VIOLENCE has emerged as an important safety and health issue in today's workplaces. Homicide, its most extreme form, is the second-leading cause of fatal occupational injuries in the United States. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, 709 workplace homicides occurred in 1998, accounting for 12 percent of the total 6,026 fatal work injuries in the United States.
WHEN a man playing tennis at a ClubCorp Inc. resort in Austin, Texas, appeared to be suffering chest pains, ClubCorp employees responded quickly. Within 30 seconds, the company's specially trained team brought an automated external defibrillator (AED) to the man's side.
FOR almost a century, NFPA 30 has guided users of flammable and combustible liquids. From 1913 to 1957, the document was published as a model municipal ordinance. In 1957, the format was changed to a code, although the technical requirements and provisions remained the same.
THREE hundred feet in the air, stepping from girder to girder, the last thing I want running through my head is a question regarding the safety equipment I am using. Will the fundamental design of that equipment in fact save my life, or will it actually take it from me? Will I be home watching the ballgame with my family tonight, or will they be preparing for my funeral?
REPORTING requirements for a facility can cover a broad spectrum of laws, regulations, and standards at the federal, state, and local levels. These requirements may apply to a variety of media, such as air, land, water, and waste.
ACCIDENT Intervention Systems, as the term pertains to safety in industrial, manufacturing, and distribution facilities, is defined as: A systems approach to in-plant safety, where the three areas of Risk Management--People Protection, Property Protection and Code Compliance--are assessed and proper procedure is taken to neutralize workplace hazards and improve code compliance.
LOSING a valuable employee heavily impacts the organization on many levels: the loss of productivity, the impact to company morale, the employee safety and security issues, and risk and liability issues.
THE present status of ocular engineering now allows for many new concepts that change or modify the optical system of the eye. Some of these are corrections for existing ocular impairments, but they require completely new approaches to the fitness-for-duty status and qualifying of incumbents or existing employees. Let's consider a few of these changes.
IT was a Monday night last May at Las Palmitas, a restaurant in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, when a fire broke out in its lounge filled with a crowd of 200 customers.
ON a cold November evening in Michigan last year, a 20-year-old Hispanic worker was killed while removing bridge formwork as he stood atop an elevated truck bed. When he and a co-worker attempted to lower the platform, which could also serve as a dump truck, the bed malfunctioned and would not go down.
FIRE, tornado, bomb threat, hazardous material spill--all are emergencies that can, and often do, strike without warning. They are disruptive to normal operations. They frequently cause serious injury, property damage, and production downtime.
MANY companies are feeling the pressure to employ technology-based training solutions instead of continuing their reliance on traditional classroom training. Some even have taken the plunge with pilot projects, producing both favorable and unfavorable results.
RESPIRATOR Assigned Protection Factors (APFs) represent a critical aspect of respirator performance and are an essential part of any respiratory protection program. APFs are used to determine the Maximum Use Concentrations (MUC) for each type of respirator.
IT'S every facility manager's worst nightmare: plant failures, workers injured on the job, or a pending lawsuit over facility safety. Do you have an organized and accurate documentation process to prove you have taken the appropriate preventive measures for safety compliance and equipment maintenance?
A variety of field instrumentation is in wide use today by environmental engineers and consultants. Questions often arise regarding the theory of operation of various types of instruments and what is the proper or "best" application at a particular field site.
HOW should you go about establishing or revising a respiratory protection program for a small or medium-size business? Many managers and newly appointed safety administrators who call us looking for advice seem overwhelmed at the prospect of wading through reams of government documents and possibly misinterpreting the regulations or selecting the wrong equipment.