Among the end of 2019-beginning of 2020 workplace incidents in the U.S. were employees killed or seriously injured by collapsed machinery, a pallet grinder and an exploding wheel. In Nebraska, a 39-year-old woman sustained traumatic injuries to her head, arms and upper body when she was partially pulled into the pallet grinder she’d been working with. The woman, an employee of Tradewell Pallet in Gretna, was air lifted to a hospital by a medical condition, where she was reported to be in critical condition, according to news sources.

Fifty-one years ago today, a massive explosion killed 78 coal miners in West Virginia and led to significant changes in mining safety through the passage of the 1969 Coal Mine Safety and Health Act. On Sunday, family members of the workers who perished in the Farmington Mine disaster and coal miners and their families gathered in Marion County for a solemn ceremony that has taken place every year for more than a half a century.

Heart attacks killed 33 of the 82 firefighters who died while on duty in the U.S. last year, according to a report from the U.S. Fire Administration (USFA). “Firefighter Fatalities in the United States” is compiled annually by the USFA to identify and analyze all on-duty firefighter fatalities to increase understanding of their causes and how they can be prevented.

Federal safety regulators, state oil and gas authorities, and the energy industry need to close regulatory gaps that contributed to the worst oil drilling accident in nearly a decade, a federal agency said in an unprecedented report. The 2018 explosion and fire outside Quinton, Okla., killed five people, making it the deadliest accident in the drilling industry since 2010, when a BP oil rig exploded and killed 11 workers in the Gulf of Mexico.

OSHA is investigating two workplace deaths that occurred last Thursday – in Pennsylvania and Illinois. News reports say 38-year-old Luke Marzano was part of a crew cleaning up the site of the former Bethlehem Steel Corp. headquarters – which was demolished four months ago – when he was killed in an incident.

Under pressure from worker safety advocates, the U.S. Chemical Safety Board (CSB) has decided to return to a policy of including the names of deceased workers in its investigative reports. The CSB, an independent federal agency charged with investigating industrial chemical incidents, has included names of fatally injured workers in its reports since 2014. The agency changed its policy in June with the release of two reports on fatal incidents.

A spate of recent struck-by accidents in Texas, Indiana and Florida have left three workers dead – and OSHA investigators busy. In Robertson County, Texas, an employee at a used auto parts business died when a vehicle fell on him. OSHA is investigating the incident at Abco Auto Parts, which claimed the life of 43-year-old Carmelo Aguirre-Ortega on August 19th.

Once again, fall-related violations were behind most of the biggest fines OSHA issued to construction companies in the second quarter of 2019. One of the contractors, Shawn D. Purvis, has been charged criminally in relation to a death that occurred on one of his company's jobsites.

The U.S. Chemical Safety Board (CSB) will be reviewing a recent policy change, after testimony at its public meeting on Tuesday from occupational health experts and worker advocates opposed to the agency’s decision to stop naming accident victims in its reports. CSB Interim Executive Kristen acknowledged “a lot of passion around this subject,” and said that she’d asked the agency’s general counsel to review the policy and to report back with recommendations.

The U.S. Chemical Safety Board’s decision to reverse a policy of including the names of workers killed in the incidents it investigates is drawing fire from safety advocates. In a letter to the CSB, more than fifty organizations and individuals demand that the agency reinstate its policy of naming the fatally injured workers in its reports – something it had previously done since 2014. The CSB stopped the practice recently because doing so “may infer culpability on the part of the entity responsible for the operation of the facility where the incident occurred,” according to a spokesperson.