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Every year, between 150 and 200 fatalities and some 50,000 injuries occur due to failure to control the release of hazardous energy. Lockout/tagout (LOTO) refers to the OSHA-required practices and procedures to protect workers from unexpected start-up of machinery or hazardous energy released during service or maintenance.
Committees that focus on safety and health improvement, ergonomics, incident investigation, or other specific goals are common in businesses of all sizes. Labor/management safety committees aren’t mandated in California, but many employers use them to comply with the communication requirements of the Injury and Illness Prevention Program (IIPP) standard in General Industry Safety Orders Section […]
Recently, one of our subscribers asked the following question:
On the heels of the recent shooting rampage by an Uber driver in Michigan, an assembly-line painter at the Excel Industries lawn mower manufacturing plant in Hesston, Kansas, killed 3 and injured 14 in a shooting spree.
Yesterday, we looked at the health hazards OSHA identified in the paint room at a Connecticut amusement park. But paint rooms pose more than just health hazards. The chemicals involved in paint spray operations also pose fire and explosion hazards that must be addressed. When it inspected the paint spray room at Lake Compounce Family […]
At Lake Compounce Family Theme Park in Bristol, Connecticut, visitors can ride the Boulder Dash – a wooden coaster that reaches speeds above 60 mph – or the brand-new Phobia – a steel coaster that flips riders through a cobra inversion 150 feet in the air. But behind the thrills and chills were some working […]
When the U.S. Supreme Court granted a state petition to stay EPA’s Clean Power Plan (CPP) until the state case against the plan worked its way through the U.S. appeals court (and possibly the Supreme Court itself), the five justices favoring the stay did not specify why they made that decision. However, in their brief, […]
In an effort to cut the cost of complying with EPA’s lead-based paint (LBP) program, the Agency has issued a final rule simplifying refresher training under the lead renovation, repair, and paining (RRP) rule and removed the jurisdiction-specific certification and accreditation requirement under the LBP activities rule in states where the Agency implements that rule. […]
Q. An EHS chemical, Sulfuric Acid, exceeds 500 pounds. Therefore aggregation of Sulfuric Acid containing compounds is required in TRI reporting. In that aggregation, are lab chemicals included or exempted?
The Constitution is silent on protection of the environment, and so environmental cases did not provide the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia with a convenient opening to expand on his belief in originalism—the position that the Constitution means what the framers wanted it to mean when they wrote it and that meaning does not […]