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The winner of this year’s Council on Practices and Standards (COPS) Safety Professional of the year award is Thomas (Thom) Kramer, P.E., CSP Mr. Kramer is a safety consultant and structural engineer with more than 15 years of expertise. As a dually registered professional engineer and certified safety profession, he has spent much of his career consulting with clients on the investigation and renovation of facilities, which often required extensive and creative structural and safety modification.

If they had been in place, safety mechanisms might have saved a 62-year-old parts assembler who died after he was struck by a 4-pound metal spacer that flew off a 4-ton hydraulic press, OSHA inspectors determined.

In the past five years, 59 people have been struck by falling debris from New York City construction sites, according to the New York Post. And the numbers are on the rise: 27 percent of those pedestrians were victimized between January and September in 2014.

Late last year, performances resumed in a Cirque du Soleil show after changes were made to the choreography and equipment used in the scene in which a performer died in a fall.

Historically, dropped objects have played a principal role in oil and gas incidents. This situation should not be tolerated or allowed to continue. We must eliminate this type of incident. Dropped objects is a collective issue and not just an operator or a rig owner’s problem; it is a common problem for everyone in our industry.

The main hazards associated with working at height are people falling and objects falling onto people below. These may occur as a result of inadequate edge protection, or from objects in storage being poorly secured.

Federal regulators’ adoption of industry consensus standards shows their desire to keep up-to-date with worker safety risks posed by electricity, including highly dangerous arc flashes that cause thousands of burns each year, according to Business Insurance, a bi-weekly magazine and daily news website.

A journeyman lineman with Marshall Municipal Utilities in Missouri was airlifted to a hospital after he suffered an arc flash injury on the job on June 8, according to the Marshall News.

Manufacturers of off-road vehicles have mounted fierce resistance to proposed federal rules aimed at reducing rollover crashes that have killed hundreds of riders. After failing to persuade the Consumer Product Safety Commission to shelve the rules, the companies have turned to Congress to run interference.

According to Chevron’s Craig May, society has challenged the oil and gas industry to show that it can meet the world’s growing energy needs in a safer and more environmentally sustainable way.