While filing reports in his 6th floor downtown office, Jeff Rucker, Dallas regional program manager for OSHA's On-Site Consultation Program, noticed several construction workers at a building across the street taking down a large holiday ornament display without proper fall protection.
Introduction: When many people think about carbon emissions, they assume that cars and other motorized vehicles are the main culprits. However, building construction uses 30 percent of all raw materials consumed in this country and 12 percent of all available potable water – 15 trillion gallons each year. This level of water consumption is ultimately unsustainable, given that the United Nations World Water Development Report 3, issued in 2009, states that one-third of the world’s population already lacks access to clean water.
The revised ANSI/ASSE A10.32 Standard ‘Personal Fall Protection for Use in Construction and Demolition Operations’ released last week contains new equipment criteria, providing minimum guidelines for fall protection equipment, to establish performance criteria for this equipment in construction and demolition and to make recommendations for use and inspection.
Everyone these days is talking about performance indicators for workplace safety. It’s widely understood that if you only measure injuries and follow OSHA injury/illness recordkeeping requirements you have a large blindspot in truly assessing how you safety processes are working, or not working. OSHA has its own set of measures.
The Massachusetts FACE Project—in conjunction with the national Campaign to Prevent Falls in Construction, and with input from local industry and labor safety experts, contractors, and researchers—has updated and published a series of four residential construction fall prevention brochures for contractors.
I2P2, confined spaces and walking working surfaces are all items on the regulatory agenda issued by OSHA last month. The agenda identifies issues that are being considered for or are in the process of rulemaking – although the agency stresses that rules for some of the items on it might not be issued this year, and some might never be issued.
First self-perform heavy civil contractor in New York region to receive OSHA VPP Status
January 11, 2013
Skanska USA Civil, a leading contractor for civil engineering, construction, and infrastructure projects, announced today that it has been awarded “VPP” status, safety recognition by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration's (OSHA) Voluntary Protection Programs (VPP), for its work on the Croton Water Treatment Plant project in the Bronx, New York.
Two Wisconsin companies – including one with a previous crane-related worker fatality -- face ten safety citations in the wake of a crane collapse at a bridge construction site last summer that left one man dead and another hospitalized.
OSHA has announced that it will extend for three months its temporary enforcement measures in residential construction – to March 15, 2013. Those measures include priority free on-site compliance assistance, penalty reductions, extended abatement dates, measures to ensure consistency, and increased outreach.
