An OSHA investigation following the death of two workers at a crude oil refinery in Wynnewood, Oklahoma resulted in fifteen serious citations against Wynnewood Refining Company – earning the company a spot in the agency’s Severe Violator Enforcement Program (SVEP).

The EPA has issued updates to pollution limits for new power plants under the mercury and air toxics standards, based on new information and analysis that became available to the agency after the rule was finalized.

A federal court yesterday upheld the legal authority of the Chemical Safety Board (CSB) to investigate the April 2010 Macondo blowout and explosion in the Gulf of Mexico. U.S. Federal District Court Judge Lee Rosenthal issued an Order that denied a motion by Transocean Deepwater Drilling, Inc. to block the CSB’s access to information pertinent to the CSB’s investigation.

A trainee at a Las Vegas-based energy company died in September of last year after falling 75 feet from a horizontal ladder being used as a temporary platform between a transmission tower and a live 500-kilovolt transmission line.

A mining company fought the law and the law won recently, when the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky ordered the D & C Mining Corp. to pay the $1.67 million in safety fines it has so far failed to pay.

An employee checking asphalt levels from the top of a tank died after falling 15 feet and hitting his head on a concrete structure supporting the tank. The September 2012 accident at Corvallis, Mont.-based M.R. Asphalt Inc. resulted in 16 safety and health violations, including one willful for failing to provide a guardrail or fall protection on the working surface.

OSHA has cited Highway Technologies Inc. in Minneapolis for 10 safety – including six willful – violations after a worker died from injuries sustained while working with equipment that came into contact with overhead power lines on I-94 near Menomonie, Wis., on Sept. 17, 2012.

OSHA defines a willful violation as “one committed with intentional knowing or voluntary disregard for the law's requirements, or with plain indifference to worker safety and health.” Of the 21 healthy and safety violations earned by Smithville Manufacturing Co. in Ohio recently, only one was willful – but it was the one related to the traumatic amputation of a worker’s finger by an unguarded press machine.

Workers at an Ohio manufacturing company were exposed to lead, according to OSHA – along with electrical and machine guarding hazards. The OSHA inspection that uncovered those conditions lead to 26 health and safety violations against Mahle Engine Components USA Inc.

OSHA has cited Komatsu America Corp. in Peoria, Ill. with four safety violations, including two repeat, after a worker at the company’s truck manufacturing plant was injured while testing hydraulic cylinders for leakage.