Today's Safety News

RSS

The Chinese government yesterday has ordered a nationwide review of workplace safety, after last week’s warehouse explosion that killed at least 114 people and destroyed dozens of buildings in the port city of Tianjin.

The summer of 2015 has scorched the western U.S. with thousands of wildfires. According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), exposure to excessive wildfire smoke even at a distance can harm eyes, lungs and heart. The CDC advises that to avoid illness caused by wildfire smoke exposure, seven steps should be taken:

The Department of Homeland Security can’t verify threat level reports from thousands of chemical plants across the country, reducing Homeland’s ability to respond to a chemical attack or emergency, according to a new government report.

A county employee who works at the Lucas County (Ohio) Job and Family Services building has been hospitalized for nearly two weeks with pneumonia while some 19 others have called in sick with upper respiratory problems over the past six weeks, county officials told the Toledo Blade.

NIOSH is celebrating N95 Day on Sept. 4, 2015. N95 is a category of respirators commonly used by healthcare personnel tested and certified by NIOSH. The agency is partnering with the Joint Commission to highlight two new educational products, Hospital Respiratory Protection Program Toolkit: Resources for Respirator Program Administrators (National Toolkit), and Implementing Hospital Respiratory Protection Programs: Strategies from the Field.

Safety at work can depend on an effective or comfortable fit between the physical workplace or the tools of work, and the worker. A seatbelt becomes impractical if it can’t be latched securely or comfortably. The safety that firefighters’ gloves provide is compromised if the gloves are too big, hampering dexterity and movement in a hectic and physically risky situation.

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.

In early August, an error by personnel supervised by the EPA caused millions of gallons of mine waste to pour into a Colorado river that provides drinking water for thousands of nearby residents.

The probable cause of the accident last year in New Jersey that killed comic James McNair and critically injured actor Tracy Morgan and three others was driver fatigue, according to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which released its preliminary findings on the incident yesterday.