Practical EHS Tips, News & Advice. Updated Daily.
What tools are you using to reduce work-related injuries and fatalities in your workplace? Do you collect and review your injury and illness data? Review safety bulletins from your industry trade group? Investigate near misses and incorporate lessons learned into your training? But have you ever considered … working cooperatively with your industry competitors? Or […]
At the close of its 2017 regular legislative session, the Connecticut General Assembly adopted an increasingly popular nationwide trend in brownfields remediation and redevelopment. By establishing the framework for a state brownfields land bank program, the Connecticut legislation represents a shift in the way brownfields projects are being administered around the country. With reduced budgets […]
The EPA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (agencies) have initiated what they describe as a “two-step process” that will result in a revised definition of the Clean Water Act (CWA) term waters of the United States (WOTUS). The first step is a proposed rule that would rescind the Obama administration’s WOTUS definition (June […]
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) issued a proposed rule to delay the date by which certain employers are required to submit their completed 300A form electronically from July 1 to December 1, 2017. The Agency is proposing the extension to allow the Trump administration an opportunity to review the requirements of the rule […]
Many industries have an adversarial relationship with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), in which OSHA makes rules and enforces them through inspections, fines, and penalties—often with vocal support from unions and other worker groups. The industry, for its part, fights new regulations during the rulemaking process, and then in the courts and in […]
The case against EPA’s effort to freeze the Agency’s June 2016 New Source Performance Standards (NSPS) imposing air pollution controls the oil and natural gas (O&G) industry expanded when the attorneys general (AGs) of 14 states and the city of Chicago filed a motion to intervene on behalf of the plaintiffs, five environmental groups. “State […]
Congress is discussing a bill that would allow the year-round retail sale of E15 (an 85 percent gasoline/15 percent ethanol blend). Introduced in the Senate by Senator Deb Fischer (R-NE), the Consumer and Fuel Retailer Choice Act (S. 517) would “expand consumer choice and eliminate confusion at the pump,” says Fischer, “by ensuring a consistently […]
In the communication tower industry, workers are at risk of falls and structural collapse—a risk that is increased by the chances that, at some point, safety will fall through a gap in the multiple layers of cellular service providers (carriers), tower owners, turf vendors, contractors, and subcontractors arrayed over them.
OSHA proposed on Friday, June 23 to exclude construction and shipbuilding from a final rule issued on January 9, 2017 reducing workers’ exposure to beryllium. The lightweight metal is used primarily in foundry and smelting, composites manufacturing, dental lab work, among other applications. Under the proposal only general industry workplaces would be subject to the […]
It’s simple enough to identify the hazards of communication tower work: falls and structural collapses, rigging and hoisting practices, and struck-by hazards. What’s sticky is the question of who is responsible for workers’ safety in an industry that employs multiple layers of contractors.