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…
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…
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…
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…
Five years ago tonight a fire broke out at the West Fertilizer company in West, Texas. Emergency responders rushed toward the facility which contained 40 to 60 tons of fertilizer grade ammonium nitrate, but twenty minutes later a massive explosion ripped through the building killing 12 responders and three others, injuring 252 and damaging or destroying…
More Freedom and More Catastrophic Fertilizer Explosions: After a catastrophic ammonium nitrate explosion at West Fertilizer exploded in 2013 killed 15 people, injured 130 more and destroyed much of the town of West, OSHA discovered that the facility was not covered by OSHA’s Process Safety Management and had therefore not been inspected since the mid-1980s.…
Five gas rig workers are presumed dead after an explosion gas rig in Quinton, OK. The names of the employees are Matt Smith of McAlester, Parker Waldridge of Crescent and Roger Cunningham from Seminole — and two from neighboring states, Josh Ray of Fort Worth, Texas; and Cody Risk of Wellington, Colorado. For much of the…
Dan Zak of the Washington Post has written a long feature article on the impact and aftermath of the West fertilizer explosion that killed 15 people, injured 252 and damaged or destroyed 500 buildings in the small town of West Texas on April 17, 2013. The article does a great job of describing the impact of…
The Republican Congress may not be fulfilling it responsibility to provide oversight over a Republican-controlled OSHA, but the Government Accountability Office is still on the job. The GAO is Congress’s “watchdog” and investigates how the federal government spends taxpayer dollars. Over the past couple of years, the GAO has investigated OSHA’s activities around protecting healthcare workers…
It’s not all bad news out there. While Washington sucks workers down into an abyss of corporate anarchy, the State of California is showing us that humans can be rational and protective of their fellow beings. Despite efforts by federal EPA to roll back its Risk Management Program improvements, other Trump administration attacks on worker…