A newsletter of workplace safety and labor issues
Workers in chemical facilities and those living nearby can sleep easier after the US Congress declined to include language in the long-awaited Farm Bill that would have forced OSHA to write regulatory language into the Process Safety Management (PSM) standard that would have threatened the lives of chemical plant workers and those living nearby. PSM…
“Bhopal” For health and safety activists and public health people, that word sends shivers up our spines. Thinking of the disaster — where thousands died and many more thousands continue to suffer decades later — and the potential for similar disasters in the future. What I’ve found however, is that young people these days don’t…
The Little Program That Refuses To Die: OSHA announced its 2018 Susan Harwood Grant Awardees last week. This is the $10 million life-saving training grant program that the Trump administration (and Republicans in the House of Representatives try unsuccessfully to kill every year. Happily they’ve been unsuccessful, because the grants go to groups that provide…
Boom truck hits power lines in Flagler, electrocuting 2 workers PALM COAST, Fla. – Two construction workers were electrocuted Monday in an industrial accident in Flagler County, sheriff’s officials said. The men died around 8:30 a.m. on Sebastian Court in Palm Coast. According to Flagler Sheriff Rick Staly, Nomad LLC, a subcontractor, was laying concrete foundation for a new house…
Well there’s some very bad news for those of you who don’t want to be blown to smithereens in your sleep by a bomb train or your local fertilizer supplier. Brakes are for wimps As those of you who read my posts on the Lac Megantic disaster where 47 people were incinerated by a “bomb…
In a stinging rebuke to the Environmental Protection Agency, a federal court has called EPA’s delay in implementing the Obama administration’s chemical disaster rule “arbitrary and capricious” and told the agency to implement the rule. EPA had argued that delaying the rule would reduce industry confusion while it figured out whether it wanted to modify…
Captives on the Kill Line: Hiring immigrant workers — even undocumented workers — can be a headache. They get rounded up in immigration raids, move away or move on to better-paid jobs. A much better and more profitable bet are prisoners on work-release. The Southern Poverty Law Center tells the story of one worker, Frank Dwayne…
Last week, the House of Representatives narrowly passed the Farm Bill. And a little noticed sentence in this this gigantic piece of legislation threatens the lives of those living near chemical facilities and the employees that work within them. What does the Agriculture bill have to do with chemical plant safety? As a gift to…
The Chemical Safety Board released its report on the Arkema chemical incident last week. You may recall that during the heavy rains in the Houston area following Hurricane Harvey last year, the Arkema chemical plant was flooded and lost all ability to control the temperature of reactive organic peroxides. The company evacuated the plant and…
Adding tragedy to catastrophe, Patterson UTI CEO Andy Hendricks is receiving only a paltry $2.25 million bonus for 2017 because the safety portion of his bonus calculation (and their top executives) was eliminated as a result of the explosion that killed five Patterson UTI workers in Quinton, Oklahoma on January 22. According to Energywire, The company’s six…