Practical EHS Tips, News & Advice. Updated Daily.
October has been National Protect Your Hearing Month, and our experts at Safety.BLR.com® have been busy answering subscribers’ questions about hearing conservation. We’ve selected a couple for our EHS Daily Advisor readers—where does an office employee fit into a hearing conservation program, and what happens when an employee refuses to take a baseline audiometric test?
One of the most important tools for preventing workplace injuries, illnesses, and fatalities is a hazard assessment. Situations are analyzed to determine the risks they pose, and then employers decide how best to control those risks. Unfortunately, one increasingly common hazard has thus far defied our ability to predict and prevent it—mass shootings.
Drinking water and wastewater infrastructure projects are beginning to receive loans under the federal government’s 2014 Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (WIFIA), and we can expect to see additional lending in the coming year. We describe here the background and composition of WIFIA and which types of proposals appear to be receiving interest from […]
Protecting workers from the hazards of trenches has lately been front and center in OSHA’s outreach to employers. One critical step in ensuring that you are meeting your obligations to protect employees who dig and work in trenches is to have a solid knowledge of how to classify soils. The Agency has produced an 11-minute […]
In a final rule published in the early fall (September 28, 2018, (Federal Register (FR)), the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) withdrew or revised many provisions of the previous administration’s regulations to reduce waste of natural gas from venting, flaring, and leaks during oil and natural gas production activities on onshore federal and Indian […]
At the 2018 National Safety Council (NSC) Congress & Expo, Dr. David Michaels, the former head of OSHA and a professor of environmental and occupational health at the George Washington University School of Public Health, copresented a session with Colin Duncan, CEO of Soteris Group, in which the pair highlighted the need for empirical research […]
Multiple news media have reported—and a statement by Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue made it semi-official—that President Donald Trump has directed the EPA to begin rulemaking to allow year-round sales of gasoline with 15 percent ethanol (E15).
On October 10, 2018, California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health (DOSH) issued an emergency proposal that would amend its State Plan to require designated employers in the state to electronically submit to federal OSHA their Cal/OSHA Form 300A, which contains data on occupational injuries and illnesses that occurred in 2017; under the proposal, the […]
In its latest maneuver to shrink the regulatory legacy of the Obama administration, the EPA is withdrawing a proposal that would have imposed standards on the generation of byproduct materials associated with uranium and thorium in situ recovery (ISR).
In pre-rule notice in its Fall 2018 Unified Agenda , OSHA indicates that it would like to update the public record on a 2007 advanced notice of proposed rulemaking (ANPRM) to revise its existing (1971) standard governing mechanical power presses (29 Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) 1910.217). OSHA notes in the Agenda that the current […]