The National Safety Council (NSC) is accepting nominations for five of its prestigious safety awards and designations: the Distinguished Service to Safety Award, the Marion Martin Award, the Community Advancement Award, the Teen Safety Award and Rising Stars of Safety. Winners will have advanced safety in the workplace, in the community or on the road, and will have demonstrated improvement and the effectiveness of their actions, as well as the impact their actions have had to reduce injuries and deaths.
OSHA has cited Dana Railcare – based in Wilmington, Delaware – for confined space hazards after an employee fatality in Pittston, Pennsylvania. The railcar service provider faces $551,226 in proposed penalties. An employee was asphyxiated in May 2019, while servicing a rail car containing crude oil sludge. OSHA cited the company for four willful and three serious violations for failing to protect employees from the hazards of entering permit-required confined spaces, and inadequate respiratory protection procedures.
It’s the most wonderful time of the year…unless you're an airline pilot, flying over a home bedazzled with holiday laser lighting that's pointing up at the sky. If that happens, you and your passengers could be in serious danger, because you could be distracted or temporarily blinded by the residential laser-light display. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which says it receives reports of such incidents each year from pilots.
More bicyclists die on U.S. roadways in crashes with motor vehicles than the deaths resulting in railroad, marine or aviation accidents1, according the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which has taken up the subject of bicycle safety for the first time in 47 years. The 806 bicyclists who died in crashes in 2017 got the NTSB’s attention; so did the fact that bikes are increasingly being used a means of transportation.
A steelworker in Gary, Indiana is recovering from injuries sustained last week in a workplace incident at Gary Works, a sprawling steel mill along Lake Michigan.
News sources say the man, a maintenance technician, was working on a blast furnace when the incident occurred, leaving him with multiple serious injuries
Prediabetes: An emerging health threat can lead to type 2 diabetes
December 9, 2019
Nearly 1 in 5 adolescents aged 12-18 years, and 1 in 4 young adults aged 19-34 years, are living with prediabetes, according to a new CDC studyexternal icon published in JAMAexternal icon Pediatrics.
Prediabetes is a health condition in which blood sugar levels are higher than normal, but not yet high enough to be diagnosed as type 2 diabetes.
OSHA inspections increase, the crew of a fishing vessel escapes a sinking ship and two young UPS workers lose their lives in a California workplace incident. These were among the occupational safety and health stories featured on ISHN.com this week.
After more than two decades years of legal wrangling, OSHA has finally collected $412,000 in penalties assessed to a New Jersey construction company for safety violations – plus interest.
The action comes after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in July found Altor Inc. and its president Vasilios Saites in contempt for failing to pay the fines. Even that decision – which followed litigation that included multiple hearings before the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission (OSHRC) and the Court of Appeals – was followed by subsequent briefings and negotiations before the case came to a close.
Workplace violence was a common theme in some of the workplace incidents that killed or injured employees in the U.S. There were also incidents involving machinery, a fall and a struck-by fatality. Here are some of the occupational safety news stories of the week:
Captain ignores forecast, fishing vessel goes down in gale force winds
December 5, 2019
The sinking of a fishing vessel off Portland, Maine last year sounds very much like a scene from the Hollywood movie, “A Perfect Storm," starring George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg. Fortunately, the real-life crew survived, unlike their cinematic counterparts – although their rescue was not without some tense moments. In both cases, however, a major factor in the calamity which endangered crew members was the captain’s decision not to return directly to port despite extreme weather conditions.