Cross posted from The Pump Handle.
MSHA announced Tuesday that it will be issuing on September 23 an emergency temporary standard (ETS) to improve a practice to prevent coal dust explosions. The rule addresses "rock dusting"--the decades old practice of generously applying pulverized limestone dust throughout a coal mine to dilute the potential power of a coal dust explosion. As NIOSH's Man and Teacoach explain:
"...the rock dust disperses, mixes with the coal dust and prevents flame propagation by acting as a thermal inhibitor or heat sink; i.e., the rock dust reduces the flame temperature to the point where devolatilization of the coal particles can no longer occur; thus, the explosion is inhibited."
Investigators suspect that the deadly blast that killed 29 miners on April 5 at Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch mine may have been fueled by coal dust.
When the Labor Secretary Hilda Solis issued the Department's regulatory agenda in May 2010, a revision to MSHA's rock dust standard was not identified as a rulemaking priority. The agency's standard, which dates back to 1969, drew the attention however of Congressman George Miller (D-CA). He included revisions to the rock dust standard in H.R. 5663, a worker safety bill he introduced on July 1, 2010. I suspect the Congressman had read Coal Tattoo's April 13 post reporting that government scientists had warned that existing rock dust standards were inadequate for Tuesday's highly mechanized underground coal mining practices.
Full textToday Jacob Lew heads to the hill for two Senate hearings on his nomination to be the new director of the White House's Office of Management and Budget. He is expected to be confirmed.
The hearings will likely focus on budgetary issues, but no less important is another division of OMB: the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), the office charged with coordinating regulatory policy. The policy context is this: from salmonella-laced eggs to the BP oil spill, we are in a year of regulatory disasters. No one agency or individual is responsible for the breakdown; the problems are pervasive and the fixes often not easy.
The OMB could be playing a positive role in supporting regulatory agencies and helping to stop the next crisis before it happens. Instead, it has too often busied itself meddling in agencies' processes, and rushing to stand up for industries with questionable claims of high regulatory compliance costs. Meanwhile, in the real world, toys are tainted with lead, the coal ash ponds are leaking chemicals into the water, and we move from one food contamination episode to the next.
Full textToday CPR releases a new white paper, From Ship to Shore: Reforming the National Contingency Plan to Improve Protections for Oil Spill Cleanup Workers (press release), a look at how decisions were made about safety protections for cleanup workers in the aftermath of the BP oil spill -- and the lessons for the future.
The federal government's pre-disaster planning on worker safety issues didn't adequately consult the safety experts, and that meant the decision-making in the immediate wake of the spill couldn't be adequate. Too many cleanup workers in the Gulf were given inadequate training on the use of personal protective equipment. Employers and individual workers were left to determine on their own how to resolve the difficult question of what level of protections, such as respirators, to use.
OSHA and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) are constrained to limited roles for planning for and implementing regulations related to oil spill disasters under the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, the statute governing oil spill response. As a result, the federal government's advance planning for disaster response doesn't adequately incorporate agency expertise best suited for planning for worker safety issues in disaster cleanup.
Full textOn Wednesday, EPA announced its intention to revise (pdf) the TSCA Inventory Update Rule (IUR). The TSCA Inventory is the official list of chemicals in commerce, and the IUR is the regulation that requires companies to submit production and use data to EPA to ensure the Inventory accurately represents all of the chemicals out there. This week's announcement marks the second time in ten years that EPA has decided the IUR needs improvement, based on agency staff’s efforts to regulate toxic chemicals using the data available to them.
As Dan Rosenberg points out over at Switchboard, the changes are mostly good, although EPA certainly could have gone further on a few fronts. For one, EPA has expressed some interest in changing the IUR’s requirements for reporting occupational exposures—changes that would be a huge improvement—but hasn’t yet decided exactly how to implement the changes.
Under current regulations, we don’t get much information about occupational exposures to toxic chemicals. In addition to total production volume data, companies have to describe the total number of workers likely to be exposed to a chemical (provided in a range), the maximum concentration of a chemical when it’s sent off site (or when it’s reacted on-site), and the physical form of the chemical. For chemicals produced or imported in quantities greater than 300,000 pounds per year, existing regulations mandate disclosure of some additional information about processing and use, but not enough to significantly improve our understanding of worker exposures. That’s in fact rather basic data, and leaves out the details that would allow for better risk management, including information on specific worker tasks and potential exposures. According to EPA, the information submitted under these regulations was so useless that the agency “could develop only qualitative exposure characterizations with relative ranking of low, medium, or high for characterizing potential exposures to various populations.”
Full textA report released in Washington this morning highlights "The Hidden Struggles of Migrant Worker Women In The Maryland Crab Industry." The paper, by Centro de los Derechos del Migrante, Inc. and the International Human Right Law Clinic at American University Washington College of Law, is focused mostly on immigration policy issues (a little outside our purview), but I wanted to note the section on worker safety.
The report looks at the hundreds of Mexican women who travel every year to the Eastern Shore of Maryland on H-2B guestworker visas to work in the crab industry. The researchers interviewed more than 40 current or former workers, and found that:
Full textWork-related injuries are common for many of the migrant workers in the Maryland crab industry. Use of sharp knives, contact with chemicals, lack of formal training, and the pace of work all contribute to injuries. ... In fact, cuts, scrapes, and rashes on the hands and arms of workers were so routine that many interviewed workers did not view them as actual injuries. When the authors asked, “Have you experienced any injuries at work?” many workers responded “No.” When asked specifically about cuts, the women universally responded affirmatively. ... Many of the injuries sustained by these workers could, and should have been prevented by following laws related to occupational safety and health.
Cross-posted from The Pump Handle.
Cong. George Miller (D-CA) is a man of tough talk and swift action. Today, along with 15 other House members, he introduced H.R. 5663 a bill to upgrade provisions of our nation's key federal workplace health and safety laws. Every year, tens of thousands of workers are killed or made ill because of on-the-job hazards, and this year the toll of death made headline news. The Deepwater Horizon disaster and the Upper Big Branch mine explosion alone cut short the lives of 40 workers, with their coworkers' and families' lives changed forever.
H.R. 5663 will modernize whistleblower protections for workers who express concerns about safety and health, raise the maximum civil penalty amount that can be proposed by OSHA for serious, willful and repeat violations, and allow for criminal sanctions against employers who knowingly violate safety regulations that contributed to the death of a worker. Deb Koehler-Fergen, whose son Travis Koehler, 26, was killed while working for Boyd Gaming at the Orleans Hotel in Las Vegas enthusiastically endorsed the bill.
"Employers who put workers lives at risk should be held accountable for their actions, including much stiffer penalties and the possibility of jail time."Full text
OSHA’s pending rule on construction crane and derrick safety cleared OIRA review yesterday.
The cranes rule has been a long, long time in the making and was featured as a case study in our white paper last year on the Costs of Regulatory Delay. It’s good news that this life-saving rule is finally almost set.
Update: Celeste Monforton has more on this at The Pump Handle:
Full textFirst, OIRA has completed its review of OSHA's final rule on cranes and derricks. The notation on the regs.gov website says "consistent with change," a phrase that has meaning only to those who have the secret decoder ring. Because the internal deliberations between OMB and the affected agency are considered confidential, (a policy dating back to OIRA's creation under President Reagan) we don't know whether the "change" required by OMB are good, bad or indifferent to worker protection.
As I said, this news may be mundane, or not. Once the final rule is published, we'll see how OSHA addressed the few sticky issues raised by interested parties. Looking on the bright side, it may mean that a new rule to protect workers (and the public) around cranes and derricks may be a reality very soon.
Cross-posted from The Pump Handle.
Beginning in December 2006, I’ve written five blog post commenting on the content of the Department of Labor’s (DOL) regulatory agenda for worker health and safety rulemakings. Most of my posts [see links below] have criticized the Labor Secretary and senior OSHA and MSHA staff for failing to offer a bold vision for progressive worker protections. Now that the Obama & Solis team have been on board for more than a year, I’m not willing to cut them any slack for being newbies. Regrettably, as with the Bush/Chao agendas, my posts today will question rather than complement the OSHA team (and any bigger fish up the food chain) who are responsible for this plan.
I’ll start with the good news from OSHA’s reg agenda. In the month of July, OSHA projects it will issue two final rules, one on cranes and derricks in construction and another to revise the OSHA 300 log with a column to record musculoskeletal disorders. The first is a rule that has been in the works for 7 years and long overdue (here, here, here, here, here, here, here.) The second will simply reinstate a change in injury recordkeeping requirements that should have taken affect in early 2001, but was axed by OSHA officials under direction from the Bush/Chao Administration.
Now, the reg agenda items that have me perplexed. We’ve heard the Secretary Solis and Asst. Secretary Michaels talk about green jobs, and we know that construction workers are a large part of that workforce. But, construction workers continue to get short-shrift at OSHA when it comes to mandatory H&S protections.
Full textGuest blogger Patrick MacRoy is Director of Community-Based Initiatives and RRP Training Program Manager for the National Center for Healthy Housing. He launched the first “train-the-trainer” program to help increase the supply of accredited RRP training providers and has been working on related policy issues.
Today marks a major milestone in the century-long battle against childhood lead poisoning in the United States: the EPA will be officially implementing the Renovation, Repair, and Painting rule. Known as the RRP rule, the regulation is designed to prevent the contamination of nearly four million homes a year with toxic lead dust created from the disturbance of old lead-based paint during rehab or maintenance work in older homes. Mandated by Congress nearly two decades ago, the rule has long been a source of controversy and will continue to require attention from advocates to ensure it reaches its full potential.
As part of the Residential Lead Based Paint Hazard Reduction Act of 1992, Congress mandated EPA to study the lead hazards created by renovation activities to determine appropriate regulations. EPA studied the issue exhaustively, missing the congressional deadline of October 1996 to promulgate regulations in the process. EPA’s studies, however, clearly demonstrated that renovation activity results in high levels of lead dust, and EPA continued to promise health and housing advocates that regulations were in the works. Despite the public assurances, the Bush administration EPA was quietly working to undermine the rule. In March 2005, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility released internal EPA documents showing the agency had abandoned the regulations the previous year, deciding instead to push for a “voluntary” approach of encouraging awareness and training for contractors.
Full textAs the Pump Handle noted earlier this week, OSHA submitted its draft final rule on construction cranes and derricks to OMB on Friday of last week. It’s good news that the process is now moving along.
The cranes and derricks rule has been a long saga, and it was one of the case studies in our report last year on the costs of regulatory delay.
By OSHA’s estimates, 89 people are killed and 263 are injured each year in construction crane incidents. The existing safety standards for the use of cranes, derricks, and other heavy machinery at construction sites are now almost 40 years old and are in dire need of updating to account for changes in technology and construction practices. Beginning in the mid-1990s, industry itself began petitioning OSHA for stronger and more comprehensive regulations, and in 2004 a committee of industry, labor, and government representatives reached agreement on a draft proposed rule. That’s the rule that is now a bit closer to finally becoming a reality.
The rule requires operators, inspectors, and assembly and disassembly workers to be certified, and it also helps account for many of the technological changes that have occurred since 1971. OSHA estimates that the new rule could cut the death and injury rate by more than half.
The regulatory delay in the cranes rule has had a cost in human lives. It's long past time we got this one right.
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