Facility Safety

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Employees have been evacuated from the spill area. The onsite response team is suiting up and reviewing their plan to contain the spill and keep it from reaching a nearby creek. Now is not the time to start frantically paging through a dust-covered spill response plan — or worse, an outdated phone book — to try to find a store in the area that might have a piece of equipment that the responders will need.

Streamlight® Inc., a leading provider of high-performance lighting and weapon light/laser sighting devices, added new High Lumen (HL) models to its popular Stinger® LED and Strion® LED series of lights. The new Stinger® LED HL™, the Stinger DS® LED HL™ and the Strion® LED HL™ use state-of-the-art C4® LED technology to provide industrial, automotive, outdoor and other users with extreme brightness, delivering up to 640 lumens.

A recent incident at a rural oil and gas production site in Texas that critically injured two people has the U.S. Chemical Safety Board (CSB) renewing its call for more precautions – despite the fact that the Railroad Commission of Texas (RRC-TX) has declined to increase security at such sites, arguing that the number of incidents doesn’t justify it.

Detcon’s rugged new CXT-Series wireless gas detection sensors are designed for use in heavy industrial environments and especially suitable for mobile applications. These “environmentally bulletproof” field devices include fully encapsulated sensor electronics housed in a stainless steel enclosure, thereby eliminating potential damage that may be caused from water ingress and vibration.

In mid-January, in a press conference in front of Target Corporation headquarters in downtown Minneapolis, over two dozen employees of retail cleaning companies that clean Target stores in the Twin Cities metro area announced OSHA complaints that were filed January 17th. The complaints allege that workers, who are employees of the cleaning contractors, are locked in the Target stores and must find a manager to unlock doors if there is a need to exit the building.

Following yet another fire in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on Saturday, January  26 that killed at least seven people who were locked inside Smart Export Garments Ltd, the Clean Clothes Campaign (CCC), the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC) and the International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF) called on major retailers and brands that buy apparel from Bangladesh to join the labor-supported Bangladesh Fire and Building Safety Agreement in order to prevent future tragedies, according to a statement issued by the Clean Clothes Campaign.

December impact inspections by the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) found one of the lowest number of violations to date, but Joseph A. Main, assistant secretary of labor for mine safety and health said: "We still see some mines that fail to address recurring problems that put miners at risk."

A “safety stand down” to promote safety and health practices at oil and gas exploration and production sites in Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas continues through Feb. 28. The program is an initiative by OSHA and the National Service, Transmission, Exploration & Production Safety Network, more commonly known as STEPS.

Unhappy with what they call a “piecemeal approach” to safety problems at an Illinois auto parts maker, labor officials are calling for a “wall-to-wall” inspection of the plant.

The newest of Vortec’s line of HazLoc enclosure coolers, capable of removing heat at up to 5000 BTU/hour, won official UL certification this month. The Vortec Dual HazLoc Vortex A/C model 7570 is innovative in that it effectively cools even very large enclosures through a unique 2-stage cooling process, while conserving compressed air.