of the road, striking the guard rail and bridge before going over the bridge, Carpentieri said.

The truck caught fire, and Marquell died at the scene, Carpentieri said. The accident is under investigation.


Worker Killed In Evanston Construction Accident

CHICAGO, IL -- One construction worker was killed and another injured Friday afternoon when part of an Evanston parking garage collapsed.

The sixth floor of the Sherman Plaza parking garage, at Benson Avenue and Davis Street in the near north suburb, apparently collapsed onto the fifth floor at about 3 p.m. Friday.

The two workers were trapped under the debris after scaffolding and forming material fell on them while they were on the fifth of six floors, said Evanston Fire Department Capt. Kurt Dickman.


Cab Driver Crashes Onto Freeway After Shooting Police Investigate Suspicious Pickup Call


DETROIT, MI -- A cab driver was shot and killed after being called for a run along the Southfield freeway in Detroit early Monday morning.


IN NYC. S.I. PLUMBER DIES AT JOB ON BOWERY

New York, NY -- A PLUMBER died - possibly from electrocution - while working in a Bowery flophouse yesterday, police and officials said.

Eddie Kasza, 37, a father of three from Staten Island, was in a second-floor bathroom at 197 Bowery when he leaned against exposed wires, sources said.

Kasza, who weighed about 350 pounds, had been perspiring heavily all day and may have suffered a heart attack, witnesses said. But rescue workers saw burns on his body.


CHRISTIANSBURG WORKER KILLED

Roanoke, VA -- A 60-year-old Christiansburg Public Works employee was run over by a dump truck and killed Wednesday while working on a road.

Jack Lynne Bean of Christiansburg apparently did not hear the safety beep when a dump truck driven by Joseph Allen Booth, 33, backed up and crushed him, said Virginia State Police Sgt. Bob Carpentieri. The incident happened around 11:30 a.m. on Chrisman Mill Road in Christiansburg. Bean was pronounced dead at the scene.

Bean was working with a "tamper," a remote-controlled machine that flattens dirt, Carpentieri said. Noise from the tamper and other equipment at the work site likely drowned out the sound of the reverse beep on the dump truck, Carpentieri said.


Worker Killed

TORRANCE, CA -- Authorities today identified a 61-year-old contract maintenance worker who fell to his death at the MobilExxon refinery in Torrance. Killed in the fall was David Yanez-Plasencia of Long Beach, said Los Angeles County coroner's Lt. Richard Hanna. Yanez-Plasencia fell 15 feet into the empty water treatment tank in the "tank farm" area of the refinery, according to Torrance Fire Capt. Steve Deuel. Firefighters assigned to an Urban Search and Rescue Team retrieved the body from the tank, Deuel said. The accident at the refinery at 3700 W. 190th St. was reported at 8:47 p.m. yesterday, Deuel said. Torrance police investigated the fall, but a preliminary investigation indicated the man accidentally slipped and fell, according to authorities.


Worker who died in fall identified as Honduran

Charleston, SC -- A worker who died after falling from the roof of a house under construction on Daniel Island has been identified as Taurino Bueso Romero.

Romero's home address was Charlotte, but his body is being returned to his family in Honduras, Berkeley County Chief Deputy Coroner Bill Salisbury said. Romero, 38, was alone on the roof of the house on Delahow Street when he slipped and fell 21 feet Tuesday morning. Romero was pronounced dead at Medical University Hospital. He was employed by Mejia Brother Construction in Goose Creek, Salisbury said.


Apple Valley clerk's death ruled an accident

St. Paul, MN -- The Apple Valley gas station clerk found shot in the head in early August accidentally killed himself, authorities said Wednesday.

Nail Mahmoud, 23, was the victim not of a homicide, as police first had suspected, but of a tragic mishap. Rumors swirled in the community about the cause of his death, but the investigation's conclusion has left Mahmoud's family and friends reeling.

Mahmoud, a Palestinian immigrant living in Savage, had worked as a cashier for two years at the Quick Stop 66 convenience store at the busy corner of County Road 42 and Garden View Drive. He came to Minnesota four years ago, after his mother was gunned down in the West Bank city of Ramallah.


Police trainee accidentally shot, dies

AUSTELL, Ga. -- An investigation has been ordered into the death of a Georgia police recruit who was accidentally shot by her instructor on the first day of weapons training.

Tara Drummond, 23, was shot at a police academy in Austell, Ga., Tuesday afternoon, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported Thursday. She was a recruit for the Kennesaw police department, one of about 30 trainees in their seventh week of a 10-week course.

The trainees were in a classroom in the basement of the academy when the unidentified instructor's gun discharged, said Carol Morgan, the academy director. Drummond was rushed to a hospital, where she died, the report said.


Armored car guard shot, killed in mall

An AT Systems armored car security guard (Fritz Alphonse)was gunned down Saturday afternoon in the middle of West Lake Mall in an apparent robbery as stunned shoppers watched in horror, according to Atlanta police. The security guard died instantly from a gunshot wound to the head, said police spokeswoman Sylvia Abernathy.

Witnesses at the crowded mall told officers that the security guard had just left a store about 4 p.m. after making a pickup. Witnesses told police that three armed men were seen following the guard, Abernathy said.

"They approached the [guard], and one of them seized the money bag," Abernathy said. "Words were exchanged, and the driver was shot in the head and killed instantly."
The men apparently left with the money, she said.

This was the second time in two years in Atlanta that an armored truck guard has been killed in a robbery. Bantek West guard Moustafa Koura was killed in October 2003 after he and another guard were shot in a well-lit parking lot.


WORKER FELL TO DEATH AFTER RELEASING SAFETY ROPE

The 31-year-old dropped when a ledge where his foot was resting gave way while he was trying to change position.

The construction worker who fell about 50 feet from the roof of a Richmond Road building apparently dropped to his death after he untied a safety rope, and then a metal ledge where his foot was resting gave way, police said Wednesday.

The 31-year-old worker was preparing to change his position on the roof to reach more shingles when he fell, a preliminary Williamsburg Police Department probe found.

The man's body hit a construction vehicle before striking the ground, Deputy Police Chief Dave Sloggie said. The incident happened about 3 p.m. Tuesday when construction workers were building the Yankee Candle store. Another worker also lost his footing when the metal ledge gave way but he was still connected to a safety rope and escaped any serious injury.

Police haven't released the worker's identity, pending notification of next of kin. But authorities said he was married and lived with his brother in Richmond. Both men are originally from Mexico.


City worker dies after being injured on job in August

Grand Rapids, MI -- A memorial service is scheduled for Tuesday for a Grand Rapids city worker who died after being hurt on the job. Fifty-one-year-old John Hartman of Dorr, an employee for the Department of Forestry, was injured August 25 while cutting down a rotting maple tree in front of a home at 43 Rose SW.

A large branch snapped and fell on Hartman's head and shoulder. Witnesses say he then flipped in the air and landed on the ground.


Explosion at plant kills one, injures two

Myrtle Beach, SC -- One man was killed and two other workers were injured Monday during an explosion at the Carolina Polymers plant, officials said. Nine firefighters also were taken to a local hospital for observation after the blast, which released chemicals from a tank into the air, said Thom Berry, spokesman for the state Department of Health and Environmental Control.

Two contract workers were on the roof working on the tank when it exploded about 10:30 a.m., said Lt. Shea Smith, spokesman for the Greenville County Sheriff's Office.
Brenton Alan Knight, 29, of Wellford, died of "blast injuries," including head, neck and chest trauma, Greenville County Deputy Coroner Linda Holbrook told The Greenville News.


GAS STATION CLERK KILLED; VICTIM OF SHOOTING IN APPARENT ROBBERY

Hartford, CT -- A gas station clerk who moved to Hartford earlier this year became the city's 20th homicide victim of 2005 when he was shot during an apparent robbery early Wednesday.

Hartford police did not release the man's identity Wednesday, but his roommate identified him as Zehir Khan, who moved to Hartford from Virginia. Khan was working the overnight shift at the Sunoco station at 181 Franklin Ave. when he was shot sometime before 1:40 a.m., according to police and his roommate. Khan was pronounced dead at Hartford Hospital about five hours later.


Kentucky Fire Chief Killed in Crash

Watts, KY -- A Kentucky fire chief was killed in a motor vehicle accident while driving to a fire call Sunday evening. Chief Henry James Combs, age 46, served the Watts Volunteer Fire Department in Breathitt County for four years, and was also a member of the Jackson and Vancleve fire departments.

Jackson Fire Chief Roger Friley said Combs was responding to the Watts fire station in his privately owned vehicle when he lost control on a curve and slid sideways into a ditch. The vehicle flipped over and Combs died of asphyxiation, Friley said.


Man Held in Car Salesman's Death

Cerritos, CA -- A man suspected of stabbing a car salesman to death with a butcher knife did so after his request to test drive a Corvette was turned down at a Cerritos auto dealership, authorities said Wednesday.

The salesman died shortly afterward at Long Beach Memorial Hospital, coroner's Lt. Emil Moldovan said. His identity was withheld until relatives could be notified.


Man charged in deaths of uncle, store owner

Tuscaloosa, -- A Sawyerville man has been arrested and charged in the separate slayings of his uncle and a popular Hale County store owner. James Albert Davis, 24, was ordered held without bond Tuesday on capital murder charges.

Police Chief Claude Hamilton said Davis is charged in the deaths of his uncle, Freeman Nixon, 78, of Greensboro, and Johnny Windham, 61, who owned and operated Junction Grocery south of Moundville. A customer discovered Windham shot to death inside Junction Grocery on Friday morning. The lone country store sits at the intersections of Alabama highways 60 and 69.


Lino Lakes cop dies in I-35W chase

Lino Lakes, MN -- A Lino Lakes police officer was killed Tuesday evening when a driver fleeing arrest struck him along Interstate 35W during a high-speed chase.

Police said the driver, a 26-year-old man wanted on an assault warrant out of South Dakota, led officers on a 13-mile chase southbound on the freeway that ended when his vehicle struck the officer, crossed the median and rammed a northbound minivan.

Shawn Silvera, 32, an eight-year veteran of the Lino Lakes Police Department, was laying out a Stop Stick, a device put on the roadway to deflate the tires of a fleeing vehicle, when he was struck just south of Anoka County Road 23 in Lino Lakes. "Silvera intended to terminate the pursuit without any injuries," said Anoka County Sheriff Bruce Andersohn.


Tow Truck Driver Killed While Fixing Flat Tire

Los Angeles, CA -- A tow truck driver fixing a flat tire was fatally injured when the pickup he was servicing was hit from behind on the shoulder of the Riverside Freeway, authorities said Tuesday.

Michael Shultz, 24, of La Habra died following the crash about 4:50 p.m. Monday on the freeway near the Foothill toll road, a California Highway Patrol spokesman said. The car that hit the pickup was driven by Laura Crowley, 24, of Anaheim, the CHP said.


Man dies in crash of small plane at Blytheville

Blytheville, MS -- Authorities say a 74-year-old pilot died after his crop duster crashed at Blytheville's airport. The crash Monday afternoon occurred after L.J. Broussard had been spraying fields in Mississippi County. Witnesses say the aircraft pulled up as it was landing, veered right and crashed.


Collier Employee Killed In Accident Is Identified

ODESSA, TX - The man killed in an industrial accident Tuesday at Collier Safe Co. was identified as Dustin Veon Hall, 24, of New Port Richey.

Hall became pinned by a hydraulic arm at the top of a cement mixer when he was performing maintenance on it, according to a sheriff's office report.

Another Collier Safe employee who was working with Hall called for help, but it was too late.


Entergy contractor dies in storm

Jackson, MS -- A contract electrical worker helping to restore power in Jackson was killed Thursday when he came in contact with a hot wire. The accident slowed restoration work by Entergy crews dispatched to Jackson and South Mississippi.

"We had a mandatory stand-down for safety briefings," said Pat Nelson, regional customer service manager for Entergy in Southaven who has been temporarily transferred to McComb to help coordinate restoration efforts there.


Vendors want murder probe

Los Angeles, CA -- Ice cream vendors marched Friday with their carts in South Los Angeles to protest violence against vendors and call for an investigation into the recent murder of a colleague.

During an attempted robbery Saturday by a man and two teenage women, ice cream vendor Eliseo Reyes, 69, was fatally shot near East 56th and San Pedro streets. More than 30 ice cream vendors were at the shooting scene Friday, where they placed black ribbons on their carts and carried signs demanding justice.


Crash kills trucker on I-30

Benton, AR -- Truck driver Khaled Jerome Cooper, 40, of Russellville was killed when his westbound tractor-trailer collided with the rear of another westbound rig on Interstate 30 in Benton about 2 p.m. Cooper's truck caught on fire, state police said.

Stanley V. Ross of Dallas, the driver of the other truck, was not injured. Passenger Lisa M. Ross, also of Dallas, was injured and taken to Saline Memorial Hospital. Her condition was not available Wednesday.


Fatal truck pileup shuts down Tri-State

Chicago, IL -- Traffic on an eastbound span of the Tri-State Tollway was blocked for about 10 hours Wednesday following an early morning crash in South Holland that left one truck driver dead and injured two others.

The crash occurred about 1:15 a.m. near the Lincoln Oasis. Drivers were diverted at Halsted Street until the road was cleared shortly after the body of Stanley Krzysciak was finally retrieved from his mashed semitrailer truck about 10:45 a.m., police said.

"Without question, it was terrible for motorists," Illinois State Police Trooper Doug Whitmore said. "Some people were caught between Halsted and the crash site. Their whole day was ruined. We had a lot of emergency equipment in there. It was hard to move around."


Va. Day Laborer Held in Slaying Of Contractor

Chevy Chase, MD -- A day laborer from Annandale has been charged with murder in the stabbing death of a Fairfax County contractor who had hired him to work in a Chevy Chase home, police said yesterday.

The slaying occurred after the day laborer stole stereo equipment and jewelry from the house where they were working, court records say.

The smoldering body of Hak Bong Kim, 55, was discovered Aug. 15 in the woods near St. Michael's Catholic Church on Ravensworth Road in Annandale. The body was so badly burned that police initially could not tell whether it was that of a man or a woman. Kim's family had reported him missing the night before, so detectives were quickly able to obtain dental records and identify Kim.


POLICE LINK 4 TO DEATH OF CARRIER SLAIN WOMAN WAS MISTAKEN AS DRUG RIVAL

AIKEN, SC - Two men have been arrested, and investigators are looking for two others they say ambushed and killed a newspaper carrier they mistook for a rival drug dealer. Two of the four men already have been charged with murder.

The four men attacked Aiken Standard employees Debra Dorch and Joe Brewer, who were delivering newspapers to homes in the area of Union Academy Road and Windsor Road near Salley on Saturday morning, he said. They thought the carriers were rival drug dealers, Sheriff Hunt said. Ms. Dorch died of her injuries.


Bethlehem grocer is shot to death

Bethlehem, PA -- The 50-year-old owner of a grocery store on Bethlehem's South Side was found shot to death Sunday afternoon in the store, police said.

Concepcion Martinez was found dead on the floor behind the counter of the Martinez Family Grocery & Deli at 635 Broadway around 2 p.m., according to Bethlehem police. An autopsy is scheduled today.


CRUSHED HARD HAT DIES IN HIS BROTHER'S ARMS

A worker died in his brother's arms while another miraculously escaped a nine-story fall in separate construction-site accidents in Brooklyn yesterday.

Arturo Gonzalez, 27, was crushed to death at around 2:45 on Fourth Avenue in Sunset Park as he and co-workers tried to lift a large steel beam with improvised equipment, a witness said.

Gonzalez and other workers had jury-rigged a pulley to raise the beam, but it gave way, sending the beam crashing onto Gonzalez, according to Edmin Gonzalez, no relation, who watched from his window next door.

The dead man's brother, Juan-Carlos Najera, also worked at the site. "The beam caught him in the center of his chest," said Gonzalez. "Blood was coming out of his mouth. His brother held his head to the side so he could breathe and held him until he died."


Richland County, S.C., deputy tried to pass, lost control

Columbia, SC - A Richland County sheriff's deputy who was killed in an I-20 crash in May was trying to pass a truck when he lost control of his patrol car, an investigation has determined. Deputy Keith Cannon, 26, of Irmo, died May 4 while responding to a call. His westbound Chevrolet Camaro skidded into the median, under a cable barrier and into the eastbound lanes of I-20, where it collided with two vehicles.


Slain restaurant owner called generous, polite; Immigrant from Pakistan shot, killed in apparent robbery

Milwaukee, WI -- Mohammad Zeeshan "Shan" Ali worked long hours getting his restaurant to fly in its first year, but the 40-year-old yearned to trade 12-hour days for more time with his wife and three children.

This week he talked with a friend who owned a gas station about the stress and strain of running a business from behind bulletproof glass on Milwaukee's north side.

"He was telling me, 'This life is very hard,'" said Syed Rizvi, whose gas station is near Ali's restaurant. "He was hoping to spend more time with his kid, but time was real short."
At 10:30 p.m. Thursday, Ali, of Mequon, was shot in the back as he was leaving his carry-out restaurant Fast 'n Tasty, at 3800 N. Teutonia Ave., the victim of an apparent robbery. Two suspects, who stole less than $1,000, were seen running from the scene and were still at large late Friday, police said.


Truckers killed in collision are identified

Sacramento, CA -- Two truck drivers killed in a fiery head-on collision last week on Highway 65 have been identified as Gregory Zimmerman, 55, of Corning and John D. Herzog, 42, of Grants Pass, Ore., the Placer County Coroner's Office said.

Herzog was northbound on the two-lane highway north of Lincoln on Thursday when his empty flatbed truck drifted into the southbound lane, the California Highway Patrol said.
Zimmerman, who was heading southbound with a full load of logs, smashed into the truck, the CHP said. Zimmerman's truck plunged into a ditch, spilled its load and burned, the CHP said.


Kenmore man charged in fatal shooting of clerk

Seattle, WA -- Christopher Bistryski, accused of using a handgun owned by a King County sheriff deputy to kill a clerk at a Kenmore convenience store Saturday, was charged in King County Superior Court yesterday with first-degree murder.

Prosecutors said Bistryski, 23, lives in Kenmore with 44-year-old sheriff's deputy Ferenc Zana and used one of Zana's personal handguns to kill Mohammad-Imad [also known as Dimitri] Harb at a nearby Plaid Pantry.


N.C. man dies during church construction

JOLIVUE, NC -- A North Carolina man died when roof trusses caved in at a church-construction site in Augusta County on Monday evening.

Serrafin Garcia Zefarino died under more than a ton of wooden beams, just 3 feet from a doorway at the Victory Worship Center on Hammond Lane, according to project superintendent Roger Childress, of Thomas Builders.

"All of the sudden, they just heard a crack and all of the trusses came down," Childress said. The collapse occurred just as workers were wrapping up work for the night on the church-addition project. Two other workers were hospitalized after riding the falling trusses to the ground. All three men worked for Blacksburg-based United Framing Contractors.


Hospital worker fatally shot by estranged husband

SHAMOKIN, Pa. -- A police officer fatally shot his estranged wife at the hospital where she worked, fled and remained at large Wednesday, police said. Tina Curran, 31, of Mount Carmel, was shot several times. She was flown to the trauma unit at Geisinger Medical Center in Danville, where she was pronounced dead.


FORKLIFT KILLS L.I. BYSTANDER

A popular social worker was crushed to death by a forklift as it moved construction supplies outside a Long Island school.

Lauren Ludwig, 53, was knocked down and killed at 11:31 a.m. Monday as she walked from her car to the front door of PS 6 in Oceanside, where she was assistant director of a privately run alcohol- and drug-abuse counseling program.

Police said the 5-foot-4 social worker was hit by the four-foot-high right front tire of the Lull Hi-Loader as it moved roofing materials to another section of the building, which is getting repairs.


Man charged in death of shelter supervisor

SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- An alleged drug dealer from San Francisco was charged with murder Tuesday in the slaying of a 35-year-old homeless shelter supervisor, who police say was gunned down after his killer mistook him for a drug rival.

Dennis Anderson, 23, was charged with the Aug. 3 killing of Fred Ayatch. Ayatch was shot at 2:15 a.m. as he came out of an alley onto Eddy Street near Divisadero Street in the Western Addition. He was shot several more times as he lay on the ground, police said.

Labels: taxi drivers, Weekly Toll, Workplace Violence

The Charleston, West Virginia Gazette has a long article on the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) Mystery Man, Richard Stickler, who President Bush nominated last week. Most of the article is just a review of Stickler's career, from being captain of the Barrackville High School basketball team that won 27 games in a row, from mine laborer to management of Beth Energy’s Boone County holdings in West Virginia, to being a manager for Performance Coal, and finally to a government position in Pennsylvania where he ran into a bit of controversy:

In March 1997, Stickler was named director of Pennsylvania’s underground mine safety agency, a post he held until July 2003.

Carol Raulston, a spokeswoman for the National Mining Association, said that Pennsylvania made “great strides” in mine safety during Stickler’s time with the state agency. “He clearly has a great deal of experience with mine safety and health,” Raulston said.

While he was in the Pennsylvania job, nine coal miners were trapped for three days in a flooded underground mine near Somerset, Pa.

Various investigations have said that state and federal regulators — including the agency that Stickler was running — could have done more to prevent the Quecreek flood.

For example, a state grand jury issued a report that said, before approving a permit for the operation, the state could have required Quecreek Mining to confirm the location of a flooded underground mine that the workers accidentally drilled into, causing the flood.

(you can read more background of the Quecreek incident here.

It's hard to tell exactly what to make of Stickler. He's held a number of management positions, as well as one government job. (And does anyone know what he was doing after he left the Pennsylvania job in 2003?) As former Clinton MSHA director Davit McAteer said

Stickler is “a guy with a history in the mining industry, and this is a job that requires you to represent everybody — not one side or the other. I hope he meets that challenge.”

I hope so, but most of Bush's nominees have failed (miserably) to meet that challenge. New OSHA nominee Ed Foulke, of the union busting firm Jackson Lewis, doesn't exactly make me optimistic about these new appointments.

Go ahead, prove me wrong.

Labels: Richard Stickler

The National Safety Council bestowed its prestigious "Green Cross" on the DuPont Corporation last week as an organization that has "distinguished itself over a period of years for outstanding achievement in workplace and off-the-job safety and health programs."

The United Steelworkers, however, noted in a report and press release that, while DuPont may disginguish itself, it didn't do so in a good way:

Unfortunately, despite all the slogans, DuPont’s history is not commendable. Instead of practicing openness and ethics, DuPont entrenches itself and resists taking responsibility for current and past trespasses, which continues to put citizens, the environment, and most of all, workers at risk. DuPont’s safety program blames the worker for on-the-job hazards and its goal of zero accidents encourages a system of non-reporting.

DuPont talks the talk but in reality does not walk the walk. It continues to be one of the dirtiest and most dangerous companies in the United States, and possibly, the
world.

DuPont’s True Record:

• Violations for failure to report industrial accidents to OSHA
  
• One of the “Dangerous Dozen” for putting over 9 million people at risk
  
• 20 Superfund sites and thousands of sick plaintiffs
  
• Number one producer of toxic dioxins in the U.S.
  
• Sued by the EPA for withholding evidence showing potential harmful effects of its Teflon-chemical, C8

Steelworkers dressed in orange shirts proclaiming DuPont puts "U.S. Jobs and the Environment at Risk," demonstrated in front of the National Safety Council conference. They were protesting DuPont's award and the company's "STOP" Program, a behavior-based safety program which is based on the theory that almost all injuries are caused by workers' unsafe acts.

In contrast, the USW research has shown that multiple root causes related to hazards and unsafe conditions, not multiple unsafe behaviors, cause accidents.

"We felt it was vital that members of the health and safety community understood the truth regarding DuPont's safety record," said DuPont worker and rally participant Jim Rowe. "What this company sells to other corporations and what actually happens at DuPont plants are two completely different things. In fact, we have found many safety folks here at the conference have been sympathetic to our message."

The USW represents 1,800 workers at six DuPont facilities.

One of my first workplace inspections at AFSCME was a wastewater treatment plant following a confined space fatality. In subsequent years, I inspected a number of plants, some terrible and some, well, less terrible. But I don't think I ever came across one as bad as this:

Makeshift catch basins direct flowing rainwater through battered, crumbling ceilings. Workers trudge through moats of raw and semi-treated sewage to repair damaged equipment. Water rises around high-voltage electrical boxes. There's mold. Disease. Flooded tunnels. Open manholes. Chemical spills. Exposed wiring. Human waste.

Unfortunately, the only way to make the public (and public officials) pay attention was for the workers to secretly video conditions at the plant and release them to the media, despite previous complaints to the state's public employee OSHA office.

And, as usual in these cases, harassment of workers accompanies serious health and safety problems:

As early as next week, the union could file health and safety grievances against the county. He also promises to examine the alleged intimidation tactics employed by management to keep workers quiet.

"I'm being told that our employees are being stifled from showing these violations and reporting these violations, and they're being intimidated, coerced and threatened by the superintendent," says [Jerry Laricchiuta, president of the Civil Service Employees Association (CSEA) Local 830 of Nassau County]. "Whatever legal resources or whatever we have in our power, we're going to use against that kind of bully management."

[Tim Corr, a CSEA administrative assistant in charge of member health and safety] urges members who witness specific violations but are afraid to report them to OSHA for fear of retribution to file their complaint through the union. Union leaders will put their own names on the form instead of the employees'.

[Peter Gerbasi, Nassau's deputy county executive of parks and public works] says this shows the union "reacting to a small group of disgruntled employees who rather than working to make things better would rather create crises that don't exist."

Damn troublemakers. Grrr!

Actually, if a worker requests it, OSHA complaints are supposed to be kept confidential. Nevertheless,workers are often still intimidated, figuring (often accurately) that management has ways to figure out who filed the complaint. And althouth the Occupational Safety and Health Act(OSHAct) technically protects workers against retaliation for exercising their right, justice is often slow and ineffective.

One of the good things about the OSHAct is that it gives "worker representatives" (unions) certain rights to represent workers -- filing complaints, walking around with OSHA inspectors on inspections, and (limited) participation in any settlement negotiations after the employer is cited.

The United Steelworkers who represent the workers at BP's Texas City refinery that was fined $21 million yesterday, criticized OSHA for reaching a settlment with the company before the citation was issued:

"We will never know what OSHA traded away to get the settlement," said Mr. Gerard. "The families of the victims, workers in the plant, and the surrounding community deserve to know all the problems OSHA uncovered. And the workers who face those hazards every day on the job should have had a voice in the settlement talks."

"The penalty is the largest in OSHA’s history," said Gary Beevers, Director of the USW’s Region 6. “We are grateful for that. But by itself, the penalty will not deter future misconduct. Penalties are supposed to hurt, and this one represents less than half a day of BP’s corporate income. It doesn’t even cover what BP saved by not making the safety improvements that would have prevented the March 23 explosion.”

Had the citation been issued before settlement discussions, not only would all of the original penalties be known, but the union would have been able to participate in settlement discussions.

Labels: BP

Mollie Ivins sees some common threads reaching from "Brownie" to Bush's pick for OSHA, Ed Foulke:

There’s a doctoral dissertation to be written about Bush appointees named during the administration’s frequent fits of Petulant Pique. These PP appointments are made in the immortal childhood spirit of “nanny-nanny boo-boo, I’ll show you.”

***

The PP appointments are less for reasons of ideology or even rewarding the politically faithful than just in the old nyeh-nyeh spirit.

You could, for example, put any number of people at the Department of Labor who are wholly unsympathetic to the labor movement — Bush has installed shoals of them already. But there is a certain arch, flippant malice to making Edwin Foulke assistant secretary in charge of the health and safety of workers.

Republican appointees who oppose the agencies to which they are assigned are a dime a dozen, but Foulke is a partner from the most notorious union-busting law firm in the country. What he does for a living is destroy the only organizations that care about workers’ health and safety.

Here’s another PP pick: put a timber industry lobbyist in as head of the Forest Service. How about a mining industry lobbyist who believes public lands are unconstitutional in charge of the public lands? Nice shot. A utility lobbyist who represented the worst air polluters in the country as head of the clean air division at the EPA? A laff riot. As head of the Superfund, a woman whose last job was teaching corporate polluters how to evade Superfund regulations? Cute, cute, cute. A Monsanto lobbyist as No. 2 at the EPA.

A lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute at the Council on Environmental Quality. And so on. And so forth.

The Federal Trade Commission was finally embarrassed enough by demands from Democratic governors to start an investigation into recent price gouging by oil companies. But a former lawyer for ChevronTexaco will head the investigation. Is this fun or what?

Is anyone surprised who'se been paying attention for the past five years?

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration fined BP Amoco more than $21 million for over 300 violations related to the March 28 explosion that killed 15 workers and injured 170.

The citation included 170 "Egregious Willful Violations" at the maximum $70,000 each for total of $11,690,000. Willful violations are those committed with an intentional disregard of, or plain indifference to, the requirements of the Occupational Safety and Health Act and regulations. "Egregious" means that instead of one citation for a number of violations, each individual violation is cited at the maximum. There were five additional willful safety violations and two willful health violations.

OSHA Regional Administrator John Miles said that the agency is considering whether to refer some violations to the Justice Department for possible criminal prosecution. OSHA is only allowed to file criminal charges when a willful violation results in a fatality. But according to an earlier article in the Houston Chronicle, the law limits OSHA to filing criminal charges when a company kills its own employee(s). In the BP case, only employees of a contractor were killed.

Because the explosion also released 19,000 pounds of hexane and other toxic substances into the air, however, it is possible for the Environmental Protection Agency to prosecute under the Clean Air Act (CAA), which has much stronger penalties. The CAA states that a person “negligently places another person in imminent danger of death or serious bodily injury” can be sentenced to one year in jail, and a person who at the time knowingly places another person in imminent danger of death or serious bodily injury can serve up to 15 years in jail.

In the settlement with OSHA, BP also agreed to:

• complete a review of the ISOM unit to determine how it can be operated safely and alert OSHA if and when a decision is made to start up the unit in the future;


• retain a firm with expertise in process safety management (PSM), including pressure relief systems, safety instrumented systems, human factor analysis and performing process safety audits, to conduct a refinery-wide comprehensive audit and analysis of the company's PSM systems;


• hire an expert to assess and report on communication within and between management, supervisors, and authorized employee representatives and non-management employees and the impact of the communication on implementation of safety practices and procedures;


• submit to OSHA and BP Products' authorized employee representative, every six months for three years, logs of occupational injuries and illnesses ("OSHA 300 Logs") and all incident reports related to PSM issues;


• notify the OSHA area office of any incident or injury at the Texas City facility that results in an employee losing one or more workdays during the same three-year period.

Under the agreement, BP does not admit the alleged violations or agree with the way OSHA has characterized them.

Although BP Products North America President Ross Pillari stated he was pleased to have reached an agreement with OSHA and fully endorsed the corrective actions, a BP statement cautioned that "Under the agreement, BP does not admit the alleged violations or agree with the way OSHA has characterized them."

In a preliminary report, BP claimed that the explosion was the fault of "deeply disturbing" mistakes by the workers. Despite BP's casting of blame on its employees, the US Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board has found that several alarms and other equipment had failed on the day of the explosion and that The BP had been having problems with the process for five years before the explosion.

The CSB issued an urgent recommendation to BP last month to commission an independent panel that would review a range of safety management and culture issues stemming from the explosion. BP agreed to set up the panel. OSHA's Miles agreed that "the health and safety culture at the BP plant was lax, which contributed to the blast."

Personally, I'm surprised and pleased at the size of the penalty which is far higher than I had predicted. On the other hand,

• The clear lesson for employers is not to kill too many workers at one time. After all, the fine amounts to $1.4 million per fatality. How often does a fine come anywhere close to that amount when an employer's willful actions results in the death of only one or two employees?


• Despite the record size of the penalty, it's a mere pimple on the total profits of the company. BP had $285 billion in revenue and $17 billion in profit for 2004. For example, corporate giant Tyson Foods, with a 2004 profit of $403 million was fined only $60,000 for the 1999 deaths of two workers at its animal feed plant in Robards, Ky. As I said before, only a fine in the neighborhood of $20 billion would have a punishing financial impact on the company.

More BP stories here.

Labels: BP, Chemical Safety Board

[Note: See update below. --JB]

It just keeps getting worse. Employers and the Bush administration are using Katrina to gut environmental protections, cut workers' pay and now even break strikes:

About a dozen evacuees from Hurricane Katrina are filling in for striking workers at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, hospital officials said Saturday.

The workers -- among them janitorial staff and nursing assistants from the storm-ravaged gulf -- are employed by a temporary employment agency, CPMC Medical Director Allan Pont said.

"We learned they were Katrina refugees through word of mouth," Pont said. "Our staff is hearing what an ordeal they've been through"

Pont said the hospital had little recourse but to hire temporary workers to care for patients and provide upkeep for the hospital, but union members walking a picket line outside the hospital were aghast to find out the hospital was using evacuees from Hurricane Katrina to fill their jobs.

About 800 cafeteria workers, health aides and represented by SEIU on strike last week against three campuses of Sutter Health, CPMC's parent company

"It's such an extraordinary irony," said Sal Rosselli, president of SEIU United Health Care Workers West.

"SEIU is sending nurses and psych techs to New Orleans to care for people there. We're engaging the government to establish training programs there for workers who are unemployed."

Sutter has hired a scab supply company -- Healthcare Contingency Staffing Services (HCSS) to supply workers to fill in for the strikers. HCSS is run by the unsavory scabmaster Gary Fanger, who the Bay Guardian calls "the perfect guy for the messy, unpleasant, and all around ugly job of quashing a strike.":

a 52-year-old ex-felon who's been convicted on fraud, forgery, and drug charges and accused of stealing trade secrets and failing to pay child support.

Fanger portrays himself as a decent guy who's made some mistakes over the years. "I did some stupid things back then," he says. But, "I think I've been a contributor to society by employing hundreds of people.... I'm a good boss, a good dad."

· · ·

You can chart the career of Gary W. Fanger, a bulky man with blond hair, a soft voice, and a passion for sailing, by trolling the court records and criminal databases of California, Colorado, and beyond.

Fanger, who was raised in Los Gatos, first appears in the system in 1981, in Colorado, when Aspen police accused him of writing a bad check for $1,666.66, according to a search-warrant affidavit. At the time, Fanger was running what appears to have been a barter business called Executive Exchange. The case was closed and prosecution deferred when Fanger agreed to repay the money along with a $250 fine and court costs, court records show.

By 1984 he was wearing handcuffs again, accused by Denver cops of second-degree forgery (four counts), criminal impersonation (three counts), and check fraud (a single count). At trial, court reports indicate, he was found guilty on two forgery charges and sentenced to four years in the state pen; he appealed the conviction and was released on bond.

While out on bond, he was popped a third time, for "conspiracy to dispense" cocaine, according to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. Probation records say he pled to a single count of "Criminal Attempt to Possess a Schedule II Controlled Substance," and got another four-year sentence, to be served consecutively with his earlier term. Fanger tells us he did three years in the Colorado pen and used the time behind bars to pursue college degrees.

His probation officer didn't have particularly flattering things to say about him, concluding, in a written report, that he was driven by "greed" and "the opportunity to turn $100,000 into half a million dollars in three to four weeks time." The probation officer was also concerned that Fanger was $25,000 behind on child support payments to an ex-spouse, with whom he'd had four kids.

"It's amazing," says one source who knows Fanger. "Every person around him gets screwed."

UPDATE: I recently received a call from Gary Fanger asking me to take down this post, disputing some of the allegations made in the Guardian article, and noting that even some of the accurate points were long in the past. Also note that Mr. Fanger has apparently left the "strike staffing" business.

While I have a policy of not taking down posts, I do have a policy of letting everyone have their say. I am publishing Mr. Fanger's letter below.

Dear Jordan,

Thank you for taking the time to talk about the Scab Master post this morning. I wrote a letter a couple of days ago to the publisher of the Guardian asking him to take the article down. The article was interesting because the next issue had a full page inside front cover ad for the SEIU. I don’t know if they were rewarding them for the article but my issues with the SEIU are behind both of us. Their negative information about me was pulled down by them voluntarily last year. I am hoping you can do the same.

I understand that you don’t normally take your postings down but this is a little different since the information was taken from the Guardian and it was not substantiated like it should have been. They called me hours before it went to press and even though I gave th em plenty of references, my son who is an attorney, an ex wife, an employee and other business associates they did not take the time to interview them.

The article covers the strike but mostly talks about my life and portrays a lot of negative information, some which is false and some that was true many years ago about past taxes and child support that was due and now paid. The article mentions a criminal record that is over 20 years old which I paid a price for but this article and its content continues to haunt my life. I have several children I am supporting, I pay all my taxes and I have no child support that is due. I have overcome a lot of obstacles in my life but still this article coming up on the top of a Google search is causing me personal and professional problems.

One of my employees voluntarily wrote a counter follow up commentary that ran in an issue just after this article. It helped because it would show up under the Scab Master article but it does not show up any more. I ignored the posts for years but lately they have caused me some real problems professionally and even when I was trying to get a loan.

I appreciate your time and attention and hope that you will consider my request.

Sincerely,

Gary Fanger

Labels: Katrina, Union Busting

From Confined Space Roving Correspondent Bill Kojola

Our soon-to-be nominated and likely future leader of OSHA has recently been on a kick to get "fat" out of the workplace. That's right, Ed is zeroing in on what he thinks is a major workplace problem - OBESITY. It's the cause of much of our problems in the workforce according to Chairman Foulke -- things like decreased productivity, increased workplace violence and musculoskeletal disorders -- and may lead to the destruction of our workers' comp and health care systems and the ruin of the business community!

Sound preposterous?? Not at all - let's follow the bouncing ball. Ed is active as a member of the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) and it's Employee Health, Safety & Security Committee and he's been speaking out:

The obesity epidemic is a smoldering time bomb on HR's (human resources) doorway. The problem has been identified, but so far, real solutions haven't been discovered. Unless they are -- and soon -- the economic fallout will be devastating. The health care and workers' comp systems may collapse, many employers will be driven out of business...or all of the above.

And in July 8, 2004 testimony before the House Small Business Subcommittee on Tax, Finance, and Exports on HR 1818, the Workforce Health Improvement Program Act, Chairman Ed says:

First, for those employers and employees who take advantage of this bill's provisions, it is almost guaranteed that their employees will suffer less health-related on-the-job injuries. Specifically, with more frequent exercise, employees will strengthen their muscle tone and as a result will be less susceptible to back injuries and muscle strain.

Furthermore, reducing obesity in the workplace will in turn reduce some psychological disorders such as depression. This in turn could reduce violence in the workplace.

Whew! Such enlightenment. A future OSHA standard on obesity?? The standards writing shop needs something to do -- and now here's a standard the Bush folks might like.

So it turns out that the nomination of Edwin Foulke as Assistant Secretary of Labor for OSHA last week is looking more and more like a typical Bush administration move: Appoint a Republican political operative to head an agency that he's spent most of his career working to undermine. Except in this case, there's an extra twist. Foulke is not just a Republican mover and shaker in South Carolina, he's also a partner at Jackson-Lewis, one of the most notorious union-busting lawfirms in the country. How appropriate for a Bush Administration Assistant Secretary of Labor.

I realized that when I wrote the original post that Jackson Lewis resided on the dark side, but I didn't have time to do much research that evening. Little did I know how easy the research would be. Just Google "Jackson Lewis" + "union busting" and you come up with 322 hits. Substitute "union busting" with the more polite phrase "union avoidance" and you get 304 hits.

Jackson Lewis publishes a newsletter called Preventive Strategies and one of their main Practice Areas is Labor Relations, including Preventive Practices"

Committed to the practice of preventive labor relations through issue assessment, supervisory training, policy development, and positive communications, Jackson Lewis has assisted many employers in winning NLRB elections or in avoiding union elections altogether. (emphasis added)

Much of Jackson-Lewis's evildoing, or "preventive labor relations" came to light nationally in a New York Times article last year that described how Enersys, a company that had hired Jackson Lewis to help it "avoid" a union, sued the law firm for malpractice, accusing Jackson Lewis of advising it to engage in illegal behavior.

You've really got to read the entire article. It's a nightmare about how the workers at the plant chose to organize with the International Union of Electrical Workers (IUE), despite the anti-union campaign organized by Jackson Lewis for the company. The company then fired a union steward and broke numerous other labor laws leading to an NLRB complaint citing 120 violations of federal law, among them wrongly firing union leaders, assisting the anti-union campaign, improperly withdrawing union recognition and moving production to nonunion plants as retaliation. The company then refused to sign a contract and threatened layoffs unless the union agreed to a "gainsharing program," that would provide bonuses based on productivity increases. The company never provided the bonuses and it was later discovered never had any intention to. (More on Enersys here.)

Even Tonight Show host Jay Leno doesn't think much of union busting firms like Jackson, Lewis:

Unionists have a good reason to watch "The Tonight Show". Its host, comedian Jay Leno, just busted the number-one union busting law firm, Jackson, Lewis, out of a lucrative deal.

Leno was scheduled to appear at the Society of Human Resource Management's annual convention in Las Vegas on June 25-28 - that is until union research Rick Rehberg found out about it. Rehberg, a corporate researcher for the Food & Allied Service Trades, an AFL-CIO department, kept coming across Jackson, Lewis in the 25 or so union campaigns he's worked on.

That's not surprising since the notorious law firm has defeated organizing drives in over 30 states. And they've done it mean and dirty. For example, the New York Daily News reported the law firm was responsible for setting up armed guards at factory gates in at least three states to stop union organizing campaigns. And Jackson, Lewis routinely advises companies to set up forced overtime when union meetings are scheduled, watch workers during break time to detect potential organizing drives, and prohibit workers' communication to thwart the distribution of union material.

Companies pay big money to Jackson, Lewis and other union busters for exactly that kind of information. In fact, union busting is a billion dollar industry. Jackson, Lewis charges $1,200 to $1,600 a person for running seminars titled, "How to Stay Union Free in Today's Era of Corporate Campaigns" and "Best Employer Practices to Stay Union Free in the Millennium". But thanks to Leno, Jackson, Lewis, won't be garnering a hefty check at this year's SHRM conference.

You can also find stories about J-L's participation in notorious campaigns against the unionization of Borders Bookstores, Berlin Health & Rehabilitation Center in Berlin, Vermont, Episcopal Church Home, nursing home in Rochester, NY, and Patient Care in New York City and many, many more. Infuriated after losing a 2002 election at Saint-Gobain Abrasives factory in Worcester, Massachusetts, Jackson Lewis even went so far as to file an unfair labor practice suit against Congressman Jim McGovern (D-MA) because he told workers that they should vote for the union (which they did.)

Foulke isn't directly part of J-L's union-busting practice. He belongs to the "Workplace Safety Compliance, including Violence Prevention" practice:

To assist in compliance efforts and to reduce the likelihood of a citation, we advise employers in developing safety programs and conducting preventive self-audits to pinpoint and remedy potential legal vulnerabilities.

Yes, you read that right. The purpose of Jackson Lewis's safety programs and self audits is not to protect workers from getting injured or killed, but to "pinpoint and prevent potential legal vulnerabilities." We all have our priorities.

And then there's the Violence Prevention part, which from J-L's perspective seems to be instruction in how to lay off troublesome employees without having them come back in and blow your head off. No mention is made of the overwhelming cause of workplace violence like retail store robberies and assaults of mental health and social service workers.

Foulke was also a member of J-L's Management Training practice, which includes programs on "maintaining union-free status."

Whether or not Foulke participated directly in Jackson Lewis's union busting activities, he certainly didn't have a whole lot of good things to say about one of labor's priorities throughout the 1990's, OSHA's ergonomics standard that was repealed by the Bush administration in 2001:

"It should be called the OSHA Lawyers' Full Employment Act," says Edwin Foulke, himself an attorney who specializes in OSHA-related issues for the Jackson Lewis law firm based in Washington, D.C. "I would have liked to have seen voluntary guidelines. Most employers want to do the right thing, but this will just be a big record-keeping exercise."

Foulke and other skeptics claim there isn't enough science yet to prescribe precise fixes for problems....

While Foulke was basically J-L's OSHA guy, questions need to be asked (preferably by Senators at his confirmation hearing) about what Foulke thinks about workers' right to organize. Was he in sync with the union busting activities of Jackson Lewis? Are union organizing campaigns that focus on health and safety issues a healthy sign of worker involvement or a sign of trouble? What does he think about behavioral safety programs that blame workers for accidents?

What does he think about the role of the "worker representative" as described in the OSHA law? Is it a good thing if workers exercise their rights to push management into improving safety conditions? Coming out of such a virulently anti-union firm, will he be able to work with unions? Unlike any other Republican administrations since OSHA was created in 1971, the Bush appointees have refused, with rare exceptions, to work seriously with unions. Will he continue this practice?

So what does all this mean for OSHA over the next 3 ½ years?

The bottom line is that we’re somewhat lacking in actual health and safety expertise in OSHA's front office. We now have attorneys in all of the top three jobs: Foulke, an attorney from a union busting lawfirm, a local Republican Party chairman and an officer in the Republican National Lawyer’s Association; Deputy Assistant Secretary Jonathan Snare, a former Texas political operative, member of the Republican National Lawyer’s Association and former lobbyist for Metabolife, maker of the killer drug ephedra; and Deputy Assistant Secretary Steve Witt, an attorney who has worked at a variety of positions in OSHA's Washington headquarters since 1985.

What all this means is no major regulations except those ordered by the courts, more emphasis (if that’s possible) on costly, unproven voluntary programs like VPP and alliances, continued frosty relations (or no relations) with labor unions, enforcement will continue muddle along increasingly strained for resources and there will be little, if any, Congressional oversight unless the Democrats take back one house of Congress next year.

In other words, status quo.

Labels: Ed Foulke, Foxes Guarding The Chickencoop, Union Busting

As those of you who have been reading Confined Space for a while know, I have a few major reasons for sacrificing my sleep and other spare-time pursuits: to satisfy my political obsessions, to get health and safety information to workers, and to help create a movement in this country that will force the powers-that-be to take worker safety and health more seriously.

In order to contribute to creating some kind of movement, Confined Space needs to reach the screens of far more workers than it does now. For that reason, I'm launching a two-pronged campaign to boost circulation.

1. Linked here is a Confined Space flyer. Print up a few hundred thousand and drop them at workshops, meetings, conferences and other places where there are people you think might be interested. (There's also a more "G" rated version here.)



2. Make an effort to forward Confined Space to anyone you think might be interested. You can forward the home url http://spewingforth.blogspot.com or click on those little envelop-arrow icons at the top of each post to send individual posts to friends and co-workers.

And if you have any other ideas, let me know.

Thanks.

By strange coincidence, I wore my OSHA NOW shirt to the gym today. It was given to me in 2000 by the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA-CWA) when then Assistant Secretary for OSHA Charles Jeffress signed Memorandum of Understanding with then Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Administrator Jane Garvey, promising to address the workplace safety and health problems of flight attendants.

Today, five years later, the AFA-CWA filed a complaint in District Court against Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao and FAA Administrator Marion Blakely "for their failure to ensure the health and safety of flight attendants and other employees working in the airline industry."
The root of the problem is Section 4(b)(1) of the Occupational Safety and Health Act which states that if a federal agency claims that it has jurisdiction over the health and safety of its employees, then OSHA can't enforce the law in that agency -- even if the agency is doing a lousy job. In 1975, the FAA claimed jurisdiction over the health and safety of crewmembers on civil aircraft, yet has failed to enforce basic standards. OSHA, nevertheless, was kicked out of the picture.

Flight attendants suffer from a number of workplace health and safety problems and no one is dealing with them:

Flight attendants encounter a wide variety of occupational hazards while working aboard commercial flights including turbulence, severe changes in cabin air pressure, unwieldy service carts, exposure to toxic chemicals, unruly and sick passengers, threats of terrorism and emergency evacuations. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics, flight attendants suffer injuries and illnesses four times more frequently than workers in private industry and more than twice as often as those in construction.

After the FAA had repeatedly ignored flight attendants' requests to address these problems, the Association of Flight Attendants filed a petition in 1990 asking the agency to adopt selected OSH Act safety regulations. Seven years later, the FAA responded that AFA-CWA’s issues did not constitute an immediate safety concern and denied the petition due to "budgetary constraints."

But in 2000, Jeffress and Garvey signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) under which both agencies agreed to establish a procedure for coordinating and supporting enforcement of the OSHAct with respect to the working conditions of employees and aircraft operations, and for resolving jurisdictional questions. But that process has fallen apart under the Bush administration.

AFA-CWA’s complaint asksthe court to issue an order declaring that the FAA has failed to exercise its asserted jurisdiction to establish occupational health and safety standards for flight attendants and crewmembers. And, as a result, the Secretary of Labor has failed to fulfill her statutory duty under the OSH Act to ensure healthful working conditions for flight attendants.

And so the neverending story of public employees being treated like second class citizens continues.

As a result of laws passed by Congress over the past twenty years, Americans have the tools to be knowledgeable about the chemical hazards in their communities, and, working with public authorities and the companies that use the chemicals, should be able to respond effectively to any releases. But the events surrounding Katrina, as well as a number of lesser known chemical-related incidents raise serious doubts about the success of those efforts.

But way of background, in 1986 Congress passed the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (EPCRA), partly as a result of the 1984 Bhopal disaster. EPCRA established requirements for reporting on hazardous and toxic chemicals, but also requirements regarding emergency planning and “Community Right-to-Know” to help increase the public’s knowledge and access to information on chemicals at individual facilities, their uses, and releases into the environment.

Under the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 Congress and EPA's resulting Risk Management Program regulations, companies that use certain chemicals are required to file chemical accident prevention plans that include worst-case and other and more likely accident scenarios; the facility's accident prevention practices and emergency response program.

Meanwhile, since 9/11, homeland security funds have become available to states and subdivisions that develop "All Hazards" Emergency Operations Plans that are supposed to address chemical, as well as other hazards from terrorism to chemical releases to hurricanes.

How well are these programs working? Not so well in San Antonio.

When deadly chlorine gas spilled from a derailed tanker on the outskirts of San Antonio, city and county fire crews rushed in hoping to rescue trapped survivors.

But as panicked residents choked on fumes, the operation stalled for more than six hours as confusion and poor communication stymied the joint effort.

City firefighters had all the best protective gear, but weren't familiar with the terrain. County firefighters knew the terrain but lacked the gear. And neither group could talk to the other by radio.

The June 2004 chlorine spill, which killed four and injured dozens, exposed many of the same vulnerabilities as the 9-11 attacks, when police outside the World Trade Center couldn't use their radios to alert firefighters that the first tower had collapsed.

Now, more than a year after the train wreck and four years after the terror attacks, many of the lessons of 9-11 have yet to be heeded — a point driven home yet again by the sluggish relief effort along the Gulf Coast and in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

Then in Greenville County, South Carolina last week

Residents felt their homes tremble, workers sniffed the acrid air and parents The problem is that there is more money (for equipment and training) than coordination and organization that would result in actual preparedness. searched hurriedly for their children after a fatal chemical plant blast sent heavy black smoke billowing into the sky.

Confusion reigned in the aftermath.

Some parents weren't sure where their kids were headed after they left three Greenville County public schools that were evacuated. Once they found them, some had to wait up to an hour to claim them.

Nearby workers and residents said they received conflicting messages about whether they should leave and where they should go, although a shelter had been set up for them.

***

"There were a lot of people who were evacuated," [Taylors Fire Chief Bobby]Baker said. "There were a lot of people who were not evacuated, and that's because of the resources."


The mid-morning explosion at Carolina Polymers off Rutherford Road killed a contractor and sent 12 people to Greenville Memorial Hospital, including nine firefighters, authorities said.

***

Linda Humphrey said a firefighter told her the evacuation wasn't mandatory, but a sheriff's deputy told her 20 minutes later to leave. She wasn't told where to go with the dogs, cats and ferrets she keeps as part of pet rescue mission or how long to stay.

"I watched the news for days about what's going on in New Orleans, and for this to happen in your own backyard," Humphrey said in a reference to the much-criticized response to Hurricane Katrina.

Baker said he didn't know how many residents evacuated, but the area stretched a half-mile from the plant. About 2,000 children fled Taylors and Paris elementary schools and Sevier Middle School at the request of fire officials, said school district spokesman Oby Lyles.

The problem is that there seems to be plenty of money circulating for equipment and training, but there hasn't been anywhere near enough attention paid to the oversight and coordination from state and federal authorities that actually results in preparedness.

Emergency responders are better equipped, better trained and working together more closely than they once did, and Texas has set deadlines for getting the right tools in the hands of those who need them.

And while the spending has been haphazard, the money has opened up new worlds of technology to police, fire and health departments as well as hospitals.

Firefighters now have access to large caches of protective suits with self-contained air tanks.

At a disaster, emergency workers will strategize inside air-conditioned mobile command centers with GIS mapping systems, high-speed Internet and satellite TV. They'll use laptop computers to monitor changes in the weather, and deploy mobile decontamination tents that pop open with a few snaps.

But for all the spending, what have we bought? How much safer are we?

What happened at the train derailment was "a perfect example" of the consequences of inadequate preparation, training and equipment, said Carolyn Merritt, chairwoman of the Chemical Safety Board, the federal agency that investigates industrial chemical accidents.

Merritt said a lack of planning and coordination in responding to emergencies has been more the rule than the exception in U.S. chemical accidents in recent years.

The combination of lax government oversight and lots of free flowing money had predictable results. The San Antonio article describes the situation in Texas, but the problem is hardly limited to the Lone Star state:

In January, a state auditor's report found "significant weaknesses" in how Texas managed its grants for police, fire and emergency workers. The state agency overseeing the program, the Texas Engineering Extension Service, failed to require communities to buy equipment they needed and didn't tie spending to performance or risk, according to the report.

Monitoring was lax. And when auditors visited sites, they discovered that many towns bought equipment that was still stacked in boxes, out of easy reach in the event of a disaster. In many cases, the money wasn't going to the people who needed it most.

At the outset, the grants were set up to push the money out swiftly to the locals, who — theoretically — knew best what they should buy.

"The strategy initially was to arm first responders with what they said they needed to address all threats — not just terrorism but all hazards," said Steve McCraw, the governor's director of homeland security.

What they needed, according to spending records, included equipment that fit everyday uses.

Thousands of dollars were used to buy binoculars, traffic cones and flashlights. Communities spent more than $19 million on vehicles, and since the state didn't limit how many vehicles they could buy, some spent as much as 38 percent of their grants on pickups and vans.

State auditors also found abuses of grant funds, including a Ford Excursion assigned to an executive in Weslaco and $51,000 worth of radios Hemphill County bought from one of its own commissioners, who submitted the only bid.

In at least one instance, the abuses led to criminal charges. The Parker County emergency management coordinator and the county's purchasing agent were indicted on theft charges after a Texas Ranger found all-terrain vehicles bought with homeland security grant funds parked in their garages.

And one also wonders how much attention is being paid to the health and safety of those actually doing the work, the responders:

As time goes on, new problems arise. Chemical testing kits that came with the trailers have expired without replacements. The county also failed to fund upkeep of the equipment, including hazmat suits and air tanks that must be tested periodically.
Some volunteer firefighters who would work inside the hazmat suits, which can get hot enough to overwhelm even the healthiest firefighters, have not received routine physicals. The grants can't be used for physicals, and the county has not yet paid for them.

Some of those who would handle the equipment complain that they lack the training to use it properly. Although city and county hazmat teams have run through a few exercises together, joint training has been limited.

One thing missing from both of these articles is any mention of Local Emergency Planning Committees (LEPCs). EPCRA required states to be divided into emergency planning districts, each of which was supposed to have an LEPC that was required to develop an emergency response plan and provide information about chemicals in the community to citizens. LEPCs were supposed to be composed not just of local government emergency response officials, but also of representatives of industry, the media, hospitals as well as environmental and community groups.

In other words, LEPCs were supposed to be a vehicle for participation of the entire community, not just the "professionals" in planning for emergencies.

Unfortunately, many communities never developed LEPCs and others fell into disuse after a few years of activity. After the renewed interest in emergency preparedness after 9/11, a few LEPCs have become re-energized, although much of their attention has been diverted by "homeland security" concerns to terrorism and away from the more hum-drum, but more common chemical plant releases and train wrecks.

Yes, I know it's unfashionable (or at least it was before Katrina), but while real preparedness for real hazards requires money, it also requires some responsibility, competence and oversight on the state and federal government levels. And that means more than throwing money at local communities because "they know best what the local needs are." It means serious oversight by EPA, by OSHA and by FEMA, as well as a regulatory structure that promotes competence, honesty and agility from Washington DC to all the way down to Columbia, South Carolina and Austin, Texas and then to Greenville County and San Antonio.

We've been warned. Many times.

Labels: 9/11 World Trade Center Workers, Chemical Plant Security, Katrina

A few days ago I hadn't even heard of Greenville County, South Carolina. Now in the last week, we have this:

1. A chaotic response to a chemical release.


2. Ed Foulke, Chair of the Greenville County Republican Party is nominated to be director of federal OSHA.


3. A Greenville Technical College administrator who called Hurricane Katrina evacuees "yard apes" has been fired.

What's next, locusts?

Well this makes me feel a whole lot better

US refiners are putting off scheduled maintenance to their plants in response to a White House call to maximise petrol and diesel production following Hurricane Katrina. The move has raised concerns about long-term risks among analysts, energy executives and safety officials.

The Energy Department told refiners informally that they should boost production after the storm severely damaged oil and gas facilities in the Gulf of Mexico, sending petrol prices rocketing to record highs. Although the refiners say no formal request has been made, they admit that the White House made its position known. Several US refiners have since said they would cut back on maintenance.

"We plan to review all planned maintenance and will defer any maintenance projects unless a delay will jeopardise the safety or reliability of our plants," said Mary Rose Brown, a spokeswoman for Valero, one of the biggest US refiners.

Yet analysts note maintenance, by its very nature, is essential to keeping refineries in proper working order.

"Deferring refinery maintenance has its risks," says JP Morgan's analysts. "Working a refinery at full capacity and without necessary tune-ups can damage units, resulting in potentially very costly and extended unplanned repair work, which would be very unwelcome, given the tight market conditions."

Indeed, one energy executive said liability issues could arise if an accident takes place, leaving the White House open to blame.

Craig Stevens, a spokesman for the Department of Energy, said several oil executives had told Samuel Bodman, the energy secretary, that they would put off maintenance. His response was, if that was something they needed to do, that was fine, but he would never condone any activity that would put workers in danger, Mr Stevens said.

Or, as Richard Nixon said, "We could do that, but it would be wrong, that's for sure."

Of course, if anything does go wrong, it will be the workers' fault.

Labels: BP

As OSHA's September 23 deadline approaches, the Houston Chronicle says that agency is preparing for a recordbreaking fine for the March 23 BP Texas City explosion that killed 15 workers and injured 170. The problem is that apparently settlement talks are under way with the company which could mean a sharply lower fine and that OSHA's complete findings may never be released.

The closed-door meetings between BP and the government agency angered the nation's largest industrial union, which strongly opposed the settlement talks when notified of them by OSHA earlier this week. Victims of the blast also were displeased.

"The families of the 15 who died, the public in general and certainly the workers deserve to know everything that OSHA found before OSHA trades it away," said Mike Wright, director for health, safety and environment for the United Steelworkers in Pittsburgh.

"Even if there is negotiation afterward and the company essentially plea bargains, people still deserve to know what OSHA found initially ... ," Wright said. "This is like the police reaching an agreement with a criminal before an arrest."

Art Ramos Jr., whose father died in the blast, said he believed the agency failed to properly monitor the Texas City refinery and its citation — reduced or not — had little merit.

"Honestly, I think OSHA dropped the ball," he said. "My father thought it was one of the most dangerous plants he had ever been in."

The "advantage" of a settlement, from OSHA's point of view, is that there would be no costly, lengthy appeal of the citation.

The advantage to BP would not so much be the decreased penalty, which would be dwarfed in any case by BP's huge profits, but rather the possible removal of the stigma of a "willful" citation. Settlements often convert "willful" citations into "unclassified" citations, which the companies like because it makes them seem less at fault. In addition, OSHA can't initiate a criminal prosecution unless there has been a willful citation that caused a death, although the Justice Department could still go after BP using environmental regulations.

If no settlement is reached, the size of the fine could break OSHA's previous record:

Those familiar with the case say the fine against BP could surpass the agency's record of about $11 million — an amount that may seem small but is much larger than average. OSHA fines rarely break $1 million.

Even if OSHA issues a multimillion-dollar fine against BP, it would have little financial impact on the energy giant, which posted $12.2 billion in profits in mid-2005.

In fact, BP announced in July that it has already set aside $700 million to deal with death and personal injury claims and had paid out $120 million so far.

More BP Stories from Confined Space here.

Labels: BP

Two rather disturbing developments on the Katrina-environment front which may fortell where the administration is going with its cynical attempts to address the disaster -- not the Gulf Coast disaster, but the disaster of Bush's popularity ratings.

In their neverending search for scapegoats, the Bush administration and Republicans in Congress have found someone new to blame for the New Orleans disaster: those tree hugging, industry killing, progress slowing environmentalists. And not only did they cause the disaster, now they're even getting in the way of the good faith (and well organized) efforts of the administration to clean up the mess.

As David Sirota and the New York Times report, Senator James Inhofe (R- OK) has proposed a bill that would allow the administration to waive any environmental law for three months to assist the Katrina recovery.

As if that wasn't bad enough, NPR's All Things Considered reported Friday night that there is a draft proposal at EPA that would give the EPA administrator authority to exempt anyone from a range of environmental laws and rules in emergency situations. But not just in national "state of emergency" or even emergencies declared by the Governor of a state. The EPA administrator would be able to decide for him/herself what constitutes an emergency. The memo says that such authority is necessary because current environmental laws "could hamper speedy relief and reconstruction."

The adminstration has already used its current authority to waive environmental rules to permit contaminated water to be pumped into Lake Pontchartrain to drain the city of New Orleans, but environmentalists fear that the administration is using Katrina as a pretext to gut environmental protections.

Meanwhile, the Clarion Ledger in Mississippi has obtained documents indicating that the Bush administration is attempting to blame the New Orleans flood on environmentalists.

The Clarion-Ledger has obtained a copy of an internal e-mail the U.S. Department of Justice sent out this week to various U.S. attorneys' offices: "Has your district defended any cases on behalf of the (U.S.) Army Corps of Engineers against claims brought by environmental groups seeking to block or otherwise impede the Corps work on the levees protecting New Orleans? If so, please describe the case and the outcome of the litigation."

The administration's inquiry may have been launched by a recent article in the CATO Institutes webpage that suggests that the Sierra Club may be to blame for the flood because it demanded an environmental impact study in 1996 concerning work being done on the Mississippi River levies.

The Clarion Ledger points out, however, that not only did the Sierra Club not oppose raising the levies around New Orleans, but there was a slight problem with that conclusion.

The levees that broke causing New Orleans to flood weren't Mississippi River levees. They were levees that protected the city from Lake Pontchartrain levees on the other side of the city.

When Katrina struck, the hurricane pushed tons of water from the Gulf of Mexico into Lake Pontchartrain, which borders the city to the north. Corps officials say the water from the lake cleared the levees by 3 feet. It was those floodwaters, they say, that caused the levees to degrade until they ruptured, causing 80 percent of New Orleans to flood.

Bookbinder said the purpose of the litigation by the Sierra Club and others in 1996 was where the corps got the dirt for the project. "We had no objections to levees," he said. "We said, 'Just don't dig film materials out of the wetlands. Get the dirt from somewhere else.'"

But this administration never lets facts get in the way of a good attack against their enemies.

And not to be outdone, the above mentioned Senator Inhofe has also launched an investigation into whether or not environmentalist opposition to Corps of Engineers projects were actually the cause of the entire disaster.

Oh, by the way, if you noticed any other troublesome laws or regulations that Katrina can help get rid of, contact the National Association of Manufacturers which informed its members last week that:

We are also seeking information on other issues which have not yet been addressed but may need legislative or regulatory fixes in light of Katrina. If you have identified any such issues, please let us know that as well.

I can imagine the suggestions that are pouring in....

Other Katrina Posts

• Katrina Workers in Peril: Will We Repeat Mistakes of 9/11 Cleanup?, September 14, 2005 (Center for American Progress)
• NIEHS Comes Through On Katrina Workers' Safety Rights, September 14, 2005
• What Katrina Tells Us About Our Government's Priorities, September 14, 2005
• FEMA to OSHA: Thanks, But No Thanks, September 13, 2005
• New Orleans 2005: The Best of Times, The Worst of Times, September 13, 2005
• Hurricane Katrina Workplace Safety and Health Resources, September 13, 2005
• To Be A New Orleans Police Officer, September 13, 2005
• Bush Finds Golden Lining In Katrina: The Opportunity to Screw Workers, September 10, 2005
• Even Serious Bloggers Need To Have A Bit Of Fun Occasionally, September 10, 2005
• From A Doctor Stranded In New Orleans, September 9, 2005
• Chem Board Warns Refineries & Chem Plants to Take Special Precautions When Starting Up After Katrina, September 8, 2005
• Those Who Stayed Behind To Work: New Orleans Police, September 6, 2005
• New Orleans: As If The Water Wasn't Bad Enough..., August 31, 2005
• Hurricane Warning, August 31, 2005

Labels: Katrina

My friend Rory over there across the sea doesn’t seem to understand the American justice system, much less the American values system.

See, what makes this country great is the celebrity of our celebrities, and the importance we place on making sure nothing sullies their image. Something happens to that image and major money is at stake.

Workers, on the other hand, are better not seen at all, especially when they do something unpleasant like getting themselves killed in a dirty old septic tank.

So it comes as no surprise to us People magazine addicts that a court would sentence a photogapher to three years in jail for taking topless photographs of actress Cameron Diaz and trying to sell them back to her for $3.5 million, or sentence a teenager to 11 months in prison for hacking into Paris Hilton's cell phone, whereas someone who killed two workers in a septic tank gets fined only $4,700.

Rory is only thankful that Cameron and Hilton weren't killed in the workplace, lest the American justice system let their killers off with a light slap on the wrist.

Silly boy.

Labels: Criminal Prosecution

In a rare twofer, President Bush today nominated Edwin G. Foulke, Jr. to be an Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health and Richard Stickler to be Assistant Secretary of Labor for Mine Safety and Health.

Foulke: Not a Nutcase


Foulke's position as Chairman of the Greenville Country, South Carolina Republican Party was not mentioned in the President's press release, nor was the fact that Foulke was a Bush Pioneer which means that he pledged to gather $100,000 for the 2004 Bush campaign. He is also on the Board of Directors of the Republican National Lawyers Association.

About the best thing I heard about him from one OSHA observer is that he knows OSHA law, he's fairly mainstream, and that he's "not a nutcase," high praise for Bush appointees these days. Although one wonders when reading his biographical materials produced when running for a position on the Republican National Committee in 2004:

Ed is a life long pro-life, pro-family, social and fiscal conservative Republican. As a true Ronald Reagan Republican, he believes in limited government, lower taxes, a strong national defense and personal responsibility.

Ideologically and policy-wise, Foulke is your typical Republican, frequently wailing over the plight of small business besieged by big bad OSHA inspectors, and extolling the eternal virtues of voluntary programs as the antidote to all that is wrong with the world. He has testified several times on behalf of the Chamber of Commerce on a variety of OSHA issues and written articles warning businesses that the cost of the soon-to-be-repealed ergonomics standard would be "significant and, in some cases, result in severe financial hardship."

Richard Who?

While Foulke is at least fairly well known in the workplace safety and health community (especially in Republican circles), Stickler's appointment, on the other hand, was met by a collective "Huh?" by both labor and management.

Stickler has spent his career in the mining industry, mostly as a mine manager, and as Director of the Pennsylvania Bureau of Deep Mine Safety from 1997 to 2003. Stickler was head of the Bureau during the 2002 Quecreek Mine flood that trapped 9 miners who were eventually rescued.

United Mineworkers spokesman Phil Smith emphasized the need for good communication between MSHA and the UMWA. Communication has been good between the UMWA and current acting Assistant Secretary David Dye, although they often don't see eye to eye. Smith urged the Senate to make sure that MSHA fulfills its mandate as a strong watchdog, especially with the current pressures for increased production and the retirement of experienced miners with inexperienced miners now doing more of the work.

Some mine officials weren't quite as diplomatic, wondering where the hell they found this guy. Those who know him aren't expecting aggressive enforcement and express concern that he had spent two years working for a subsidiary of Massey Energy, which has been battling with the Mineworkers for years.

Former Assistant Secretary for OSHA John Henshaw resigned last December and former MSHA Assistant Secretary Dave Lauriski resigned last November.

Labels: Richard Stickler

My article, Katrina Workers in Peril: Will We Repeat Mistakes of 9/11 Cleanup?, has been posted on the Center for American Progress website.

(Note the correction on last night's post that the NIEHS is actually the only agency to mention workers' OSHA rights on their materials.) UPDATE: The on-line article has been corrected.

I've been complaining recently that none of the web pages on Katrina-related health and safety issues (EPA, CDC, NOISH or even OSHA)mention workers health and safety rights and that it's the employer's responsibilty to provide safe working conditions.

But I just took a look at the Katrina Responder Orientation Briefing slide show produce by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences' (NIEHS) Worker Education and Training Program (WETP), and low and behold, this is what I found:



Way to go. You win the Confined Space "Seal of Approval"

This is by Gary Bass, Executive Director of OMB Watch in CounterPunch:

There are big issues to examine in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Why has it been acceptable to provide tax breaks primarily for the richest in our society when basic human needs have gone unmet for so many? There have been so many tax breaks over the past five years that to many it has simply become routine. Yet there are consequences. The tax cuts lead to higher deficits and the result, as we have witnessed in New Orleans, is inadequate funding of programs addressing the large-scale problems we expect our government to tackle for us, such as infrastructure improvements and services for basic human needs. For example, it has been known for some time that the levees in New Orleans could not withstand a hurricane of Katrina's magnitude. In fact, they needed maintenance work to hold in the face of even lesser storms. Yet we pinched pennies to support unproven supply side economic theory, giving tax breaks when spending could have saved lives. And what money was available was spent on misplaced priorities. The consequences, as we now know, are unacceptable.

Yet despite the evidence Hurricane Katrina brings, there are some in Congress considering more fiscal folly: a temporary repeal of the gasoline tax (which protects the country's roads and bridges -- essential for a smooth evacuation in any future crisis); a vote to repeal the estate tax (which provides incentives for charitable contributions to nonprofits like the Red Cross and others providing critical relief to Hurricane Katrina's victims); and the possibility of additional cuts in basic life-supports like food stamps, Medicaid, and student loans. These are some of the very programs victims of Hurricane Katrina and the communities that take them in will have to rely upon in the months ahead. Sound, equitable fiscal policies would dictate that these programs be expanded, not cut. And to pay for them, the tax cuts that have largely benefited the wealthiest in our society should be undone. It's time for shared sacrifice.

OSHA was severely criticized following 9/11 for not ensuring the workers used proper respiratory protection following the collapse of the World Trade Centers. Thousands are disabled as a result.

While the controversy about the appropriate role for OSHA during disasters continues, one thing on which everyone agrees is that the workplace safety agency has a crucial role to play in supplying life-saving information to rescue and recovery workers who may be doing jobs that they haven't been trained to do, without the proper protective equipment. The scale of the disaster across the entire Gulf Coast, combined with the potential health problems created by the toxic New Orleans flood will most likely dwarf the effort that OSHA made following 9/11.

To its credit, the agency was apparently ready to spring into action after Katrina (as its emergency plan directed), but according to documents obtained by the Wall St. Journal, they ran up against the same FEMA screw-ups that we've been hearing so much about.

In one instance, federal environmental health specialists, who were charged with protecting both rescue workers and evacuees, weren't called in by the Department of Homeland Security until Sunday -- 12 days after the Occupational Safety & Health Administration announced it had teams from various agencies standing by ready to assist. Even now, with mounting evidence of environmental problems, the deployment is being held up by continuing interagency wrangling, according to officials at the National Institutes of Health, which also is involved in the effort.

***

Jonathan L. Snare, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Labor for OSHA, said he was prepared to offer the full resources of the agency to help protect the safety and health of workers responding to Katrina.

Health and safety experts play an important role by testing the environment at a disaster for toxins, disease and pathogens. They then advise rescue workers about needs for protective clothing for themselves as well as for the people they are trying to move from harm's way.

The National Response Plan gives OSHA responsibility to coordinate efforts to protect and monitor disaster workers and victims from environmental hazards.
But the part of the plan that authorizes OSHA's role as coordinator and allows it to mobilize experts from other agencies such as NIH wasn't activated by FEMA until shortly before 5 p.m. Sunday. The delay came despite repeated efforts by the agencies to mobilize.

***

By Friday, experts and officials from NIH, the Department of Labor and the Environmental Protection Agency began to make frantic calls to the Department of Homeland Security and members of Congress, demanding that the worker-safety portion of the national response plan be activated.

No reason has been offered by either FEMA or the Department of Homeland Security for the delay in activating OSHA's role.

Some Homeland Security officials are already starting to acknowledge significant weaknesses in the national response plan, which was completely disregarded at times during the crisis.

Hopefully this particular screw up was just another of the many that have been documented and not a deliberate neglect of worker safety. Nevertheless, OSHA's response does raise a number of issues that will need to be addressed in the coming months and years:

• How will OSHA manage to assemble the needed resources to address the massive worker safety and health threats in the coming months and years with its current resources? At its current staffing and inspection levels, it would take federal OSHA 108 years to inspect each workplace under its jurisdiction just once.

• How long will OSHA remain in "compliance assistance mode" before deciding that a heavier stick is going to be needed to save lives? While you obviously don't want OSHA taking the time to write citations while the emergency is ongoing, the deadly hazards of the recovery will go on for the foreseeable future. Much of the work will undoubtedly be done by less-than-ethical contractors and low wage workers who are not trained or equipped to do the work safely. (And the suspension of Davis Bacon only makes matters worse.)
  
  Despite the ongoing health effects of the World Trade Center collapse, OSHA is justifiably proud of the fact that not one worker died during the entire demolition. But that took place over a few square blocks in a relatively short period of time, not thousands of square miles over the entire Gulf Coast between Florida and Texas.


• How are workers going to learn not just that they should work safety, but that they have a right to a safe workplace, a right to be trained, a right to call for an OSHA inspection and a right to refuse work that may kill them. And that they can exercise these rights without being retaliated against.


• How is OSHA going to deal with the fact that public employees aren't covered by OSHA in any of these states. Will they still provide technical assistance? Will they work with the states to provide some kind of enforcement? Will this ridiculous situation wake up the legislators of these states about how public employees are treated like second class citizens?
  

This is an amazing story from CounterPunch written by two California EMTs who had been in New Orleans for a Conference when Katrina struck. It's an deeply inspiring and depressing story at the same time. Read it all.

A few highlights:

Heros and Sheroes

We also suspect the media will have been inundated with "hero" images of the National Guard, the troops and police struggling to help the "victims" of the hurricane. What you will not see, but what we witnessed, were the real heroes and sheroes of the hurricane relief effort: the working class of New Orleans.

The maintenance workers who used a forklift to carry the sick and disabled. The engineers who rigged, nurtured and kept the generators running. The electricians who improvised thick extension cords stretching over blocks to share the little electricity we had in order to free cars stuck on rooftop parking lots. Nurses who took over for mechanical ventilators and spent many hours on end manually forcing air into the lungs of unconscious patients to keep them alive. Doormen who rescued folks stuck in elevators. Refinery workers who broke into boat yards, "stealing" boats to rescue their neighbors clinging to their roofs in flood waters. Mechanics who helped hotwire any car that could be found to ferry people out of the city. And the food service workers who scoured the commercial kitchens, improvising communal meals for hundreds of those stranded.

Most of these workers had lost their homes and had not heard from members of their families. Yet they stayed and provided the only infrastructure for the 20 percent of New Orleans that was not under water.

Woodstock vs. Men With Guns

They were eventually locked out of their hotel but told that neither the Convention Center nor the SuperDome were accepting anyone else for obvious reasons. The National Guard told them to go to the Freeway where there were buses to take them out of the city. Not only were the buses not there, but sheriffs from the other side of the Mississippi fired shots over their head to keep them from crossing the bridge.

We questioned why we couldn't cross the bridge anyway, especially as there was little traffic on the six-lane highway. They responded that the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans, and there would be no Superdomes in their city. These were code words for: if you are poor and Black, you are not crossing the Mississippi River, and you are not getting out of New Orleans.

So they set up a camp in the middle of the freeway

Our little encampment began to blossom. Someone stole a water delivery truck and brought it up to us. Let's hear it for looting! A mile or so down the freeway, an Army truck lost a couple of pallets of C-rations on a tight turn. We ferried the food back to our camp in shopping carts.

Now--secure with these two necessities, food and water--cooperation, community and creativity flowered. We organized a clean-up and hung garbage bags from the rebar poles. We made beds from wood pallets and cardboard. We designated a storm drain as the bathroom, and the kids built an elaborate enclosure for privacy out of plastic, broken umbrellas and other scraps. We even organized a food-recycling system where individuals could swap out parts of C-rations (applesauce for babies and candies for kids!).

This was something we saw repeatedly in the aftermath of Katrina. When individuals had to fight to find food or water, it meant looking out for yourself. You had to do whatever it took to find water for your kids or food for your parents. But when these basic needs were met, people began to look out for each other, working together and constructing a community.

If the relief organizations had saturated the city with food and water in the first two or three days, the desperation, frustration and ugliness would not have set in.

Flush with the necessities, we offered food and water to passing families and individuals. Many decided to stay and join us. Our encampment grew to 80 or 90 people.

From a woman with a battery-powered radio, we learned that the media was talking about us. Up in full view on the freeway, every relief and news organizations saw us on their way into the city. Officials were being asked what they were going to do about all those families living up on the freeway. The officials responded that they were going to take care of us. Some of us got a sinking feeling. "Taking care of us" had an ominous tone to it.

Unfortunately, our sinking feeling (along with the sinking city) was accurate. Just as dusk set in, a sheriff showed up, jumped out of his patrol vehicle, aimed his gun at our faces and screamed, "Get off the fucking freeway." A helicopter arrived and used the wind from its blades to blow away our flimsy structures. As we retreated, the sheriff loaded up his truck with our food and water.

Once again, at gunpoint, we were forced off the freeway. All the law enforcement agencies appeared threatened when we congregated into groups of 20 or more. In every congregation of "victims," they saw "mob" or "riot." We felt safety in numbers. Our "we must stay together" attitude was impossible because the agencies would force us into small atomized groups.

In the pandemonium of having our camp raided and destroyed, we scattered once again. Reduced to a small group of eight people, in the dark, we sought refuge in an abandoned school bus, under the freeway on Cilo Street. We were hiding from possible criminal elements, but equally and definitely, we were hiding from the police and sheriffs with their martial law, curfew and shoot-to-kill policies.

The next day, our group of eight walked most of the day, made contact with the New Orleans Fire Department and were eventually airlifted out by an urban search-and-rescue team.

Amazing to see how that the breakdown of civilization during disasters doesn't just occur in those foreign countries full of dark-skinned people.

Occupational Safety and Health Administration: Keeping Workers Safe During Clean Up and Recovery Operations Following Hurricanes

And although you wouldn't know it from OSHA's hurricane-related materials, workers have a number of rights under the Occupational Safety and Health Act

National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH): Hurricane Katrina Response: Storm and Flood Cleanup

• NIOSH Hazard-Based Interim Guidelines: Protective Equipment For Workers In Hurricane Flood Response
• NIOSH Interim Guidance on Personal Protective Equipment and Clothing for Flood Response Workers
• Suggested Respirator Cleaning and Sanitation Procedures
• Traumatic Incident Stress: Information For Emergency Response Workers

National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences' (NIEHS) Worker Education and Training Program (WETP):Hurricane Katrina Resources

• Protecting Yourself While Helping Others (Responder Orientation Briefing)
• Protección personal y ayuda a los demás: consideraciones de seguridad para participantes
• Safety Awareness for Responders to Hurricane Katrina: Protecting Yourself While Helping Others
• Poster: Safety Awareness for Responders to Hurricanes: Protecting Yourself While Helping Others
• Guidelines for the Protection and Training of Workers Engaged in Maintenance and Remediation Work Associated with Mold (Print Layout Version)

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA): Hurricane Katrina Response

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC): Hurricane Katrina Health & Safety

• Hurricane Information for Response and Cleanup Workers
• Environmental Concerns after Hurricane Katrina

Department of Homeland Security, which also includes the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)


OTHER RESOURCES

Effect Measure has a number of good postings on Katrina-related public health issues like mosquitos, Information about infections, E. coli and God's role in the disaster.

The Labor Department has a webpage addressing Hurricane Recovery Assistance, including information about recovery jobs and Disaster Unemployment Assistance

Finally, the New Orleans Times Picayune is still publishing from a college dorm room after its offices were inundated by the flood. Check it out.

Excerpts from a Washington Post article today:

They sleep on the concrete sidewalk or in their cars. They scavenge for food from abandoned stores and cook by fire. They wash the laundry by hand and leave it to dry on lines hung from lampposts.

This is what life has been like for New Orleans police officers since Hurricane Katrina tore apart their city nearly two weeks ago.

***

In the days before the hurricane, the police force numbered 1,750. After Katrina, officials could account for only a few more than 1,200. No one knows whether the missing are dead, injured or just could not face the horror of the work.

During the worst of it, when people were drowning in their homes and dying because of a lack of basic necessities, two officers put guns to their heads and killed themselves. Two hundred quit. An estimated 70 percent of the force is now homeless.

***

Until Thursday, when the first batch of officers was allowed to take a five-day vacation, the force had been working nonstop for 11 days. They watched people urinate on themselves because no bathrooms were available, they saw babies die of starvation, and they pulled dead bodies from the Superdome and convention center.

To other rescue workers, the victims were nameless strangers. To New Orleans officers, they were neighbors, friends, family members.

***

For David Holtzclaw, 42, a tough-talking, macho police officer who has been on the force for nearly 25 years and has seen many dead bodies, it's about a baby. He was helping at the convention center one night when a man came up to him carrying his baby in a filthy blanket.

"The baby's lips were blue," he remembered. He hadn't eaten in days, and the mother was unable to breast-feed because she was ill.

Holtzclaw didn't know what to do. There was no hospital, no paramedics to call. He rushed the father and baby into his car, and began speeding west, away from the water. He stopped in St. Charles Parish and called an emergency medical service crew, which picked up the child. He found out later that the baby did not survive.
"I never thought in my wildest fears that this could happen -- that a baby could starve like that in America. I have to think God has a reason," he said.

Attention DC Area Residents

The DC Labor Film Festival kicks off on Thursday, September 15 at the American Film Institute in Silver Spring. On Friday, September 16, Barbara Kopple will be receiving the Tony Mazzocchi Labor Arts Award prior to the showing of her classic film, Harlan County USA, one of the greatest labor documentaries ever made. The award will be followed by a short film about Tony's life and times.

In case there is anyone out there who doesn't know, Tony Mazzocchi was the visionary leader of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union and one of the fathers of the workplace health and safety movement in this country and a leader in the struggle for workers rights.

On September 17, Jane Fonda will attend a 25th anniversary screening of her film "Nine to Five". The event is a benefit for Working America and the evening's program will include Fonda and Karen Nussbaum, co-founder of 9 to 5 –– the organization of women office workers.

Other films at the festival include Il Posto, Maids (Domesticas), Office Space, Living to Work, Mardi Gras:Made in China, Off to War, The Phantom of the Operator, and Where Do You Stand?: Stories from an American Mill. The full schedule can be found here.

Given the popularity of chain saws in the Gulf Coast these days, Revere at Effect Measure thought it wise to post a recall notice for Makita DCS6401 and DCS7901-model chain saws.

The problem is that "The flywheels on some of the chain saws can come apart during use, which could cause serious personal injury."

If you know anyone who can distribute this information to those who need it, pass it on.

I often ridicule Congressman Charlie Norwood (R-GA) for coining the notion that OSHA's Bloodborne Pathogens Standard "outlawed the tooth fairy." Sometimes I'd feel a bit bad about it because anyone can say dumb things and, through the miracle of the web (and politically photographic memories like mine), those fateful words can haunt you until the end of time (and beyond).

But it turns out that not only does Norwood not regret those words, he's still saying the same dumb things in an article that just appeared this week:

As a private-practice dentist for 25 years before coming to Congress, I know firsthand just how ridiculous the regulatory excesses of OSHA can become.

In 1991, dentists across America discovered that OSHA had “outlawed the tooth fairy.” In a fit of regulatory zeal to combat the spread of AIDS and other communicable diseases through blood-borne pathogens, the rule-writers at OSHA had determined to make it a violation to allow any item that had been in contact with bodily fluids to leave a medical facility except in a biohazards container.

So the old tradition of dentists pulling stubborn baby teeth and giving them to the children in little plastic boxes to put under their pillows for the tooth fairy was suddenly in violation of federal law. OSHA later argued that it didn’t mean to include baby teeth in the banned materials list, after it made a stink in the press. But if you’re a private-practice dentist who risks paying fines running in the thousands for even minor OSHA violations, you are forced to take the most stringent view of any OSHA dictate.

Incidents such as the tooth-fairy nightmare are among the events that inspired me to sell my practice and run for Congress in 1994. I don’t know of any other member who initially ran for the House on a platform of OSHA reform, but that is just how strongly I felt about it.

Actually, OSHA doesn't have any jurisdiction over public exposures, and never has. A dentist could actually drench a poor innocent child with contaminated blood and OSHA couldn't touch him. (The regular law would fry his ass.) And if you really want to, you can still take home your appendix, tonsils, and gall bladder as far as OSHA is concerned. And it has nothing whatsoever to do with the stink he made in the press. Norwood knows this. He always has (or at least would have if he had bothered to ask a question.)

And speaking of stink, this little anecdote appears in an article Norwood has written in The Hill defending the OSHA-weakening bills his committee passed out of the House of Representatives in July. Norwood, who was first elected in the 1994 "Contract On America" election, chairs the House Subcommittee on Workforce Protection. His bills, as you may recall, would force OSHA to pay all legal expenses of cases it lost against small businesses, stack the OSHA Review Commission with more Republican appointees, weaken OSHA's regulatory interpretation authority and give more power to the OSHA Review Commission, and give employers extra time to file appeals to penalties in case their dog ate the citation.

Norwood justifies his bills to help out small business because:

OSHA enforcement overreaches certainly are damaging to any size business but deadly for small businesses. Small businesses can’t afford compliance managers, full-time safety personnel and in-house attorneys that big businesses use to keep overzealous OSHA agents at bay.

Actually, companies that hire compliance managers and full-time safety personnel generally don't go to that expense to avoid OSHA citations, but because they have a sincere concern for the safety of their employees (or have been forced to be concerned by their union.) The others are generally waging that they'll never be inspected -- a pretty good bet these days.

These "small business" bills would be much more far-reaching than they sound. Businesses with 100 or fewer employees make up 97.7 percent of all private sector establishments and the have a higher rate of fatal occupational injury than do establishments with 100 or more workers.

And is this the example of a poor small business hounded by "overzealous OSHA agents?"

Septic firm fined $4,700 in 2 deaths

Penalty levied in June Lexington County incident

By NOELLE PHILLIPS
Staff Writer

Lucas Septic Co. owes $4,700 in fines after state safety investigators ruled the company could have prevented the June deaths of two untrained workers who entered a septic tank.

The father of one of the workers called the fine “pitiful” and said his son’s death was uncalled for.

The June 29 accident killed Lucas employees Duane Howell, 29,and Verno Huggins, 58. Howell died in the tank after inhaling methane gas fumes. Huggins suffered a heart attack while trying to rescue Howell and died a week later at Lexington Medical Center.

This is a company that was in blatant non-compliance with OSHA's Confined Space standard. Lucas didn't train its employees to test air quality, didn't have a written training program, didn't have a permit system for confined space entry and from the description in the article, violated just about every paragraph of the confined space standard, a standard they certainly should have been familiar with considering that they do "septic" work, or at least that's what their name says. In my book, that means several willful citations, which means fines up to $70,000 each and the possibility of a criminal prosecution. Whoever decided on the $4,700 penalty ought to resign in shame.

But Charlie Norwood, whose state of Georgia, by the way, saw a 16% increase in occupational fatalities from 2003-2004, would like to give them longer than 15 days to file an appeal if they lose the paperwork, and for OSHA to refund their attorney's expenses in case some ignorant judge throws the case out over some technicality.

Norwood says that "OSHA enforcement overreaches certainly are ...deadly for small businesses." In reality, Norwood's bills will be deadly for small business employees.

Labels: Charlie Norwood

Machinery accident kills Dixfield woman

LISBON, ME -- Federal safety officials are investigating the death of a 21-year-old woman who was killed in a machinery accident at The Dingley Press, police said.

The accident was reported at about 10 p.m. Friday when Kayla Cox of Dixfield was training on a paper machine at the mail-order catalog publisher, said Lisbon police Detective Bernie McAllister.

Cox died at the scene and six other people were taken to a hospital to be treated for trauma after witnessing the accident, McAllister said.

The accident is being investigated by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Lisbon Police Department.


Worker killed in explosion at abandoned Thomson plant

MARION, IN-- A 41-year-old man using a blowtorch to salvage industrial equipment at the former Thomson Consumer Electronics plant was killed Monday night in an explosion that sent a fireball into the sky and rattled windows blocks away.

The victim, Seymour resident John Phillips, and other workers were removing a 10-by-20-foot canister outside the abandoned plant when Phillips cut through pipes connected to the canister just before the blast about 6 p.m., said Marion Police Capt. Jay Kay. The victim was working for Franklin Surplus, near Seymour, to collect scrap metal at the factory site


Fire Chiefs Re-Think Job's Ties to Alcohol

PITTSBURGH, PA -- When about 4,000 firefighters and guests gathered last month at the annual volunteer firemen's convention, they knew what to expect: camping, a parade, and more than a little beer and alcohol. But what started out as a long weekend of fun ended in tragedy when a fire chief died after a drunken bar fight. Another firefighter is being investigated in a fatal car crash because police said he, too, was drunk.... Ray Stringer 43, chief of a volunteer fire company in Tyrone was killed Aug. 19 in a bar fight while in town for the convention. Later that day, John Smoter, 29, of the East Taylor Township Fire Department, was involved in a head-on accident that killed an 83-year-old man.


Man charged with murder in crash that killed officer

MINNEAPOLIS, MN - A day after a Lino Lakes police officer was killed in a high speed crash, state officials said it was still not clear whether the suspect had intended to hit the official or not. Officer Shawn Silvera, 32, was killed Tuesday evening on Interstate 35W in Lino Lakes. He had been placing tire-deflation devices on the highway and was standing next to a police car when he was struck by a vehicle involved in a high-speed chase.


Refugio man guarding diplomats killed

REFUGIO, TX - A Texas man was among four contract security guards killed Wednesday when a roadside bomb flipped their sport utility vehicle on a highway near Basra, Iraq, their Virginia-based employer said. Robert McCoy a 25-year-old former Marine, and the others were working for Triple Canopy, a Herndon, Va., security company that does contract work for the Bureau of Diplomatic Security.


Two Die in One Week at Farmingdale's Adventureland, Worker, Patron First Fatalities Since Park's Opening

Farmingdale,NY- The Suffolk County Police Department Homicide Squad, along with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the New York State Department of Labor are currently investigating two deaths that occurred in as many days at Adventureland. The first involved an employee and occurred Tuesday, Aug. 30. According to police, at approximately 10:40 p.m. Stephen Gary, 18, of North Babylon was operating the Lady Bug Coaster at the amusement park on Route 110 in East Farmingdale when he was struck by one of the cars from the ride. Police stated it appears he suffered from internal injuries. He was transported to Nassau University Medical Center in East Meadow where he later died.


Wisconsin Silos worker killed in fall

LEBANON, WI – An employee of Wisconsin Silos died in a fall Thursday after scaffolding malfunctioned. Todd A. Johnson, 27, of Plover, had finished working on a silo at N5736 Waupaca County T, and other employees were lowering him, along with another worker, when the scaffolding malfunctioned. When Johnson attempted to fix it, the scaffolding broke from the supporting cables. Johnson and the scaffolding fell to the bottom of the silo.


Local man killed in car crash

Richland,MO-Ricky A. Seiner, 53, of Bolivar, died when a vehicle struck him. Seiner, a Polk County Ambulance employee, was working at a previous traffic crash when he was struck. The crash occurred in Polk County on Missouri Highway 13, south of Humansville. Dr. Christopher Chase pronounced Seiner dead at the scene. Polk County Coroner Nathan Hoffer, Humansville and Dunnigan Fire and Rescue also assisted at the scene.


Riding mower flips, crushes HP&R worker

ST. CROIX, VI - A 46-year-old V.I. Housing, Parks and Recreation employee died Thursday morning when the riding lawn mower he was operating capsized in a gut and crushed him. Deputy Chief Herminio Velazquez said police were notified about 11:16 a.m. Thursday of an accident at the D.C. Canegata Ballpark, east of Christiansted. Officers discovered that Gregory Davis, a resident of Peter's Rest, was cutting grass near a nine-foot gut on the western side of the ballfield when he and the mower fell into the gut and the mower landed on top of him.


Worker gets tangled in printing press, dies

CARLSTADT, NJ - A printing press operator died early Thursday when he got caught in the machine, police said. Peter Merchant, 57, of Leonia was finishing up his shift around 4 a.m. when he reached into a press at Unimac Graphics. The machine first latched onto his hands and pulled him up to his shoulders, then his head was pushed backward, said borough Detective Anthony Bellina.


Postal worker found dead in street

CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- A tragic accident in south Charlotte has claimed the life of a longtime postal worker. The body of Anita Chaffin, 69, was found in the street Thursday on Rittenhouse Circle. Investigators said Chaffin was run over by her own Jeep after she forgot to put it in park. Local residents said Chaffin delivered mail in their neighborhood for almost two decades.


Man dies after being run over by truck

EVESHAM-A 26-year-old employee of the Occupational Training Center of Burlington County died Sept. 2 of injuries sustained while he was working on a recycling collection truck here. Authorities said the disabled man, Joshua A. Palmer of Mount Holly, was working a curbside collection route near Carlton Avenue and Wessex Court with a co-employee, routinely leaving and returning to the truck, a 2005 Crane Carrier at 9:40 a.m. They said Palmer slipped and fell and his legs were run over by the recycling vehicle operated by James McGural Jr. of Levittown, Pa., also an employee of the Occupational Training Center.


Bike shop reopens after shootings

Albuquerque,NM- Rider Valley Motorcycles is back in business, nearly three weeks after two of its young employees were gunned down inside. The dozens of flowers that friends of David Fisher, 17, and Garrett Iversen, 22, left along the East Central store's chain-link fence have long since withered, and this weekend they were taken down in preparation for Tuesday's reopening.


Worker Dies in El Sereno Trench Collapse

Los Angeles, CA- First units on the scene reported a single family dwelling on a hillside with workers reporting a person trapped in a trench in the backyard below a retaining wall that was being erected. After confirming that only one worker was missing or trapped in the collapsed trench that was approximately twenty-five feet long and up to six feet deep, Firefighters immediately began the arduous and delicate task to reach the victim that was buried up to his face in mud and dirt on the steep hillside. Clearing mud and dirt from around the victims face and neck, an assessment was made and the forty-five year old male worker was declared dead on the scene.


Well-known farmer and Baptist minister killed in tractor accident

Lafayette, TN- A well-known baptist minister and farmer was killed Monday when a tractor he was operating overturned on the family farm just outside of Lafayette. James Allen Oliver, 80, of White Oak Creek Road, was found Monday night after he failed to come home around dark. He was pronounced dead at the scene but was transported to Macon County General for examination.


Denver Officer's Slaying Sparks Debate Over Migrant Workers

DENVER, CO -- A few hours after allegedly shooting and killing a police officer, Raul Garcia-Gomez checked into his job in the kitchen of the mayor's restaurant. The 20-year-old illegal immigrant had been washing dishes at the Cherry Cricket, the eatery co-owned by Denver Mayor John W. Hickenlooper, for about 10 months. The most attention Garcia-Gomez, a well-regarded worker, had drawn was a letter from the federal government warning that the Social Security number he had provided was invalid.


Oil field worker killed

FARMINGTON, N.M. -- An oil well service worker has been killed in an accident in San Juan County.

The San Juan County Sheriff's Department identifies him as 29-year-old Ramon Hidalgo of Farmington.

Officers say Hidalgo was trying to bleed off pressure from a well head when part of a valve hit him in the skull Tuesday.

Captain Tim Black says the part of the pipe that protrudes from the valve was disconnected when Hidalgo attempted to bleed off the pressure.

When the escaping air hit a piece that was loose, Black says it swung and killed Hidalgo instantly


Greenville County worker killed by falling beam

GREENVILLE, S.C. - A worker has been killed after a concrete beam fell on him at a construction site, Greenville County Chief Deputy Coroner Mike Ellis says.

Francisco Rojas, 44, died from head and chest injuries shortly after he was struck Wednesday, Ellis said.

Two other workers we also hit by the beam and Ellis was not sure how severely they were injured. The men worked for R & R Construction in Pelzer, Ellis said.

Rojas leaves a wife and seven children, Ellis said.


Latinos doing dangerous jobs need safe conditions

Fort Wayne, IN- Ezequiel Meza died Aug. 28 in a job accident, like too many Latinos in low-skilled, low-paying jobs working with their hands and backs. He labored as a construction worker - the kind of job that people complain immigrants are taking away from citizens. The work is dirty, sweaty and dangerous.

On Aug. 28, when many people rested from their jobs and attended church, Meza and his work crew were building an addition to an animal shelter in Mansfield, Texas, when the roof collapsed. Meza lay trapped for more than five hours before rescuers recovered his body.

The police said that they couldn't rush in to dig him out for fear of more injuries or deaths. Meza died literally buried in his work.

Truck goes off bridge, hits train; driver dies

La Crosse, WI -- Doug Kerns looked up and saw the truck fly. Kerns, an employee with the city of La Crosse engineer department, was beneath the Mormon Coulee Road underpass Tuesday afternoon, taking measurements and wrapping up a water main project, when he heard metal crash above him. "It shocked me," he said. "I just couldn't believe it was happening. I saw the truck in the air and it was completely airborne for about 60 feet." He watched the commercial vehicle crash through the guard rail, hurtle down the embankment and slam into a passing train, killing the vehicle's driver.


Douglas community mourns death of police officer

Tucson, AZ- For the first time in more than a hundred years, the community of Douglas is mourning the loss of a police officer. Ramon Rios died in the line of duty. Officer Rios collpased after chasing and handcuffing three juveniles Sunday morning. Hugo Valenzuela was with Rios during the struggle with the three juveniles. "He got to his patrol car with the subject still struggling partially with the subject and then he collapsed...Officer Rios collapsed. I myself and Sgt. Margolis proceeded to do CPR."


Construction worker dies after fall at site of highrise condo

Minneapolis, MN- Authorities said today that a worker fell into an open shaft and was fatally injured while on the job at a condominium construction site at 2nd St. and 3rd Av. in Minneapolis, a block south of the downtown post office. A police spokeswoman said her department received a call at 7:08 a.m. that informed them that a worker had fallen and was injured. The construction worker, who was not identified, later died, she said. Contradicting some media reports broadcasting that a body had been found, the police spokeswoman said the incident was a fatal accident.


Worker killed in farm van crash

PORT SHELDON, MN -- A 22-year-old man was killed and six other farm workers were injured in a two-vehicle collision Saturday. A van transporting seven Brady Farms employees was southbound at 8:40 a.m. on 152nd Avenue, about six miles north of Holland, when it was struck by a minivan driven by a 60-year-old West Olive woman, Ottawa County Sheriff's Sgt. Steve Austin said.


Worker crushed by metal plate

YORBA LINDA, CA — A 39-year-old construction worker was killed today when a 2,850-pound metal plate slipped from chains and crushed him.

The man, unidentified by police, was part of a crew working on a water pipe project at Bastanchury Road and Lakeview Avenue.

Brea police, which patrols Yorba Linda, said workers were moving the metal plate – eight feet by eight feet and one inch thick – when it slipped from some chains. The plate had been used to stabilize the wall of a trench the men were working in.


Construction Worker Dies After Bulldozer Mishap

Ashburn, VA -- A construction worker was killed this morning after he was run over by a bulldozer he was working on along Loudoun County Parkway in Ashburn.

Loudoun Sheriff’s Office spokesman Kraig Troxell said the victim’s name is being withheld until next of kin is contacted. He said witnesses saw the man working on the bulldozer’s engine shortly before 11:30 a.m. when the vehicle started to move for unknown reasons.

The man fell to the ground but ended up being run over by the bulldozer. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

This is at least the second construction worker to be killed while working this year. Jose Omar Robles Melgar, 18, of Alexandria, was working in June on a home in the 20580 block of Myers Place in Leesburg when he fell about 20 feet and died.


Police mourn cop who 'loved his job'

Philadelphia, PA- Some 250 mourners, half of them from the law enforcement community, poured into a North Philadelphia church yesterday to pay final respects to Terence V. Flomo, an undercover narcotics officer who was shot to death last week while sitting behind the wheel of his unmarked police car.


Truck driver killed in crash on Interstate 81

PREBLE, N.Y. -- A tanker truck carrying orange juice concentrate crashed on Interstate 81 Friday, killing the Canadian driver. Cortland County Fire Coordinator Bob Duell said 47-year-old Steven Tozer of Ontario was pronounced dead at the scene.


Construction worker falls to death in Pompano Beach

Pompano Beach, FL- A welder died Saturday morning at a Pompano Beach warehouse site when a forklift struck a beam the man was leaning on, causing him to lose his balance and fall about 30 feet to the ground. Just a few minutes before the fall, Eder Morales, 36, of Miami-Dade County, had taken off his safety harness to get closer to the joist he was welding, according to the Broward Sheriff's Office.


SDG&E contractor dies after falling 70 feet from electrical tower

RANCHO SAN DIEGO, CA – A contractor working on an electrical tower on the grounds of a golf course fell 70 feet to his death Monday morning near where golfers were playing.

The out-of-town worker fell shortly before 9:30 a.m. while working at the Cottonwood Golf Club on Willow Glen Drive near Dehesa Road, a fire official said. The man was a contractor working for San Diego Gas & Electric.

Bandimere Worker Burned In Fire Dies

DENVER, CO -- A worker at Bandimere Speedway died Thursday, several weeks after a fire that burned him over 75 percent of his body. Clint Parker, 24, was burned on Aug. 15, when a spark from a welder torch ignited some nearby lacquer in a repair building at the raceway.


State worker killed in accident

EASTON, N.H. --A state Transportation Department worker was killed Wednesday when his car left the road and hit some trees.

State police said Stephen McKinley, 51, of Enfield was driving west on Route 112 near the Woodstock line at about 1:20 p.m. when the accident happened.

Woodstock police and passersby pulled McKinley from his car. He was taken to a Littleton hospital where he was pronounced dead.


Highway worker dies in accident

SKANEATELES, N.Y -- Town highway worker Scott Clarry, 35, was killed when the paving machine he was driving rolled over and crushed him. It happened Monday on Hencoop Road in Skaneateles.

Authorities believe Clarry hit a tree and rolled over. Fellow workers tried to help, but could not move the 27-ton machine.


Safety officials continue to investigate White Bank fatality

COLONIAL HEIGHTS, VA - Officials from Virginia Occupational Safety and Health continue to investigate Friday's fatal accident that killed a utility worker at White Bank Park.

Mills D. Boyette, 60, of Colonial Heights had been working with three other city employees to unclog a drain in the park's restroom facility. Boyette had been an employee of the city for seven years.

When the high-pressure hose Boyette was operating burst, a metal coupling struck him in the back of the head. He was first rushed to Southside Regional Medical Center in Petersburg. He was later transferred to the Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center in Richmond where he died Saturday.

"We're all waiting for the outcome of the investigation," he said yesterday.
The hose was attached to a 1991 model Vac-Con truck. Public Works Director Charles E. Loving said the truck undergoes regular maintenance at the city garage. "It was a freak accident," Loving said.


Employee killed in explosion at Butler racetrack

QUINCY, MI — A fuel building exploded and burned at a stock car racetrack in southern Michigan, killing one employee and injuring two others, the Branch County Sheriff's Department said.

The explosion happened about 5:30 p.m. Saturday at Butler Motor Speedway, located on Clarendon Road in Butler Township near Quincy, the department said. It said about 1,000 people were evacuated temporarily from the area.

When firefighters arrived, they found that a large fire had engulfed a building that dispensed fuel to race cars, the department said in a statement. It said the building contained methanol, gasoline and propane tanks.

It said two people suffered minor injuries but Rudy Corsini, 49, of Michigan Center was critically injured. He was taken to Community Health Center of Branch county, then flown by helicopter to the burns unit at Bronson Methodist Hospital in Kalamazoo, where he died at 4:23 p.m. Sunday.


Worker falls to death at Huntsville Hospital

A construction worker fell to his death Saturday morning while working on a parking garage being built at Huntsville Hospital, said Madison County Coroner Bobby Berryhill.

The 27-year-old victim, whose name and employer were not immediately available, had been putting up framing when he fell 70 feet about 7:30 a.m., Berryhill said.


Worker Electrocuted

CALOSHA is investigating the Aug 12 electrocution of a 47-year-old caretakerat a
San Jose board-and-care facility. Nestor Fernandez, an employee of ESR Manor, is believed to have contacted a power source in an electrical panel. According to a DOSH report, the ground wire in the panel might not have been secured."


Truck driver killed in crash on Interstate 81

PREBLE, N.Y. -- A tanker truck carrying orange juice concentrate crashed on Interstate 81 Friday, killing the Canadian driver. Cortland County Fire Coordinator Bob Duell said 47-year-old Steven Tozer of Ontario was pronounced dead at the scene.


FEMA Worker Killed In Va. Crash

RADFORD, Va. -- A Federal Emergency Management Agency worker heading south to help victims of Hurricane Katrina was killed Sunday in a traffic accident on Interstate 81 near Radford.

Virginia State Police said William McClaughlin, of Manchester, N.H., was part of an 11-vehicle convoy with the agency that was traveling through Virginia.

McClaughlin was driving a truck and witnesses said it looked like one of the tires blew.

Witnesses said the driver struggled to keep control of his truck, but ran off the southbound lanes, over the grass median and hit the guardrail.


Two suspects charged in cab driver's slaying

BOSTON- Police are searching for two Boston men suspected of robbing and stabbing a cab driver to death last week. Investigators have obtained arrest warrants charging 19-year-old Cleveland Martin and 21-year-old Jashawn Robinson with murder and armed robbery. Police say both suspects apparently fled the Boston area after they allegedly killed the driver, 31-year-old Heureur Previlon.


Three crew members killed by toxic gas on cruise ship in LA port

LOS ANGELES, CA - Three crew members were killed by toxic sewer gas Friday as they repaired a waste pipe on a cruise ship that had just returned to the Port of Los Angeles. No passengers were involved. Nineteen other members of the Monarch of the Seas' crew, including two ship's physicians and a nurse, were examined but most were not believed to have actually been exposed to the toxic gas, authorities said....The three crew members probably died within 30 seconds of encountering the gas, Yu said. Fire officials said the repair was being done in an isolated, enclosed space and that most of those who later reported feelings of nausea had not been in the space but decided that they wanted to be checked out.


Tri-State crash kills semi driver, snarls traffic

CA- Traffic on the Tri-State Tollway was snarled for hours Wednesday after an early morning accident that killed a semi-truck driver and spilled "highly explosive ink" onto the roadway, officials said. The southbound lanes of the interstate were shut down for more than nine hours as authorities worked to contain printer's ink that spilled from 18 55-gallon drums onto the roadway, Glenwood Fire Chief Kevin Welsh said.


Woman Crushed By Construction Vehicle

Oceanside/Island Park, NY- A woman was fatally crushed by a construction vehicle at School 6 in Oceanside last week, and days after the incident the contractor rebuilding the roof at the site resumed the same work procedures. Lauren Ludwig, 52, an assistant director at the Oceanside Counseling Center, was walking from her car in the parking lot to the OCC office in the school at 11:31 a.m. on Aug. 22 when she was caught between the front and rear articulating tires of a Lull Hi-Loader. When the operator of the tractor-like vehicle, George Papas, 29, of Staten Island, heard a scream, he stopped the unit immediately, according to police.


Woman dies after 40-foot fall into storage tank in Canton

CANTON, Mo. — A woman died early this morning after she fell about 40 feet into a large tank, authorities said. The name of the victim was not released. Authorities said several people were at the Ayers Oil Company tank near Fourth and Grant when the woman fell through an opening from the top of the tank to a steel membrane lid, which keeps vapors from rising.


Migrant Worker Dies From Fall

Greeneville, TN- A man identified by Washington County authorities as a migrant worker died on Tuesday morning at the Johnson City Medical Center from injuries suffered when he fell Monday afternoon from a moving truck in Limestone. Rosalino H. Ramirez, 19, no address listed, was fatally injured about 4 p.m. Monday when he fell from the back of a farm truck that was hauling tomatoes along Corby Bridge Road in Limestone.


Construction Worker Dies After Being Hit By Car

Hyattsville, MD -- Maryland highway construction worker died and another man have been injured after being hit by a car.

Prince George's County Fire and E.M.S. spokesman Mark Brady says the two men were hit by the same car around 11 p.m. a few blocks apart on Route 450, Annapolis Road, near the Beltway.

Police have identified the construction worker as 22-year-old Molses Limon.


School Employee Electrocuted

Michael Sallee was apparently electrocuted on Sunday while refurbishing the boys9
locker room at the Miller Place High School.

Sallee, 37, of South Beach, who was employed by the school
district, was working with another employee, Corey Breines, installing
lighting into a new drop ceiling. The men were on opposite sides of a
cinder block wall. Breines told police he heard a sound, investigated and found
Sallee unconscious. Breines contacted other employees and police and
administered CPR.


Worker dies when a truck runs over him, The incident was Pasco's second fatal on-the-job accident in two days.

NEW PORT RICHEY, FL - The workers were preparing to dump two truckloads of dirt when they heard the voice, frantic, over their CB radios. "Stop! Stop! Stop! You ran him over!" John Rao heard it and jumped out of the driver's seat. He checked behind his own truck. Nobody there. Then he ran behind the other truck. Thomas Willard Johnson, 27, lay there in a fresh tire track. "Hold on, buddy, hold on," Rao begged, as he dialed 911. But Johnson just gasped. "He took his last breath, right there, right there in front of me," Rao recalled later. "His eyes just stayed open."


Worker killed in Worcester trench collapse cousin of Turnpike chairman

WORCESTER, Mass. --A construction worker who died when the sidewalk trench he was working in collapsed was the cousin of Massachusetts Turnpike Authority chairman Matthew Amorello. Robert Amorello, 55, died Monday after the five-foot trench in Worcester collapsed and a 4,500 pound slab of concrete fell on him. Amorello, a heavy equipment operator for A.F. Amorello & Sons Inc., often jumped into the trenches to help workers, friends said


Trucker killed in collision with train

Clyman, WI -- Semi-trailer was delivering goods in Dodge County A 58-year-old Iowa man (John Schaer, 58) was killed Tuesday morning when the semi-trailer truck he was driving was hit by a freight train in the Dodge County village of Clyman. The truck was northbound on Junction Road, a lightly traveled road about two miles south of Highway 60, and the Union Pacific train was westbound, when the collision occurred about 8:20 a.m., said Dodge County Sheriff Todd Nehls. The truck was delivering Union Pacific equipment to the nearby junction area, he said.


OSHA looking into death

Kansas City -A compliance officer with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration was sent to Neosho Monday to begin investigating the death of a worker at a local granite company. Paul Sikes, 38, was killed Friday morning at Neosho's Signature Granite when 10 sheets of granite weighing between 700 to 900 pounds each fell on him. The company is located just off of Missouri Highway 86 at 12837 Keith Lane.


Road project worker crushed in truck cab, dies

FREMONT, OH — A construction worker on the State Rt. 53 widening project was killed Monday when the cab of his dump truck was crushed by the bed of another dump truck that tipped over on top of it. Todd Lundy, 39, of Tiffin was trapped in the cab and had to be extricated by Sandusky Township firefighters. Mr. Lundy, who worked for North Coast Asphalt of Arcadia, Ohio, was pronounced dead at the scene.


Man killed in explosion of an empty fuel truck

Baltimore, MD- An empty fuel truck being converted to store water blew up outside a Sykesville company yesterday afternoon, killing a 28-year-old employee (Jeremy James Williams of Taneytown), Howard County fire officials said. The tanker exploded when a worker for Renehan's Water For Pools used a blowtorch to cut into the back of the used tanker, said William Mould, a spokesman for the fire department.


Alabama Officer Killed

31-year-old Benito Albarran has been charged with capital murder in the shooting death of Huntsville Police Officer Daniel Golden. Twenty-seven year-old Daniel H. Golden, a three-year veteran of the department, was shot in the head after responding to a call at Jalisco Restaurant on Jordan Lane near Mastin Lake Road.


Man dies in industrial accident

WILLIAMSBURG, Ky. -- A Whitley County man was killed in an industrial accident at a plastics factory in Williamsburg, authorities said.

Josh Wilson, 25, of Williamsburg, died about 11 p.m. EDT Saturday night at Williamsburg Plastics, said Whitley County coroner Andy Croley.


Man struck, killed by his own truck

Indianapolis, IN- A truck driver died Monday after being struck by his own semi-trailer while backing out of a Downtown warehouse. Steven Caldwell, 60, of Jackson, Mo., was killed when he was leaving the lot of Interstate Warehousing Inc., 1301 S. Keystone Ave., at about 8 p.m. Indianapolis Police Sgt. Judy Phillips said Caldwell stepped out of the cab of his moving vehicle for some unknown reason and was struck by the trailer. Commercial vehicle enforcement officers with the Indiana State Police assisted in the investigation.

Labels: Weekly Toll

Never bypassing an opportunity they couldn't take advantage of for their own selfish purposes, the Republican party is using the Katrina disaster as an opportunity

to advance longstanding conservative goals like giving students vouchers to pay for private schools, paying churches to help with temporary housing and scaling back business regulation.

Earlier this week, the Wall St. Journal recommended that the administration take advantage of Katrina to suspending Davis-Bacon, the law requiring that employers pay construction workers prevailing wages for public construction contracts. The President is allowed to waive the law during a “national emergency.” And like the good lapdog he is, the President did just that. Bush argued that the suspension of Davis Bacon “will result in greater assistance to these devastated communities and will permit the employment of thousands of additional individuals.”

As blogger Nathan Newman says:

Part of the line of the Bush administration is that allowing low-rent, low-wage contractors into public contracts will save the taxpayers money. But the reality is that decent wages translates into better quality and less costs down the road, as a range of studies linked to on that page highlight. If we should have learned anything from Katrina, it's that short-term cost savings translate into long-term costs.

But aside from the stupid economics of the decision, it's just an insult to the poor of the region to say that they should get paid bottom-basement wages, rather than reconstruction being a step up to a decent life for their families.

Meanwhile, the Department of Transportation has temporarily relaxed rules controlling how many hours truckers can drive when transporting fuel, and is doing the same thing with various environmental and other regulations.

Some regulatory shortcuts are understandable in a crisis, especially when we're talking about cutting red tape, but further improvishing workers in the poorest part of the country is not just political opportunism, it's also just plain mean. As AFSCME Vice President, Roberta Lynch writes in the House of Labor:

Bush and his right-wing allies have been gunning for the Davis-Bacon Act for years now, dreaming of the day when they could wipe out the requirement that contractors on federal projects pay the area’s prevailing wage for comparable work. According to the Washington Post, Republicans believe Davis-Bacon “amounts to a taxpayer subsidy to unions.”

But Davis-Bacon doesn’t require that a penny be paid to unions. Or even that union workers be employed on federal projects. It regulates the wages that are paid to workers. Funny how Republicans don’t like to mention the fact that they’re actually out to cut workers’ wages.

And funny how Bush failed to mention that the prevailing wage for construction labor in New Orleans has been about $9 per hour. I don’t know why he didn’t want to discuss the fact that when you get much lower than that, you’re talking about paying people poverty-level wages.

Even the NY Times is outraged:

By any standard of human decency, condemning many already poor and now bereft people to subpar wages - thus perpetuating their poverty - is unacceptable. It is also bad for the economy. Without the law, called the Davis-Bacon Act, contractors will be able to pay less, but they'll also get less, as lower wages invariably mean lower productivity.

What will they move on to next? Maybe those irritating costly health and safety protections?

I'm sorry, I couldn't resist this:



And I've often fantacized about doing this: Click

Windows Media

As Think Progress says:

We’re sure the local wasn’t being rude — just speaking to Cheney in a language he understands.

Just perusing my stats and noticing that SiteMeter has a new World Map feature where you can see where your last hundred hits came from. Among my last 100, are readers from South Africa, New Zealand, Philippines, India, United Arab Emirates, Yukon Territory, several locations in Europe and "Occupied Palestine."

Now, if I can get just a few of those readers to invited me on an all-expenses paid speaking tour...

BP just doesn't seem to get it. Just two months after a catastrophic explosion that killed 15 workers and injured 170 last March 23, BP Amoco Texas City management knowingly kept a unit running even the the pipes were thinning and eroding pipes, creating a "serious safety risk" according to an e-mail sent by a BP superintendent.

An e-mail obtained by the Houston Chronicle revealed that the damaged unit was kep running

because another ultraformer unit, the UU3, was shut down for maintenance. Consequently, shutting down the UU4 would force the shutdown of several other units dependent on its sole operation, the e-mail said.

"The piping is a serious safety risk," wrote superintendent Ross Vail to other unit superintendents and BP top management. "However UU4 will remain operating until UU3 has returned to safe operation. ... The decision to operate UU4 was not easy, but the risk to the site was very apparent."

BP spokesman Ronnie Chappell said inspectors found one problem line with weld erosion — a condition that weakens the pipeline and can cause it to fail — on May 26 and were able to isolate it, preventing any dangerous liquids from flowing through it. But another line with erosion detected the next day could not be isolated, he said.

In March 2004, a pipe broke in the same unit causing explosions and fire, resulting in a $63,000 OSHA fine.

The United Steelworkers union, which represents the workers at Texas City, were not amused:

"This tells a lot about the company's attitude toward safety," said Mike Wright, director of health, safety and environment for the Pittsburgh-based union. "They clearly didn't learn much since March 23."

A BP spokesperson said that the decision had nothing whatsoever to do with the company's reluctance to slow production and face revenue loss at a time when oil company profits are skyrocketing due to high gasoline prices. In fact, according to BP, shutting down the unit and restarting it again was more dangerous than leaving it running, even in a seriously damaged condition.

But safety experts in the union and industry disputed BP's reasoning.

Glenn Erwin, a former Texas City refinery worker who monitors refinery safety nationwide for the USW, said he was skeptical of that reason. But even if true, that rationale was not good enough to continue operating the unit, even for a day, he said.

"As a general rule, we can safely shut down our units and bring our units up," Erwin said. "By taking the position that we have a dangerous unit but shutting it down would be even more dangerous means there are pretty significant safety issues in the whole operation."

Scott Berger, director of the Center for Chemical Process Safety, which writes guidelines for the safe operations of refineries and other chemical plants, agreed that having to balance the two risks should be avoided.

"It would certainly ruin my day if I was in charge of the unit and basically found the piping got thin, and there was a bigger risk if I shut it down," said Berger."You are making the choice of the lesser of two evils. ... You should never let yourself get into that position in the first place."

Last month, the US Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board issued an urgent recommendation to BP to commission an independent panel that would review a range of safety management and culture issues stemming from the March 23 Texas City explosion that killed 15 and injured 170, as well as a number of other incidents at BP facilities in the United States.

Labels: BP, Chemical Safety Board

Was the lack of relief for New Orleans racist? Yes part of it was. There is no doubt in my mind that if this occurred in a rich, white republican area, federal resources would have been streaming in from minute one. But there was much more. It was about poverty in a city with about 40-50% of the population living below the poverty level. It was about anger and hatred built up in this population. It is about the thin veneer of civilization that exists in many of our cities that hides a cauldron of civil mistrust and unrest. This unrest has been exacerbated by the current administration by its callous disregard for the plight of its people. This unrest can erupt in any disaster situation where people feel abandoned and must strike out on their own to survive. It took only a day for the law of the jungle, for survival of the fittest to rule in New Orleans. Mass looting, riots, roving gangs, car jackings, murders, suicides, rapes and all of the lowest forms of human behaviors were rampant in New Orleans and dominated the news.

Yet there was another side, There was a coming together, a cooperation, a sharing and caring, a sense of commonality that brought a group of relative strangers together and allowed us and the people around us to survive. We accomplished this and saved our lives as well as the hotel guests and employees' lives. We see images of disasters on TV every day and I know that I have become
callous to this because I felt that this happened to someone else in another part of the world. But this is not the case. Any of us can be affected and with the growing uncertainties in this world, the chances are increasing that it will.

So there it is. The disaster in New Orleans is about divisiveness versus working together, about survival of the fittest versus sharing and pooling resources, about the lowest human behavior versus striving for the highest that human nature can provide. In many ways our future is our choice and we must decide quickly as more and more disasters occur due to global warming, pollution, and wars will occur.

Linked here is a letter from a doctor trapped in New Orleans after the hurricane and the courageous story about the efforts of a group of doctors at the hotel to set up a temporary clinic to help those trapped along with them.

Members of the Aamjiwnaang First Nation community near Sarnia, Ontario, Canada, noticed in 2003 that there were three all-girl softball teams and only one for boys, they started wondering if something might be wrong. There didn't seem to be enough boys being born. Turns out they're suspicions may have been correct.

According to a study published in the American journal Environmental Health Perspectives, only about a third of babies born on the reserve between 1999 and 2003 were male. Going back to include another five years, only 41 per cent of babies born in the decade were boys. The ratio is normally something closer to 50:50.

What's could be causing the problem? The study notes that there is increasing evidence that the human live birth sex ratio can be changed by a number of environmental and occupational chemical exposures. For example, fewer births of boy babies have occurred in populations exposed to dioxin, mercury, pesticides, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and parental smoking. According to many experts, the cause may be a class of chemicals called endocrine-disrupters that can influence the sex ratio by affecting the hormonal balance of the parents, or by killing fetuses of a certain gender in utero.

Exposure to chemicals is common in that area. According to Constanze Mackenzie, the fourth-year medical student at the University of Ottawa who led the study

"The community is located right in the centre of a number of large petrochemical and chemical industrial plants, so it is suspected they do have multiple exposures to environmental contaminants," said MacKenzie.">"The community is located right in the centre of a number of large petrochemical and chemical industrial plants, so it is suspected they do have multiple exposures to environmental contaminants," said MacKenzie.

She added there is ongoing research in the area that shows similar changes in sex ratios and the reproductive ability of local wildlife.

The Canadian Chemical Producers' Association suggested more research.

Related Article

GAO, NY Times & Wall St Journal: US Chemical Policy Needs Fixing, August 3, 2005

The Food and Drug Administration continues to be a case study of how a supposedly independent government agency can be captured by the industry it is supposed to be regulation. Bowing to industry pressure, the FDA has withdrawn a rulemaking designed to protect health care workers from accidential needle sticks.

Responding to studies showing that U.S. health care workers sustain 590,000 needle sticks each year, Public Citizen and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) petitioned the FDA in 2001 to ban a variety of unsafe devices used by health care workers, including certain intravenous (IV) catheters, blood collection devices, blood collection needle sets (butterfly syringes), glass capillary tubes and IV infusion equipment. Thousands of health care workers have contracted HIV and hepatitis B or C after being accidentally stuck by infected needles while on the job and many have died

The FDA issued an "Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking" to gather information about the hazard, but today announced that it was withdrawing the rulemaking because the agency

believes that the actions it has taken and continues to take along with the actions taken by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) are addressing the issue adequately at this time.

Dr. Peter Lurie of Public Citizen stated that the FDA's action "shows a profound indifference to the safety of workers and is yet another example of the Food and Drug Administrations (FDA) failure to do its job."

The FDA has increasingly come under fire for its refusal to ensure that prescription drugs are safe before being placed on the market. In most cases where unsafe drugs have had to be removed from the market, safer, equally effective alternatives have existed. Here, again, the agency is eschewing its responsibility to ensure the safety of the products it regulates. By allowing considerably more dangerous devices to stay on the market when equally effective, safer alternatives are available, the FDA has endangered the lives of hundreds of thousands of health care workers in this country.

Last week a high level FDA official resigned in protest over the agency's decision to further delay a final ruling on whether the "morning-after pill" should be made more easily accessible.

Warning that "adhering to appropriate safety management systems can spell the difference between a safe and uneventful startup and a serious incident," the US Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board issued a bulletin warning gulf coast refineries and chemical plants that shut down due to Hurricane Katrina to take special precuations when starting up again.

This is a time to make sure no more lives are claimed by this tragedy and no further delays occur in the production of essential transportation fuels and chemicals. Facilities should pay particular attention to process safety requirements during this critical period to assure a safe and expeditious return to operation.

The CSB cited three catastrophic incidents that had occurred
during the startup of continuous process equipment, killing 22 workers and causing 170 injuries.

While these incidents had a variety of causes, their occurrence underscores the hazards of startup even under “normal” conditions. In the wake of the hurricane, adhering to appropriate safety management systems can spell the difference between a safe and uneventful startup and a serious incident.

The Board recommended that facilities adhere to management of change processes before modifying any startup procedures, ensuring that adequate staffing and expertise are available, that up-to-date startup procedures are used that that non-essential personnel are kept a safe distance from the operations.

The Board provided sample checklists and urged facilities

to recognize that "human performance may be compromised due to crisis conditions." Board Chairman Carolyn Merritt added that "Many employees in the region have lost homes or loved ones in the hurricane, adding to the stress of an already difficult work situation."

Labels: Chemical Safety Board

We live in an increasingly brutal 19th century economy of savage capitalism, dominated by transnational corporations who roam the world looking for the most vulnerable workers and the most compliant governments. They succeed by playing countries off against one another and by pitting workers against one another as well. This economy affects not just workers in manufacturing and service industries, but has and will affect construction workers everywhere.

Linked here is an outstanding speech by Garrett Brown, Coordinator of the Maquiladora Health and Safety Support Network who concisely explains why foreign debt, trade treaties, immigrant rights and union rights are health and safety issues.

Garrett made this speech to a group of building and construction trades workers who were attending an annual "skills enhancement" seminar held in San Diego, with a field day in Tijuana, Mexico. Despite their initial hostility to immigrant workers in the U.S., they ended up giving him a standing ovation for an essentially "pro-immigrant" speech.

A little education can go a long way toward confronting the emotional hostility generated by the bigots in this country and focus peoples' energy toward addressing the real problems. The points he makes here are essential to understanding the economy we live in and strategically addressing the problems facing workers.

NAFTA and other trade agreements, for example, have not only been a disaster for American workers, but they've been a bigger disaster for Mexican workers, contributing to the illegal immigration problem in this country:

One of the inescapable byproducts of the new global economy and its trade rules are, as we have discussed today, massive immigration. The case of Mexico is quite clear: millions of farmers driven off the land, increased unemployment in the cities, deepening poverty throughout Mexico. The only place for starving people to go is wherever there are jobs – and that means to the U.S.

It’s worth thinking about what we – you and I – what would we do in these circumstances? I think we would do just the same as Mexican workers and farmers have done – we would come north looking for whatever work we could find to keep our families and communities alive.

Immigration has become essential for Mexico’s survival. In 2004 the “remittances” – or money sent by immigrant workers in the U.S. to their families in Mexico – amounted to $16 billion. Remittances are now the second greatest source of foreign income for the country – second only to oil sales and ahead of tourism and the maquiladoras for Mexico. Without these remittances, Mexican families would not survive, their towns and communities would not survive, and the country would be even poorer than it is now.

And the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), muscled through the Congress recently by Tom DeLay and friend will bring a similar disaster to Central America.

In the United States, according to Brown, the global economy has affect American workers in three ways: increased competition among workers for scarce jobs, more concessions by city and regions to attract business, and an accelerated “race to the bottom," putting pressure on wages and working conditions, and increased pressure from business to weaken workplace safety protections.

So what can we do about it?

• Educate: Workers need education not just about technical health and safety issues, but also

  a second kind of education, also essential, which is fundamentally political in nature. This is education about what workers’ rights are and how they can meaningfully exercise these rights; and also to understand the global context of occupational safety and health and what impacts it.

• Organize: Not only do we need to organize the 40-50% of American workers who say they would like to belong to unions, but we can't overlook the organizing potential of immigrant workers:

  Many of the immigrant workers coming to the U.S. – especially those from Central America – have had extensive union experience at home, and in an atmosphere where union activism can result in your death. So these workers represent a great potential resource for U.S unions.
  
  Moreover, the cold, hard reality of the global “savage capitalism” will be the greatest recruiter for unions offering real protections for workers. Health and safety issues have long been recognized as one key way to organize workers in their own defense. It is increasingly recognized and documented that there is a positive “union effect” on workplace health and safety when there is a union on the job.
  
  In fact, one of the most important health and safety measures in any workplace is to have informed and active workers as part of a member-controlled union on site.

• Solidarity among all working people in the global economy, which will be difficult with all the anti-immigrant feelings being generated in this country.

  Our future depends on us seeing Mexican or Chinese workers – in the U.S. or in their countries – as “fellow workers” with the same problems and goals as us; fellow workers with the same employers and the same enemies as us; fellow workers with the same dreams for themselves and their families as us; and fellow workers with the same future as us.

• Political Action: Only through political action can we ensure that we have protective regulations are enforced, and workers who are educated about health and safety conditions, as well as their rights.
  
  We also need political action to cancel the crushing foreign debts in Mexico, Central and South America, Asia and Africa

The biggest threat to workplace safety in the developing world is the unpayable (actually already paid many times over) foreign debts owed by countries like Mexico, which makes promulgation and enforcement of occupational health regulations economic suicide and a political impossibility.

Read the whole thing and pass it around.

By Guest Blogger Celeste Monforton

Not offended enough by the misdeeds and insensitivity of this Administration? Try this one: in the September 7, 2005 Federal Register, the Mine Safety and Health Administration proposed weakening a health standard for underground miners exposed to diesel exhaust and particulate matter (DPM). DPM is associated with cardiovascular and cardiopulmonary disease, and MSHA’s 2001 risk assessment estimated 15 excess lung cancer death per 1,000 workers even at the reduced exposure limit.

In this latest assault on miners’ health, MSHA is suggesting that mine operators be given until 2011 to reduce miners’ exposure to DPM. This is the second time in three months that MSHA has backed away from the 2001 DPM rule issued by the Clinton Administration. That original standard gave mine operators five years (until January 2006) to reduce miners’ exposure to DPM to a more health protective limit. With this deadline quickly approaching, well-connected voices in the mining industry heard the clock ticking and called on their friends at OMB to rescue them yet again from the rule.

The mining industry and their lobbyists have proven yet again that they will do anything to postpone spending a few dollars to reduce workers’ exposure to DPM.

The American Meat Institute didn't take kindly to a Washington Post Op-Ed last month by Lance Compa and Jamie Fellner describing the horrendous working conditions faced by meatpacking and poultry workers.

Compa and Fellner, authors of a report by Human Rights Watch issued last January entitled “Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Workers’ Rights in U.S. Meat and Poultry Plants,” described "the cuts, amputations, skin disease, permanent arm and shoulder damage, and even death from the force of repeated hard cutting motions," the fact that the companies do little to prevent these injuries (even though solutions are well known) and the lack of government protections.

But J. Patrick Boyle, president and chief executive of the American Meat Institute, writing a response in the Post, claims that Compa and Fellner's article "bears no resemblance to the reality of today's U.S. meat and poultry industry, or to our documented and successful efforts to enhance workplace safety."

Now I'm all for "balance" in our newspapers, there are two sides to every story, yadda, yadda. But I would think that a news organ as respected as the Washington Post would at least insist on a modicum of truth when accepting a response to one of their op-eds. In this case, they failed miserably. Instead of a fact-based response, we have a commercial for the AMI.

So where's the beef? Let's look at some of the myths and facts.

According to Boyle,

• It doesn't make good business sense to let workers get injured because "Each time we have to replace a valued, experienced employee, the cost of recruiting, hiring, and job and safety training for a new employee can easily exceed $5,000."
  
  Truth: I find this hard to believe, considering that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently reported that turnover in some plants can exceed 100% in a year.
  
  
• The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports a 67 percent decline in total injuries and illnesses since 1990.
  
  Truth: This is probably the biggest lie. First, the 67% drop is based on a change in BLS reporting methodology which Boyle never mentions.
  
  Second, the data is based on reported injuries and there is massive underreporting of injuries, because immigrant workers are afraid they will lose their jobs or be reported to Immigration, managers refuse to report repetitive stress injuries as work-related, insisting that they happened because of the employees' activity away from work.
  
  Finally, the BLS data does not include the night shift cleaning employees, who do the most dangerous work, but are generally employed by contractors. Instead of being counted as part of the meatpacking industry, they're counted in the same industrial category as building janitors and hotel room cleaners. (This is the same problem that has been identified in the refinery industry.)
  
  
• The United Food and Commercial Workers union estimates that it represents 60 percent of the red-meat-packing workforce, so the industry is clearly not anti-union.
  
  Truth: Something doesn't quite compute. According to the GAO,

  46 percent of workers in the meat products industry were union members, a figure that had remained stable since the 1970s. However, by the end of the 1980s, union membership had fallen to 21 percent. Declining rates of unionization coincided with increases in the use of immigrant workers, higher worker turnover, and reductions in wages.



• Processers don't force employees to work at unsafe speeds. In fact, "line speeds are based on a thorough assessment by systems engineers that ensures that tasks can be adequately and safely performed by a worker in a prescribed time." And anyway, "Line speeds, as well as food safety regulations, are monitored and enforced by nearly 8,000 federal inspectors who are in plants at all times."

Truth: Check out the article below this and then tell me how safe the line speeds are. In addition, the federal inspectors that Boyle talks about are not OSHA or worker safety inspectors, they are Department of Agriculture inspectors who are concerned about the quality and safety of the meat, not the safety of the workers. According to the GAO,

Line speed is regulated by USDA to permit adequate inspection by food safety inspectors. According to USDA, when the maximum speeds were originally set and when they are adjusted by the agency, the safety and health of plant production workers is not a consideration.

Boyle knows this. He's just hoping Washington Post readers don't know this.

So what, according to Boyle is the root cause of the apparent dementia plaguing Compa and Fellner? The root cause of this distorted picture of the American workplace is apparently that too many of today's journalism and sociology students have been contaminated by required reading of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, "a moving fictional account of an immigrant's plight in a number of industries....It's a bit like relying on "Oliver Twist" for a picture of modern child care."

According to Boyle,

If Compa and Fellner can't accept the idea that we do the right thing just because it's right and we have a strong collective conscience, maybe they can believe that we do it because it's also financially beneficial and required by federal regulations. Either way, we are proud of our workplace safety improvements and committed to further progress.

So who's living in a fantasy land? In fact, listening to J. Patrick Boyle glorify the meat packing industry is a bit like listening to Donald Rumsfeld tell us that victory is right around the corner in Iraq.

The American Meat Institute and the Washington Post should be ashamed.

Labels: American Meat Institute, Meatpacking, poultry processing, Recordkeeping, UFCW, Washington Post

No, we don't need unions anymore. Not at all like the bad old days. Let's start in Morristown, Tennessee:

Hour after hour, Antonia Lopez Paz said, her supervisor at the Koch Foods poultry plant here told women on the deboning line that production demands were so great that they could not go to the bathroom.

Sometimes she developed acute pain because she could not go, Ms. Lopez said. And one time when another woman asked for permission, "the supervisor took off his hard hat and told her, 'You can go to the bathroom in this,' " said Ms. Lopez, a Mexican immigrant who moved to this town in East Tennessee three years ago, lured by the company's promise of year-round work.

Out of her solitary complaint has grown a thriving unionization drive that fits neatly into the plans of several insurgent unions that hope to revive the labor movement by focusing on low-wage workers and immigrant workers.

***

Last April she quit Koch Foods because she was pregnant and the managers rejected her request to be transferred to a less rigorous position. Her job as a wing cutter was so arduous that she feared it would jeopardize her pregnancy.

Like many other workers, she disliked the 42-chickens-a-minute line speed. That pace means that many workers make 18,000 cuts during their eight-hour shifts as they prepare breasts, wings, tenders and cutlets for restaurants and consumers.

"What I didn't like is they would yell at us and tell us we're good for nothing and we didn't know how to work, and sometimes they wouldn't even let us leave to go home when we were sick," Ms. Lopez said as she nursed her month-old son. "We need to convince people to join the union, that they shouldn't be afraid because the union is the only way to make things better and stop them from mistreating at us."

Officials with Koch Foods declined requests to be interviewed. But at proceedings that the Tennessee Occupational Safety and Health Administration held in response to Ms. Lopez's bathroom complaint, Koch representatives said their supervisors were attentive to workers' concerns and gave adequate bathroom breaks.

Several Koch workers said the bathroom break situation improved after the unionization drive began, although some workers said problems remained. In August the state's safety administration dismissed their complaints for lack of evidence.

After Ms. Lopez quit, the unionization drive continued to gain momentum, fueled by the complaints about mistreatment and low wages. The top pay is $7.55 an hour, even for employees there a decade.

"That level of pay is a misery, an embarrassment, considering how hard we work," said Ernestina Gonzalez, who earns the top wage and said she could not afford the premiums for the health insurance the company offers.

And then 280 miles to the west, at the Gold Kist plant in Russellville, Alabama, there's this:

One day last December, Delores Smith slipped on a greasy metal plate. Ms. Smith, who prepares boxes to hold processed chickens, crashed to the floor and was in agony, certain that she had broken her right ankle.

She said Gold Kist's nurse did not even look at her ankle and told her that she must have sprained some ligaments and should take ibuprofen and go home. After a supervisor took her to her car, Ms. Smith looked at her ankle and saw pieces of bone protruding through her sock. When her son took her to the emergency room, X-rays showed that her ankle was broken in three places.

Ms. Smith still limps slightly, but now she has another health crisis. Her job involves removing folded-up boxes that workers upstairs send to her via a chute. Those boxes often tumble out, and one day in July the boxes knocked her eyeglasses to the floor, breaking the frames.

Looking comical in her taped-together glasses, Ms. Smith said: "They sent me home for the day, saying it was my fault. I also got a write-up. My glasses can't even be fixed."

At first, Gold Kist refused to pay for new glasses, which she said would cost $378. With her base wage of $8.40 an hour, that would exceed her weekly pay. Workers who do not arrive late or miss a day for a whole week receive a 75-cent-an-hour bonus.

The company, she said, has now offered to pay $38 toward the glasses. She hopes to get some more from workers' compensation.

Ms. Smith said she and the two other workers in her unit often could not go to the bathroom for hours at a time because the pace was so demanding and there was nobody to replace them.

"They don't respect us at all," she said. "That's why I'm praying for a union."

UFCW President correctly calls these conditions "criminal." Looks like it should be a slam dunk union victory at hand. So why did I have this creepy feeling while reading the article that the workers will be threatened/bribed/intimidated into voting against the union?

But who knows, maybe I'm wrong this time:

Back in Morristown, the Koch poultry workers are so united behind a union and have generated so much community support that they persuaded Koch to pledge not to mount an anti-union campaign. Several workers spoke at churches, and ministers, congregants and community groups wrote letters to the company backing unionization. The workers at Koch's kill plant and deboning plant are expected to approve unionization in mid-September.

It's hard to imagine a job worse than being a New Orleans policeman for the past week.

The last week has been a series of nonstop rescue missions, shootouts in the night and forays into foul-smelling shelters in response to gunshots and reports of rape for Sergeant Sandoz and the others on the New Orleans police force. And like most everyone else in New Orleans, police officers have been traumatized by the loss of homes and family members.

Morale on the police force is in tatters. About 500 officers - a third of the force and far more than previously estimated - have dropped out of the daily lineup. Some of them may still be in houses cut off by the storm or may have simply gone off to help their families and will eventually return. But most of the missing officers have either told their superiors that they were quitting or simply walked off the job. Two officers have shot themselves to death.

I'm not too sure about the walking off the job part. I later heard that most of those who had allegedly quit, were doing their jobs but weren't able to getin touch with anyone.

The city has offered them a week in Las Vegas as the military moves in to take their place, but most seem to just want a couple of nights of sleep and to spend some quiet time with their families.

.

According to a new AFL-CIO report Immigrants at Risk: The Urgent Need for Improved Workplace Safety and Health Policies and Programs, immigrant workers are facing an epidemic of workplace death in this country. Overall workplace fatalities among foreign-born workers increased by 46 percent from 1992 to 2002 and fatalities among Hispanic workers increased by one-third over the same period, from 553 fatalities in 1992 to 841 fatalities in 2002. Meanwhile, fatalities were falling for the workplace as a whole over the same period.

(This report only covers data through 2002. As was just reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, however, the situation has gotten worse. Fatal work injuries among Hispanic workers were up 11 percent in 2004 after declining in 2002 and 2003. 883 Hispanic workers were killed in the workplace in 2004.)

The report also found that although the share of foreign-born employment increased by 22 percent between 1996 and 2000, the share of fatal occupational injuries for this population increased by 43 percent.

Hispanic workers are employed doing the most dangerous jobs in the most dangerous industries and tend to work in the less-skilled and more dangerous occupations such as construction laborers, helpers and roofers.

Between 1996 and 2001, private construction, retail trade and transportation and public utilities (counted as one industry) were the three industries in which fatally injured foreign-born workers most frequently were employed. Nearly one in four fatally injured foreign-born workers was employed in the construction industry. Another one in three was employed either in retail trade or transportation and public utilities. Industries with the highest fatality rates for foreign-born workers include mining (30.4 per 100,000), construction (17.3 per 100,000), transportation and public utilities (15.2per 100,000) and agriculture, forestry and fishing (15.2 per 100,000).

Workplace homicide was the leading cause of fatal injury for foreign-born workers and falls were the second highest cause of death. Highway incidents, number one for native born workers, was the third leading cause of death for foreign born workers.

Even after their injured, immigrant workers have a hard time with Workers Compensation:

In a Department of Public Health Survey of 1,400 injured workers in Massachusetts, more than half of the foreign-born workers questioned had never heard of workers’ compensation, compared with 15 percent among U.S.-born workers.

While 97 percent of workers seen in a free clinic set up for garment workers in Oakland, Calif., were eligible for free health care under workers’ compensation, none sought the benefit. Fear of job loss and of being blacklisted in the industry was so strong that none was willing to apply for benefits to which they were entitled.

The report also discusses efforts being made to help immigrant workers. OSHA's Susan Harwood grant program, for example, give preference to applicants that target immigrant populations, but the Administration is proposing to eliminate the program in next year's budget. OSHA has also failed to issue a standard requiring employers to pay for personal protective equipment such as gloves and boots, a regulations that would be of particular help to immigrant workers.

On the other hand, a number of unions, COSH groups and other organizations are providing information and training to immigrant workers.

Such work needs to continue and expand to ensure as many immigrant workers as possible have access to this vital information. Immigrant workers must have the same safety and health protections as native-born workers. The existing barriers need to be removed so immigrant workers are aware of their rights and are free to exercise them without fear of retaliation.

Labels: AFL-CIO

September is National Preparedness Month, "a nationwide coordinated effort held each September to encourage Americans to take simple steps to prepare for emergencies in their homes, businesses and schools."

If only it had started in August.

From a Letter to the Editor in the Washington Post.

Louisiana lost 600,000 acres of wetlands in the 40 years ending in 1993, according to the Louisiana Coastal Wetlands Conservation and Restoration Task Force's report that year.

In recent years, 24 square miles per year of wetlands have been lost. Barrier islands have eroded and, in some cases, disappeared. The levees built to protect delta cities such as New Orleans and to facilitate international trade have starved Louisiana's wetlands for silt and caused them to wash away. The canals carved across the region by the oil and gas industries also have compromised the landscape's integrity. Functioning wetlands soak up hurricane storm surges, prevent erosion, and moderate hurricane-force winds. Functioning wetlands provide more comprehensive protection from nature's wrath than any levee the Army Corps of Engineers could ever build.

Hurricane Katrina has destroyed an American city and created America's first environmental refugees. Unless we begin to respect the value of ecosystem services and incorporate those values into land-use planning, this tragedy will be repeated.

DAVID RIPOSO
Takoma Park

I must admit, I wasn't looking forward to this Labor Day. Generally you read all kinds of depressing articles about the decline of the labor movement, so I was looking forward this year to reading even more depressing articles about the decline of the labor movement, combined with the post-mortems about the split of the labor movement.

Happily I was spared most of those stories (and didn't read most of the rest) of them because of the continuing horrors of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, followed by the continuing horrors of Hurricane SCOTUS. I've been so overwhelmed, I've actually retreated into normalcy -- reading the paper, doing self-destructive things like mountain biking with my kid, fighting off Alzheimers by playing Scrabble with the family, anything but blogging.

Just looking a the paper every day (even just looking at the photos) is almost more than I can deal with. But then when you actually read the paper....

For example, in the "Are We Feeling Safer Yet" Department, from today's NY Times we have a microcosm of the entire Bush administration:

First there's the Pavlovian (or would that be PavRovian) response to crises that may actually reveal to the American people that the Emperor has not clothes: Blame someone else:

"The way that emergency operations act under the law is the responsibility and the power, the authority, to order an evacuation rests with state and local officials," Mr. Chertoff said in his television interview. "The federal government comes in and supports those officials."

That line of argument was echoed throughout the day, in harsher language, by Republicans reflecting the White House line.

Then we continue to wonder who's in charge, are there actually any adults at home?

In interviews, these Republicans said that the normally nimble White House political operation had fallen short in part because the president and his aides were scattered outside Washington on vacation, leaving no one obviously in charge at a time of great disruption. Mr. Rove and Mr. Bush were in Texas, while Vice President Dick Cheney was at his Wyoming ranch.

This would be the same President who has shattered the record for most vacation time, but assures us that he's because of modern communication, etc., etc, he's really "on the job" even when he's on vacation. Nevermind.

Meanwhile,

Ms. Rice did not return to Washington until Thursday, after she was spotted at a Broadway show and shopping for shoes, an image that Republicans said buttressed the notion of a White House unconcerned with tragedy.

Of course, I'm not exactly sure what contribution Condi could make anyway aside from assuring forgotten poor black folk this administration really hasn't forgotten poor black folk, or maybe officially hemming and hawing over whether we're too proud to accept assistance from other countries.

But this is the "best"

These officials said that Mr. Bush and his political aides rapidly changed course in what they acknowledged was a belated realization of ...

Of what? Three guesses...

"Of the incredible damage suffered by New Orleans?" WRONG

Or maybe "Of the dire and deadly situation faced the neglected poor of New Orleans?" WRONG AGAIN

AND THE ANSWER IS: "Mr. Bush and his political aides rapidly changed course in what they acknowledged was a belated realization of the situation's political ramifications."

That's it. Not broken levies, flooded city, millions of homeless, people dying in the streets, rats eating corpses. No, none of that caused the administration to change course. It was "a belated realization of the situation's political ramifications."

OK, we have a crisis, one of the worst in American history So crisis management is taken over by Homeland Security? FEMA? The army?

As is common when this White House confronts a serious problem, management was quickly taken over by Mr. Rove and a group of associates including Mr. Bartlett. Neither man responded to requests for comment.

Then we have a guy running FEMA whose only qualification was rooming with one of Bush's politically connected buddies in college and being a failed commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association; a Homeland Security Director who refuses to believe there are thousands of abandoned refugees at the New Orleans convention center, even though it's top news on T.V. and radio across the country. I probably shouldn't be too hard on them. After all, the DHS website says that they've saved 17,000 lives. I can't tell how they're figuring, but if they say so, it's good enough for me.

On the other hand, some of the press seems to be growing cajones. Evolution or intelligent design, I don't know, but I did love this Tim Russert exchange with Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff:

MR. RUSSERT: People were stunned by a comment the president of the United States made on Wednesday, Mr. Secretary. He said, "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees." How could the president be so wrong, be so misinformed?

The amazing thing is looking at how Presidents responded in recent history. Every single one before this one: that would be Clinton, Bush I, and even Nixon launched the federal government into immediate action before the major hurricanes hit and personally supervised the aftermath. Whereas we (or should I say the Alabama, Mississippi and New Orleans) get photo ops, stage-managed events and this:

Can we survive three and a half more years of this?

Oh, wait, almost forgot about the depressing Labor Day labor news:

"Wal-Mart provides a chilling example of the damage that low-wage, non-union corporations can wreak, and their business model is going to set the standards for our children unless we do something now," Andrew L. Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), wrote in 2004. "Wal-Mart is the sewer pipe through which good jobs are being flushed."

But a major rift in the AFL-CIO that produced two warring camps in late July has almost certainly derailed that mission and threatened other important labor initiatives. And on Labor Day, union activists, corporate leaders and officials of both political parties are watching closely to determine whether the nation's largest labor federation will emerge from the split stronger and energized, or divided and weakened

Hat tips for all of this to Susie, BillMon, Frank Shiflett and my wife, who brought me the paper in bed this morning.

Dave Livingston of RawblogXport (a great labor news digest that you should all be reading regularly) is offering his labor graphics for your use, free of charge. Here is one of my favorites:



There are a bunch more here

In a classic case proving the link between worker safety and the safety of the community and the enviroment, a jury has awarded 11 pipefitters cleaning up the Hanford nuclear reservation $4.8 million in damages because they were fired for complaining about safety problems at the facility.

In 1997, [Scott]Brundridge was among a group of seven pipefitters who objected to installing a valve rated for 1,975 pounds per square inch for a test of radioactive waste pipes that needed to withstand 2,235 pounds per square inch.

Because it's often hard to prove that companies retaliate against workers for safety complaints, cases like this are hard to win. And because they're hard to win, and they take so long, workers are often reluctant to risk getting fired. So it's particularly important -- not just for the workers themselves, but for the safety of the entire community -- workers and communities know about these victories.

And although the jury was generous, Brundridge, his fellow plaintiffs and their Seattle attorney Jack Sheridan said the case wasn't about money.

It was about safety, Sheridan said.

"So many (Fluor) workers knew just to keep their heads down and not say anything," said Sheridan. "That can't be the culture we allow to exist at Hanford. This verdict sends a message."

According to the Government Accountability Project

The case revolves around the initial firing of seven pipefitters, let go after refusing to install an unsafe valve in the tank farm system that holds approximately 53 million gallons of high-level nuclear and toxic waste underground. If the valve failed, it would have risked serious injury or death for those in the vicinity, potentially spread contamination, and jeopardized the structural integrity of the storage tanks.

GAP is an organization dedicated to providing assistance to whistleblowers and helped the Hanford workers file their original suit:

“This case is all about Fluor’s multi-million dollar grudge match against a crew of pipefitters who did their jobs safely and well, which is apparently not the expected behavior at Hanford,” said Tom Carpenter, Director of GAP’s Nuclear Oversight Program. "Instead of gratitude for doing the company a favor by identifying an unsafe condition, these workers were fired and blacklisted, and their careers wrecked. Fluor is sending a message to all workers at Hanford to keep silent or face financial ruin. The government is backing Fluor the whole way with generous handouts to pay the millions in legal fees that Fluor is racking up in its war on the whistleblowers.”

This happened in a cruise ship in Los Angeles yesterday, but the same hazard may be facing rescue and cleanup workers cleaning up in the wake of Hurricane Katrina as they repair sewer lines, go down into basements or even small enclosed rooms where organic material has been rotting:

Gas Kills 3 Crewmen on Ship

By Hector Becerra and David Pierson, Times Staff Writers

Three crew members were killed and 20 others injured after sewage gushed from a pipe being repaired inside a crowded Royal Caribbean cruise ship docked at the Port of Los Angeles, releasing deadly levels of hydrogen sulfide gas.

Crew members aboard the Monarch of the Seas were trying to fix the pipe in a roughly 10- by 12-foot portion of a propeller shaft tunnel on the starboard side of the ship about 9 a.m. when the accident occurred, officials said.

The workers thought the pipe would be empty, but when they opened it, gas-laden sludge burst out of a 5-gallon sewage container, firefighters said.

Their deaths were "almost instantaneous," said Barbara Yu of the Los Angeles County Fire Department. "Hydrogen sulfide is a deadly gas, and it's heavier than air."

The amount of gas the crewmen inhaled was believed to have been four times the lethal level, Yu added.

Hydrogen sulfide is a sewage byproduct generated by decaying organic material. Also known as sewer gas, it smells like rotten eggs.

At low levels, it can irritate the eyes and throat, but at high concentrations, even a few breaths can cause sudden death.

Officials do not know what triggered the malfunction. The three workers were not wearing protective gear or breathing equipment during the repair effort.

More resources on confined space hazards can be found here.

Labels: confined space hazards

Last month, OSHA's Texas Regional Director John Miles expressed some surprising frustration (for OSHA bureaucrats) with the conditions at BP Amoco's Texas City plant. That's the plant that killed 15 and injured 170 in a massive explosion on March 23 and experienced several other incidents before and after the March explosion, including a September 2004 pipeline rupture that killed two workers and severely injured a third.

“At some point BP has to say, "enough is enough,’" said Miles. "I think that facility for BP (in Texas City) is at that point."

Miles' inspired outburst left Galveston Daily News columnist Michael Smith with a few questions:

For starters, where was OSHA before the refinery got to “enough is enough?”

Is the agency’s sole mandate to show up after the smoke clears to count bodies and give sermons about safety or is there a preventative mission as well?

The fact is that if what BP did from 2004 to now was wrong or inadequate, and clearly it was, then the same can be said for OSHA.

Miles compared BP’s refinery to a plant in Pasadena that saw three fatal accidents in 11 years, including an October 1989 explosion that killed 23 people, a June 1999 blast that killed two and a March 2000 accident that killed one.

Where was OSHA during all that?

More important is this: What can OSHA do to impress a company of BP’s size?

I suggested last month that a $20 billion fine might do the trick, but it's highly unlikely that OSHA will come within 20 billion miles of that figure.

Smith doubts it too, but challenges OSHA to step outside its lapdog image:

OSHA has the reputation, in some quarters anyway, of being a toothless watchdog. In fairness to Miles and those who work for him, that has more to do with the agendas of politicians who hold its purse strings than with their dedication or desire.

Miles implied it would take “true commitment” and not statements to make things right at BP. That’s clearly true and it is clearly true for OSHA as well as the company. We wonder if OSHA can muster that commitment, even now at this late hour.

It might also take more than a nickel-and-dime fine. We wonder if OSHA can muster that either.

Smith's column also generated two interesting and moving letters to the editor, the first from a woman who has a close connection to the plant, Katherine Rodruiguez:

On Sept. 2, 2004, the BP Texas City refinery had an “incident.” It didn’t make the news, and there was not continuing press coverage. However, three families were devastated by the news that three workers were injured in a pipeline rupture. One of them was my father, who subsequently passed away after a two-month battle in the hospital.

We have all been silent through the subsequent events at the refinery but have been grieving nonetheless.

I have made a decision to fight for my father and all other workers who deserve to have a safe work environment. I can be silent no more.

Your article is just the kind of exposure that the public needs hear.

Hopefully, in the wake of recent events, something can actually be changed for the better.

More skeptical that OSHA can -- or will be allowed to change is 20-year CalOSHA employee Jack Oudiz:

In California, we have 200 enforcement inspectors to cover more than 5 million workplaces and 16 million workers.

There are more fish and game wardens than OSHA inspectors here.

The maximum criminal penalty for EPA is 15 years — seven people were jailed for one year for harassing a wild burro. By contrast, the maximum criminal penalty from OSHA is six months — one person has been jailed since 1970 for six months.

The OSHA Act was a radical idea that much of corporate America still cannot accept, and the political will for a truly effective agency has never existed.

It has waxed and waned over the years with Democrats and Republicans respectively, but the value of putting worker lives over profits has never been highly prized.

OSHA will issue its violations by the end of this month. I asked readers to guess how high the fine would be. The guesses ranged from a low of $50,000 to a high of $1.2 million. (My guess was $832,350) Feel free to use the comment link below to continue the bidding.

But as "fun" as the guessing game is, this society still needs to answer Michael Smith's question: "What can OSHA do to impress a company of BP’s size?"

Jack Oudiz argues -- with some pretty solid history behind him -- that corporate America will never let us put workers' lives over profits. Katherine Rodriguez has decided to fight for her father "and all other workers who deserve to have a safe work environment" to prove him wrong.

We've got an election coming up soon. Might be a good time to raise some of these issues with those who are seeking to represent us.

More on this later.

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