THIS article by Northrop Grumman Ship Systems, Inc. (NGSS) addresses lessons learned from a fatality at its New Orleans facility involving a suspended load. The shipbuilding industry faces many unique hazards. Like all major shipyards, NGSS builds its vessels through modular construction. In modular construction, NGSS builds hundreds of separate units that are assembled into larger units and then integrated into the vessel.
Investigators with the Economic and Employment Enforcement Coalition, a multi-agency task force designed to root out California's underground economy, recently targeted Orange County businesses in the construction industry it said were operating illegally.
The American Society of Safety Engineers has released a historical construction and demolition standards package that includes the newly revised ANSI/ASSE A10.4-2007 Standard and all previous ANSI A10.4 standards available for the past 40-plus years.
Without prior notice, OSHA will conduct one "Swept Up in Safety Week" during each quarter of this calendar year.
THE explosion at BP's Texas City, Texas, refinery that killed 15 contract construction workers and injured 170 other workers in March 2005 is still reverberating. A lawsuit, an investigation by the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB), a glossy safety report from BP (along with $1.6 billion set aside for claims), and a bill in the Texas Legislature to mandate a state occupational safety and health plan were the first wave.
IN 1994, OSHA made a big change in how it inspects construction job sites. Previously, construction inspections were comprehensive in scope, addressing all areas of the workplace and, by inference, all classes of hazards. This may have forced compliance officers to spend too much time and effort focusing on a few projects looking for all violations--and too little time overall on many projects inspecting for the hazards most likely to cause fatalities and serious injuries to workers.
OSHA is conducting unannounced Saturday inspections of construction work sites as part of its Summer Weekend Construction Inspection Program.
The agency is determined to reduce deaths and injuries caused by falls from heights and also slips and falls. Housekeeping on sites nationwide will be examined.
After years in the works, the voluntary consensus standard Reduction of Musculoskeletal Problems in Construction (ANSI/ASSE A10.40-200x) will be submitted to the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) for final review.
Associated Builders and Contractors, the national association of 24,000 merit shop construction firms, testified May 1 at an ANSI accredited standards committee appeal hearing that the ANSI A 10.40 standard, Reduction of Musculoskeletal Problems in Construction, should not go forward.
A difficult issue faced by nearly every safety coordinator for a construction site is what to do about temporary guardrail protection. The temptation is to do the job quickly, get open-sided edges or platforms closed in as quickly as possible, and caution all personnel to be extra careful when it is necessary to approach the edge during the temporary exposure period.
ONE of your employees--let's call him Joe Supervisor--is working on a job site where a backhoe is digging the foundation for a new office building. The soil is being loaded into large dump trucks. As you can imagine, the noise level from the backhoe and the trucks is almost deafening. Of course, Joe knows all about the consequence of hearing loss from exposure to noise; that's why he's wearing ear plugs.