"These violations are indicative of the kinds of safety and health concerns, often found at department stores, that can pose serious risk to employees," said Jean Kulp, director of OSHA's Allentown, Pa., Area Office.
The company disclosed more than 680 violations of water, air, hazardous waste, emergency planning and preparedness, and pesticide regulations to EPA after auditing 12 facilities it acquired from DuPont in 2004.
The company has been fined $121,500 for violations associated with process safety management, hazardous waste operations, and emergency response, including the company's failure to identify all of the causal factors of the incident during the investigation. The chemical release resulted in the evacuation of residents living within a three-mile radius of the facility.
"This order reaffirms both the right of drivers to refuse to operate vehicles when they reasonably believe it is unsafe and the Labor Department's commitment to taking the necessary steps to protect that right," said Ken Nishiyama Atha, OSHA's regional administrator in San Francisco.
Conditions at the worksite resulted in the issuance of 35 serious and two other-than-serious citations following inspections initiated in response to a complaint.
The grant program is designed to help occupational safety and health practitioners advance in their career.
The company has "a highly involved frontline employee workforce, an excellent medical program, and energy control procedures. Safety is valued from the bottom up," said Greg Baxter, OSHA's regional administrator in Denver.
This is another example of the alarming increase in the number of pregnancy charges that this agency has seen in recent years," said Mary Jo O'Neill, regional attorney at the EEOC's Phoenix District Office.
Employers cannot rely on online or video training tools as the sole source of training because physical manipulation of actual components of PPE (as opposed to virtual components of PPE) must be part of the program, the agency notes.
The company, a small municipal solid waste burner, was accused of not taking the correct measures to control its mercury, dioxin, and furan emissions.
A former NFPA senior electrical specialist, Mastrullo is now an OSHA employee in Boston. NFPA says his evangelism in the cause of electrical safety helped to make 70E and other electrical safety programs more prominent around the world. This photo shows, from left, NFPA Chief Electrical Engineer Mark Earley; OSHA New England Regional Administrator Marthe Kent; NFPA President James Shannon; and Mastrullo.
The American Trucking Associations' Safety Management Council will present awards in September for best vehicle accident and worker injury incidence, as well as national safety director and HR professional of the year.
The American Industrial Hygiene Association's president, Lindsay Booher, wrote a letter April 2 to the chairman of the U.S. House Education and Labor Committee expressing support for HR 849.
The Integrated Starter Alternator Motor (I-SAM) is a combined starter, generator and drive motor that cuts CO2 emissions and fuel consumption in wheel loaders, such as the L220F Hybrid shown here, and heavy trucks.
Preventing disability rather than managing it will be the new model for the claims management system of the Ohio Bureau of Workers' Compensation. An April 29 forum will discuss how to identify workers at risk of long-term disability.
Occupational foot protection is very often ignored until a serious injury occurs. Safety professionals should take the following steps to ensure their facilities and employees are following best practices when it comes to foot protection.
Three centers of excellence funded in 2006 and 2007 are researching beneficial approaches to make the workplace safer and healthier for health care workers and other groups.
When combined with a well-designed safety plan, industrial safety barriers greatly minimize the risks associated with a host of potentially disastrous accidents that threaten the safety and productivity of virtually any fast-paced industrial environment.
Hot work continues to be a leading cause of industrial fires, consistently in the top five across all industries, and it has been responsible for many of industry's most severe fire losses.
Anyone can write a safety program, but it takes a real commitment on the behalf of everyone involved to create and implement a complete safety culture. The goal of developing a safety culture is to instill the qualities that motivate workers to strive to achieve safety excellence and can be developed only if all on staff work together. Just as a group is only as strong as its weakest member, your staff is only as safe as the least-concerned worker.