Last week, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar lifted the moratorium on deepwater drilling almost two months before it was set to expire.
Jim Carroll can’t shake the trepidation the West Hartford roofing contractor says he feels each time his crews go on a job. He still feels it, almost two years after a 2 ½-story fall injured one of his workers. Construction is an inherently dangerous line of work, he says, and accidents do happen.
Whether it’s writing code, cooking chicken, or breaking rocks, every occupation comes with occupational hazards. And since most of us spend 40 hours or more at our jobs every week, it pays to know the odds.
Last year the Occupational Safety and Health Administration announced an initiative to crack down on employers that fail to disclose many on-the-job injuries. Last week the agency moved ahead on the initiative, proposing more than $1.2 million in fines in a case against Houston-based Goodman Manufacturing.
There’s obviously been a lot of talk during the campaign to fill Robert C. Byrd’s U.S. Senate seat about the Obama administration’s alleged “war on coal,” with Democrat and Gov. Joe Manchin trying to fend off the rather absurd suggestion by Republican John Raese that the governor doesn’t strongly support the industry.
Massachusetts’ workplace falls have accounted for a “much higher proportion” of fatal occupational injuries than in the nation as a whole, according to a recent report by the state Department of Public Health (DPH). Close to 70 percent of those deaths, from 2000 to 2007, were in construction, the report shows.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has cited the directorate of public works at Fort Riley for one willful and 18 serious safety violations — the most dangerous involving the handling of toxic chlorine gas.
Last week, the Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation announced that an unidentified porn actor—known, as of this date, only as “Patient Zero”—had tested positive for HIV. Since then, several film companies have temporarily shut down, an unknown number of performers are on “quarantine” while being tested, and rumors about the identity of the actor and the extent of the situation have been circulating fast.
On Friday, officials from the Los Angeles-based AIDS Healthcare Foundation asked council members to instruct FilmL.A., the permitting agency they contract with, to stop issuing permits while the latest HIV case is investigated by officials with the Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation.
The international wind turbine company Vestas Wind Systems is using potentially harmful chemicals in its blades factory in Windsor, Colo., that have injured several workers, and in some cases led to employees losing their jobs, according to government records and former employees.
