Facility Safety

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A spike in mining fatalities, how anthropometric research can enhance occupational safety and a huge financial settlement over a worker fatality were among the top stories posted on ISHN.com this week.

A complaint brought OSHA investigators to Transporter Maintenance and Inspection LLC, a subsidiary of L & B Holdings LLC in Port Allen, Louisiana. That inspection resulted in one willful, 27 serious and five other violations for exposing workers to various safety and health hazards, with proposed penalties of $156,800.

In the biggest-ever settlement in California over workplace safety violations involving a single victim, Bumble Bee Foods will pay $6 million in the death of an employee who was accidentally cooked in a 270 degree industrial oven.

A former Warren Industries employee’s report to OSHA that he’d been injured on the job resulted in an agency inspection of the company’s Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin facility – and some startling findings.

In the wake of a deadly day in mining in which three miners lost their lives in separate incidents in Nevada, North Dakota and Virginia on Aug. 3, the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) is stepping up enforcement efforts and intensifying outreach and education nationwide.

Winder Power, a UK company that manufactures transformers and generators, recently reached a milestone by recording 1,000 days without a reportable accident or lost-time incident. The Leeds-based firm has not had a reportable incident resulting in lost work time for any of the technicians, engineers or other personnel working in the facility since 2012.

Proper safety guards would have stopped a 1,500-pound steel roller before it crushed and killed a 59-year-old maintenance worker, but his employer did not use them, an OSHA inspection has found.

An employee of Wilbert Inc., based in Belmont, North Carolina suffered severe burns at the company’s Bellevue, Ohio manufacturing facility because procedures had not been taken to prevent the machine from releasing hot plastic during maintenance resulting in the injury.

U.S. fire departments receive an estimated 42,800 reports of fires from industrial and manufacturing facilities each year, according to the NFPA.