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.
EACH year, thousands of people in the United States are blinded from work-related eye injuries that proper use of eye and face protection could prevent, OSHA says.
ON Dec. 11, 2002, four defendants, Ronald Brentson, Frank Hopf, Jr., Equilon Pipeline Company, LLC, and Olympic Pipeline Company pleaded guilty in federal court to committing a federal crime--the failure to keep records documenting that employees of the companies received training required by regulations promulgated pursuant to the Hazardous Liquid Pipeline Safety Act (HLPSA).
AN estimated 58 people lose their life each week as a result of electric shock. In an electrical system, the grounding system is the primary protection against electrical shock hazards. It provides a low-resistance pathway to ground to protect against electrical faults.
OXYGEN deficiencies, explosive atmospheres, and exposure to toxic gases and vapors injure or kill hundreds of workers every year during confined space entry procedures.
BEEP Beep Beep . . . beep beep beep. These are often the sounds first responders hear from their radios as they try and communicate with one another during an emergency. In most cases, these personnel are in high-risk situations, surrounded by smoke and fire, hordes of people, or the risk of chemical or biological exposure.
IT'S a good idea to monitor OSHA's Standard Interpretations site on a regular basis. You can easily find the site by clicking on the "interpretations" link right from OSHA's www.osha.gov homepage.
SINCE it first rose to popularity in the early 1990s, behavior-based safety (BBS) has become an established and widely respected tool for safety improvement. While not without its critics, BBS has clearly had its successes.
PEOPLE's reaction to being hit with cold water has been used in comedy routines for as long as anyone can remember. Providing it's not you being doused, it can be really funny. But cold water, when used in emergency showers and eyewashes, is no joke.