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It’s a tradition for APHA’s Occupational Health & Safety section to invite top officials from OSHA, MSHA, and NIOSH to a “Talking Heads” session at each APHA annual meeting. The session “The Future of Occupational Safety and Health in the Obama Administration” featured Jordan Barab, Deputy Assistant Secretary and Acting Assistant Secretary of Labor for OSHA; John Howard, Director of NIOSH; and Gregory Wagner, Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy of MSHA. The room was packed with an audience eager to hear how this new leadership plans to address worker health and safety issues that haven’t been getting enough attention in recent years.
John Howard, who was also head of NIOSH for several years during the Bush administration, characterized the change in administrations by saying that “it’s gratifying to be in the position of having your science wanted.” He emphasized that green jobs are not enough, but that “green and safe is what we need.” He also reminded the audience that there are many hurdles that have been put in place over the previous decades by the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of the government, so progress will still take lots of time and effort.
Greg Wagner told the crowd that it’s time to put the “H” of “health” back in MSHA, and noted that part of the reason the regulatory process takes so long is that there are many opportunities for public involvement. He called for greater participation from miners and urged the audience members to get involved, too.
Jordan Barab rattled off a list of things OSHA has already done: fined BP a record $87 million, issued several egregious violations (five will be issued by the end of the month, compared to four during all of last year), and ended the quotas for alliances and voluntary protection programs, to allow the agency to focus on enforcement. He said OSHA will be hiring more staff to deal with inspections, standards, and whistleblowing; holding a conference on immigrant workers; and turning attention to the problems of violence, stress, and fatigue.
The audience had a lot of questions and comments about how the agencies should go about rulemaking, enforcement, and recruiting the next generation of occupational health and safety professionals:
As is always the case at APHA, there are far too many fascinating presentations for one person to see – so I hope those of you who are also here in Philly will add comments about some of the sessions you’re attending and what you’re learning. Yesterday, I attended a session on health and safety in healthcare, which brought up some populations and scenarios that are too easily overlooked when discussing healthcare workers’ health and safety:
Each year, the Public Relations Society of America gives a Silver Anvil Award, which “acknowledges the very highest level of achievement and is the established icon of the ‘best of the best’ public relations practices.” The latest Silver Anvil has just been given to the communications firm Edelman for its work for Imperial Sugar following the 2008 explosion at its Port Wentworth, Georgia facility, which killed 14 workers and severely injured another 32.
While we here at The Pump Handle have focused on the company practices that allowed for a dangerous accumulation of combustible dust, Edelman was considering another question: “Would Imperial be seen as the helpless victim of a disaster or as a company poised to rebuild?” Edelman was considered an award-winning success because its PR work helped achieve an outcome favorable to Imperial Sugar: the restarting of production at the Port Wentworth facility and stabilization of its stock price.
The writeup of Edelman’s achievements also mentions “turn-on-dime responsiveness,” but the Savannah Morning News’s Larry Peterson has a different perspective on the company’s responsiveness:
I feel like I’m pretty up on the push for green jobs (creating jobs in the building and installation of wind turbines, construction of energy-efficient buildings, etc.) but this morning at the APHA meeting, I learned something about the occupational health angle of this movement. At a session from the Blue-Green Alliance, Walter Jones of the Laborers’ Health and Safety Fund of North America and TJ Lentz of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health spoke about making green jobs safe jobs.
So far, it seems that the shift toward greener buildings hasn’t done much to make the construction or maintenance of these places safe for workers. (One positive point is that the use of safer paints and solvents can reduce workers’ as well as residents’ exposure to fumes.) Designers of buildings don’t generally pay much attention to the ways that their plans will affect the way workers interact with them, and design schools don’t tend to include occupational health and safety in their curricula. Jones noted that between 1990 and 2003, 42% of all US construction-related fatalities were linked to design.
Problems include a lack of anchor points for workers to tie off to when they’re working off the ground, and parapets that meet building code requirements (being at least 30 inches high) but not OSHA requirements (39 to 45 inches). When it comes to wind turbines, fall protection is also crucial, and the inside of the tower is a confined space – but designers rarely address anchor points or tower access and ventilation issues.
Occupational health and safety advocates are working to get safety issues on designers’ radar. The American Association of Safety Engineers has begun working on a standard to protect workers involved in windpower facilities, and NIOSH runs a Prevention Through Design program. As we all throw our support behind green jobs, we should make sure that “green” includes worker health and safety.
At the opening general session of the American Public Health Association’s annual meeting, I learned a few things about Philadelphia, where this year’s meeting is happening. Philadelphia opened the nation’s first public hospital, nursing school, and medical school, and it boasts the highest childhood immunization rate in the nation and the greatest proportion of workers who walk to work. Also, given that water is the theme for this year’s meeting, it’s fitting to note that Philly was the home of the nation’s first municipal waterworks.
Speakers at the opening session set the tone for an ambitious and optimistic meeting (with some of that optimism probably due to the House’s passage of healthcare legislation last night):
Earlier today, the Senate Democratic Policy Committee held a hearing on the use of burn pits for trash at military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan – a practice that may be exposing thousands of soldiers and civilians to carcinogens, respiratory irritants, and neurotoxins. A particularly large burn pit at the Balad Air Base in Iraq has been getting a lot of attention, but the use of burn pits seems to be widespread at these military bases.
As DPC Chair Senator Byron Dorgan pointed out in his opening remarks, burn pits are the kind of thing you’d expect to see at a makeshift base, not at the major military installations that we’ve built in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last six or seven years. (Senator Dorgan noted that the Balad Air Base houses 20,000 troops and has “good paved roads, two large swimming pools with diving wells, two PX’s that look like huge American-style supermarkets, five mess halls, and a full-service movie theater complete with a Dolby surround sound system.”) Witness Anthony Szema, MD, Chief of the Allergy Section at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Northport, NY, explained to the committee that bases should replace burn pits with incinerators as quickly as possible because incinerators burn trash at higher temperatures and thus create far less harmful smoke.
Lt. Col. Darrin L. Curtis, Ph.D., P.E. (Ret.), a former bioenvironmental engineer with the US Air Force, testified that while he was stationed at the Balad Air Base, he worked with members of the Army’s Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine (CHPPM) on conducting air sampling. He expressed concerns that the sampling was not accurately capturing the burn pit’s smoke plume, which shifted frequently with the winds, but CHPPM used the results to publish a risk assessment stating that “adverse health risks are unlikely.” The Department of Defense has relied on this report to conclude that “long-term health effects are not expected to occur from breathing the smoke” at Balad Air base. Lt. Col. Curtis and the other witnesses had a very different assessment of the situation, though.
OSHA has announced the largest fine ever in its history: $87 million for BP’s safety violations and failure to correct hazards at the Texas City refinery where a 2005 explosion killed 15 workers and injured 170. The New York Times’ Steven Greenhouse explains:
Federal officials said the penalty was the result of BP’s failure to comply in hundreds of instances with a 2005 agreement to fix safety hazards at the refinery, the nation’s third-largest.
According to documents obtained by The New York Times, OSHA issued 271 notifications to BP for failing to correct hazards at the Texas City refinery over the four-year period since the explosion. As a result, OSHA, which is part of the Labor Department, is issuing fines of $56.7 million. In addition, OSHA also identified 439 “willful and egregious” violations of industry-accepted safety controls at the refinery. Those violations will lead to $30.7 million in additional fines. …
A series of investigations attributed the March 23, 2005, explosion to overzealous cost-cutting on safety, undue production pressures, antiquated equipment and fatigued employees — some who worked 12 hours a day for 29 straight days.
In other news:
High-profile issues like the public option and cost containment have been getting a lot of attention in the discussion about healthcare legislation, but there are less-noticed issues that are also important. Today, the Union of Concerned Scientists draws attention to the need to ensure the scientific integrity of the advisory committees that will be established to help federal agencies implement new healthcare laws.
In a letter signed by 20 organizations, UCS calls on the chairs of Congressional committees to require that advisory panels created by the new healthcare legislation actively seek out members without conflicts of interests, require disclosure of members’ names and backgrounds, and require that all information about each advisory panel, including a full audio or video record of each panel meeting, be accessible online.
Here’s the full text of the letter and the list of signatories:
New York-based Fairbank Farms is recalling more than 500,000 pounds of ground beef products that may be contaminated with E. coli O157:H7. Gardiner Harris reports in the New York Times that two people – one from New Hampshire and one from New York – have died after eating the ground beef suspected of contamination, and more than two dozen people have fallen ill.
The products in question bear a stamp reading “EST 492” and were distributed to retailers (including Trader Joe’s and Giant) in Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Virginia. A Fairbanks Farms spokesperson told the Times that the products had September sell-by dates and should no longer be on grocery shelves; however, some customers may still have these products in their freezers. The USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service has posted a list of the products subject to recall, and notes that one product – cases of 10-pound “Fairbank Farms Fresh Ground Beef Chubs” – was sold to retailers for further processing and will likely not bear the package dates and sell-by dates being publicized.
Harris’s article and the FSIS press release about the recall highlight two food-safety issues that bear emphasizing.
Yesterday’s House Education and Labor Committee hearing on Nevada OSHA – and state OSHA plans in general – had both disturbing and encouraging moments. The hearing centered on a review of the NV-OSHA program by federal OSHA, which identified numerous problems with the state agency’s practices. Several Members and witnesses focused on the case of Orleans Hotel and Casino, where on February 2, 2007 employees were told to enter a confined space, even though they were not trained to do so. Travis Koehler and Richard Luzier were overcome by fumes and killed, and their co-worker David Snow was seriously injured.
In his opening remarks, Committee Chair George Miller said, “It is clear that there is something terribly wrong with Nevada’s OSHA program,” and used the Orleans case as an example. Prior to the February 2007 tragedy, Orleans owner Boyd Gaming had been cited for violations substantially similar to those involved in this case – and yet, even after their failure to correct hazards that killed two men and seriously injured another, Boyd Gaming escaped a willful violation. Complaints to federal OSHA about the case alleged that this outcome could only have resulted from a back-room deal. And one of those complaints, Congressman Miller explained, came from an inspector on the case, who suffered professionally after speaking out:
