We’ve reported before about the Kleen Energy explosion, and the incident is once again in the headlines, as OSHA head Dr. David Michaels has issued a letter to other power plants in attempt to avoid future, similar explosions.

The letter talks of the entirely preventable explosion, which occurred when natural gas being used to clean out pipes was ignited. The explosion resulted in OSHA issuing a $16.5 million fine and Michaels urges that this is not the kind of accident that should ever happen again.

Michaels also reminds that an active effort toward worker safety is the responsibility of the employers, and negligence in these areas will not be tolerated.

“The practice of using natural gas blows to clean piping systems is inherently dangerous.” Michaels wrote. “The United States Chemical Safety Board, which also investigated the blast, recommended that employers be prohibited from releasing flammable gas to the atmosphere for the purpose of cleaning fuel gas piping. There are feasible alternatives to cleaning gas fuel piping with natural gas; these alternatives include the use of non-flammable, non-explosive media to clean the pipes. OSHA strongly recommends the use of non-flammable, non-explosive alternative media when it is necessary to use gas to clean piping.”

Michaels also cited the following, minimum requirements, when performing such procedures:

 - 9 CFR 1926.20(b)(2) – The employer must provide a competent person able to recognize construction workplace hazards, including those associated with natural gas blows. 

 - 29 CFR 1926.21(b)(2) – The employer must train employees to recognize construction workplace hazards, including those associated with natural gas blows. 

 - 29 CFR 1926.352(c) – The employer must ensure that welding, cutting or heating at construction sites is not conducted in the presence of flammable compounds, including natural gas. 

 - 29 CFR 1926.403(b)(2) – The employer must ensure that listed, labeled, or certified equipment at construction sites is used in accordance with instructions included in the listing, labeling, or certification (prohibit the use of equipment that can ignite natural gas). 

 - Section 5(a)(1) of the Occupational Safety and Health Act – The employer must keep its workplace free from recognized hazards causing or likely to cause death or serious physical harm. The hazards of natural gas blows are well-recognized in the power plant construction industry. This letter provides individual employers with direct knowledge of the hazards.

If you notice that your plant is violating any of these regulations, we remind you that OSHA’s can help you responsibly report your employer. You can also read the full letter here.

Do you work in a power plant? Do you feel adequate safety measures are in place? Let us know in the comments below.

Submitted by Andrew Fatato.

The United Steelworkers Tony Mazzocchi Center, USWTMC and the Communication Workers of America conducted its first joint integration training on September 14-17 at the USW Pittsburgh Headquarters.  The training consisted of Effective Health and Safety Committee training, Hazard Mapping, Theory of Adult Learning and Electrical and Lock out/Tag out training.  Friday was solely dedicated to strategic planning of the grant work in each of the CWA Districts.  Using the success in the USW District 2 Kevin Wilson Initiative as the model, District 2 Worker-Trainer Steve Doherty spoke to the CWA members about the building of the Districts Initiative and how they were able to succeed in reaching their members along with the approach to sustain the efforts.

The 4 day training was well received by our brothers and sisters from the CWA and they are anxious to take the next steps in helping their members to remain safe and healthy in their work in the telecommunications, broadcasting, cable TV, journalism, publishing, manufacturing, airlines, customer service, government service, health care, education and other fields.

Each of the 12 CWA Health and Safety Activists will be attending the USWTMC Train the Trainer training in November.  Upon completion of the trainer course they will be able to provide training to their members while being assisted by TMC authorized trainers.

Submitted by John Scardella, USW TMC staff.

In 1994 I started working in health & safety at the United Rubber Workers.  There was a rich tradition of health and safety at the URW and much work to be done.  One project that I put on my list of things to do that first day was the OSHA case at Dayton Tire in Oklahoma City, OK.  An Occupational Safety and Health Revision Commission (OSHRC) Decision was issued on September 10, 2010 on the case. 

Background –

Bob Julian worked at Dayton Tire in Oklahoma City.  In October 1993 he was killed when a tire assembly machine suddenly started.  Every workplace death is a tragedy.  This fatality related to lockout tagout of production equipment and became a much publicized case.  Brother Julian’s death prompted a massive OSHA investigation and what at the time was the third highest proposed fine in history, almost $7.5 million in April 1994.

Dayton Tire appealed. The case was heard by an Administrative Law Judge.  Department of Labor lawyers, outside counsel for the company, and the USW (at the time URW) Local Union 998L Vice President and Safety Chair Tony Carr participated in the process.  In 1997 the administrative law judge issued a decision and reduced the fine significantly to $518,000. The case was appealed to the OSHRC.

Many years passed while the case was at the Review Commission. The case outlived the plant, which Bridgestone Firestone closed in late 2006. In a statement, Bridgestone Firestone pointed to the judge’s reduction of the fine as proof the case against the company has no merit.

Update –

Last week, seventeen years after the death of brother Julian, the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission issued a decision upholding all but one of the citations and assessing a penalty to Bridgestone/Firestone of $1,975,000.  The case appears to have held its merit and did indeed uphold all but one of the OSHA citations on lockout tagout.  The employer may appeal the decision of the Review Commission to the courts, so the case may not yet be finished. 

This case provides one example of needed improvements to the OSHA enforcement process because workers shouldn’t have to wait for years and years for cases to be reviewed by the OSHRC.  Other important improvements to the OSHA process are included in the Robert C. Byrd Miner Safety and Health Act of 2010.  More information on this legislation is available from the AFL-CIO.

Workers in many workplaces continue to struggle to integrate effective lockout programs in their workplaces.  Let’s hope that this decision helps them to protect their health and safety!

Submitted by Jim Frederick, USW TMC.

Thanks to the urging of Public Citizen, a labor advocacy group calling for regulation in the area of medical resident hours, Dr. David Michaels, head of OSHA, has issued a statement:

We are very concerned about medical residents working extremely long hours, and we know of evidence linking sleep deprecation with an increased risk of needle sticks, puncture wounds, lacerations, medical errors and motor vehicle accidents. We will review and consider the petition on this subject submitted by Public Citizen and others.

The relationship of long hours, worker fatigue and safety is a concern beyond medical residents, since there is extensive evidence linking fatigue with operator error. In its investigation of the root causes of the BP Texas City oil refinery explosion in 2005, in which 15 workers were killed and approximately 170 injured, the U.S. Chemical Safety Board identified worker fatigue and long work hours as a likely contributing factor to the explosion.

It is clear that long work hours can lead to tragic mistakes, endangering workers, patients and the public. All employers must recognize and prevent workplace hazards. That is the law. Hospitals and medical training programs are not exempt from ensuring that their employees’ health and safety are protected.

OSHA is working every day to ensure that employers provide not just jobs, but good, safe jobs. No worker, whether low-skilled and low-wage, or highly trained, should be injured, or lose his or her life for a paycheck.

Has fatigue played a role in the day-to-day operations of your job? Let us know in the comments below.

Submitted by Andrew Fatato.

Source: Pew Charitable Trusts, 2009, based on the National Establishment Time Series Database; analysis by Pew Center on the States and Collaborative Economics.

Source: Pew Charitable Trusts, 2009, based on the National Establishment Time Series Database; analysis by Pew Center on the States and Collaborative Economics.

Due to the enactment of last year’s stimulus bills, the latest numbers show that green jobs are on the rise. The bill included $490 million for the training of workers in green industries and helped to create jobs in organic farming, wind energy, recycling and other sustainable areas of the labor sector. The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency was also given $16.8 million to develop training programs for those individuals looking to join the green workforce.

You can read more about the expanding opportunities here, or check out the Pew Study from which the charts above were pulled.

Have you seen an increase in green initiatives in your industry? Let us know in the comments below.

Submitted by Andrew Fatato.

By Mike Elk, posted September 7, 2010 in The Hunnington Post.

Union workers have been locked out at the uranium enrichment facility in Metropolis, Illinois for two months now after contract negotiations broke down over Honeywell’s demand that workers give up their retiree health care coverage and pension plans. The Metropolis uranium facility is the only one in the United States that can convert U308 into the extremely deadly UF6. 

Because the plant is the only conversion facility of its kind in the United States, familiarity with the Metropolis plant, and not just generic experience in the field, is essential to ensuring the plant’s safety. Concerns have been raised by local community members and union officials that replacement workers at the Honeywell facility cannot safely operate the plant since they have no site-specific experience in this type of conversion facility.

Workers claim that Cote is far more interested in keeping his record profits high than actually protecting workers and the surrounding community. They believe that Honeywell CEO David Cote is willing to risk nuclear fallout in order to demand that uranium workers cut their retiree health care and pension plans.

On Saturday, nuclear regulators allowed Honeywell to start up core production at the facility, where core production had been shut down for over two months due to concerns about the training of replacement workers. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission delayed reopening the plant for several days after questions were raised about the unusually high levels of uranium that were appearing in the urine tests of several nuclear workers.

The following day, a hydrogen explosion rocked the plant. The blast shook the ground in front of the plant and could be heard a mile away, according to local reports. State Trooper Bridget Rice said that police were called to investigate to the scene of the explosion after receiving several phone calls reporting an explosion at the plant. Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesman Roger Hannah also confirmed that there was indeed “a small hydrogen explosion that was very loud” at the Metropolis facility.

The plant splits hydrofluoric acid into hydrogen and fluoride. The hydrogen then gets scrubbed and released into the atmosphere and fluorine goes into the process. If the hydrogen and fluorine recombine, it can be very reactive and cause a non-radioactive hydrogen explosion. On Saturday, hydrogen was accidentally recombined with fluorine causing a massive explosion that could be heard a mile away and leading to the plant being temporarily shut down.

Honeywell Spokesman Peter Dapel released this statement: “There was a noise at Metropolis Works yesterday that occurred as a result of the normal venting of one of our systems…. The union workforce is very familiar with the procedure that caused yesterday’s noise, having executed similar processes on at least two occasions earlier this year prior to the work stoppage with the exact same outcomes. It is common to plants that work with fluorine, and characteristic of plants that are following correct procedures.”

However, union spokesman John Paul Smith claims that the workers who worked at the plant for decades said very minor explosions had occurred, but no explosion of such a magnitude that it could be heard outside of the plant. State police also could not cite an incident where they had been called to the plant to investigate an explosion at the Metropolis facility that had been reported to them by local community members.

Workers and local community members see this explosion as evidence that the quickly trained replacement workers are not qualified to operate the plant.

Local union officials claim that the workers are not properly trained to work in the plant. In a statement released last week USW Local 7-699 claimed, “The Union workforce was required to have extensive on-the-job training on running units from qualified trainers for several months prior to being qualified. We have recently learned that several Fluorination workers were deemed ‘qualified’ by company personnel after one week of training. Furthermore, Union employees were required to have been a qualified operator for six months on a running unit before they were allowed to begin to train another employee. The company is currently training their own employees with people who themselves are not qualified.”

Additional concerns have been raised about the safety records of the replacement workers at the Metropolis facility who are employed by the Shaw Group. In 2009, a subsidiary of the Shaw Group was made to pay $6.2 million to the federal government for forcing its workers not to report safety and site violations when working on nuclear plant sites in Alabama and Tennessee.

Local community members are claiming that Honeywell is also not properly reporting safety violations at the nuclear facility in Metropolis. A recent report by Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) says Honeywell has failed to notify the NRC of 37 reportable unplanned, uranium contamination events at its Metropolis facility between January 2008 and January 2010.

The Metropolis facility had previously been shut down after a release of deadly toxic UF6 gas in December of 2003, which hospitalized four community members and lead to evacuations of dozens of residents near the plant. This was only the second time in American history (the first being the infamous Three Mile Island disaster) where a site area emergency forced the evacuation of a community surrounding a nuclear power facility. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission at the time found that Honeywell “failed to implement some parts of its emergency response plan and did not provide sufficient information to local emergency responders”.

The Environmental Protection Agency has also been very critical of the safety record of the uranium enrichment facility. According to the report by Sam Tranum of Uranium Intelligence Weekly, in May of 2009 the EPA listed the Metropolis facility as being “in significant noncompliance – a high priority violator” of the Clean Air Act and that the Metropolis facility had been in violation of the Clean Air Act for the nine months prior to that. Also, the EPA found that the Honeywell Metropolis uranium facility had been violating the Clean Water Act for about two years, but returned to compliance in December of 2009.

A federal grand jury has been convened to look into criminal violations of federal environmental laws. Honeywell initially tried to cover up the grand jury investigation to local community and union members. However SEC reports forced the company to reveal they were under grand jury investigation. According to Sam Tranum of Uranium Intelligence Weekly:

Details of the investigation are being kept under tight control by the relevant authorities, including the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Justice (DOJ), but the existence of a grand jury probe was confirmed by Honeywell International’s most recent 10Q filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission. It stated that the EPA and DOJ are investigating “whether the storage of certain sludges generated during uranium hexafluoride production at our Metropolis, Illinois facility has been in compliance with the requirements of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act [RCRA],” adding that, “The federal authorities have convened a grand jury in this matter.”

Honeywell’s long history of safety violations, the poor training of replacement workers at the Metropolis facility, and Saturday’s hydrogen explosion, have lead local workers and community members to call on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to shut down production until the contract dispute can be resolved. “This just simply isn’t normal, what’s happening at the plant,” said union member John Paul Smith.

Workers are also calling on President Obama to put pressure on his close economic adviser Honeywell CEO David Cote to settle the safety and contract issues at the plant. They are asking President Obama to remove David Cote from the President’s Deficit Commission if he does not resolve the safety and contract issues.

Last week, the 350,000 members of the Steelworkers Organization of Active Retirees called on President Obama to fire Cote from the so-called Deficit Commission. They released a statement saying:

Mr. Cote’s cruel and calculated behavior towards workers at its hexafluoride plant in Metropolis, Ill. clearly illustrates that he’s unqualified and inappropriate to help decide issues such as whether to reduce the federal deficit by cutting programs like social security or by upgrading the faulty military contracting process, from which Honeywell benefits.
Mr. Cote should be evicted from the so-called Deficit Commission immediately before he can use that position to harm all Americans the way he is injuring Honeywell workers in Illinois.

BP Texas City, Texas Refinery - 2005

An agreement earlier this month between OSHA and the executives of BP has ensured that the oil giant will pay for the safety violations that led to the 2005 Texas City explosion and continued thereafter. BP will pay the full fine of $50.6 million, after OSHA adjusted the figure to erase duplicate fines.

The most promising parts of the new deal are the regulatory measures that BP must now live under, which include an investment of $500 million into the safety infrastructure of the facility.

More details of the new safety measures from the OSHA press release:

Under the agreement, BP immediately will begin performing safety reviews of the refinery equipment according to set schedules and make permanent corrections. The agreement also identifies many items in need of immediate attention; the company has agreed to address those concerns quickly and to hire independent experts to monitor its efforts. Additionally, the agreement provides an unprecedented level of oversight of BP’s safety program including regular meetings with OSHA, frequent site inspections and the submission of quarterly reports for the agency’s review.  Finally, in a step toward workplace safety corporate-wide, BP agrees to establish a liaison between its North American and London boards of directors and OSHA, which will allow the agency to raise compliance problems at the highest level.

Workers must never be subject to a timeline like this again:

Timeline of Events Related to the BPTCR Monitoring Inspection (from OSHA)

• March 23, 2005 – Isomerization Unit explosion; 15 workers killed, at least 170 injured.
• June 2005 – Residual Hydrotreater Unit explosion and fire.
• September 22, 2005 – Settlement Agreement with OSHA signed.
• June 2006 – Settlement Agreement’s independent auditor study and recommendations. Included in the study are recommendations to BP-TCR to implement the ISA S84.00.01 Standard for safety-instrumented-systems.
• July 22, 2006 – an employee of a contractor was fatally injured when he was crushed between a scissor lift and a pipe rack at BP-TCR.
• January 2007 - Baker Report issued which identified numerous systemic process safety issues at BP U.S. refineries, including BP-TCR
• March 2007 – CSB BP-TCR investigation report issued
• June 5, 2007 – BP-TCR experienced a fatality when an employee of a contractor was electrocuted while working on a light circuit in a process area.
• June 7, 2007 – OSHA launches its National Emphasis Program on Refineries, CPL 03-00-004 Petroleum Refinery Process Safety Management NEP.
• Jan. 14, 2008 – The top head blew off a pressure vessel resulting in the death of a BP employee. BP was issued four serious citations related to PSM.
• October 9, 2008 – A contract employee was fatally injured at BPTCR when, after being struck by a front end loader, the employee was pinned on the ground between a guard rail and the bucket of the loader.
• December 2008 – 3rd Party PSM Consultant report on audit of relief valve study methodology.
• September 22, 2009 – The deadline for BP to complete abatement outlined in the 2005 Settlement Agreement.
• October 30, 2009 – OSHA issues Notification of Failure to Abate and willful citations with proposed penalties of $87,430,000.
• August 12, 2010 – OSHA reaches agreement with BP for it to pay the entire $50.6 million penalty for Failure to Abate violations 

Submitted by Patrick McQueen.

A moratorium on deep-sea oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico will put 9,000 people out of a job and affect an additional 14,000 jobs, according to federal findings published in July. A six-month ban issued in June was struck down in court, but in July a new ban was put in place by the Obama administration that is currently being debated by the courts.

Meanwhile, energy activists and environmental lobbyists are debating the merits of such a ban, with many arguing that it will have more negative impact on Gulf communities than positive impact on drilling standards. The debate comes in the wake of the $100 million misplaced worker relief fund  set up by the government and BP.

The Obama administration continues to assert that a ban is necessary, while they believe the economic impact already sits lower than initially feared.

“In light of the current risks of deepwater drilling as illustrated by the BP Deepwater Horizon Spill and the potential impacts of another spill, the moratorium is necessary and appropriate. With that said, the worst-case economic impact estimates from three months ago have not been realized. The reality on the ground suggests that the impacts are less than we initially projected as a potential worst-case scenario,” Interior Department spokesman Matt Lee-Ashley said.  from the Boston Globe .

What do you think? Do we need a ban on drilling in the Gulf to ensure new regulations are put in place, or is it more important to restore the health of the Gulf communities? Let us know in the comments.

Submitted by Patrick McQueen.

We’re linking to work done by Steve Joynt of the Press-Register (Mobile, AL) that was brought to our attention by commenter Les Rausch, who correctly reminded us that:

We can never lose sight of the human cost of BP’s and others’ malfeasance. Most important: 11 men lost their lives when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded on April 20.    -  from our earlier blog, ‘Are the Gulf Spill Cleanup Workers Being Adequately Protected?’ comments.

The piece is a compilation of the biographies of the 11 men who lost their lives when the blowout occurred on the Deepwater Horizon. The men ranged from age 22 to 56. Many were fathers. Some were to be married and start families for the first time. They were floor hands, drillers, and engineers. All of them leave a void.

Please, take a minute to view Oil Spill Day 100: The 11 Men Who Died on the Deepwater Horizon (link: http://blog.al.com/live/2010/07/oil_spill_day_100_the_11_men_w.html). With these men in our hearts and minds, let’s work to make sure their deaths were not in vain, and disasters like this never take place again in the American workplace.

Submitted by Patrick McQueen