Nearly a year after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, a sharper focus on offshore safety is boosting demand for specialized equipment and services centered in Houston, even as the nation’s chief hub for the offshore industry continues to wrestle with a drilling slowdown. Eager to get back to work, oil companies are spending millions to satisfy tougher safety and environmental regulations in the Gulf of Mexico.
Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said Monday that the government won’t pay air traffic controllers to nap but stressed that federal officials “take very seriously” their responsibility to ensure safety in the skies and on airport runways. Under new rules the FAA will put in place this week, the mandatory number of hours off between shifts increases from eight hours to nine. Workers are now banned from working an unscheduled midnight shift after a day off.
OSHA has issued Notices of Unsafe or Unhealthful Working Conditions to the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) Lakefront Airport Air Traffic Control Tower in New Orleans for exposing workers to possible fire hazards.
The Department of Mental Health was authorized this week to fill 25 positions, a spokeswoman for the state agency that runs Napa State Hospital said. The announcement was made after California Health and Human Services Agency Secretary Diana Dooley visited Napa State Hospital on Thursday to discuss safety and security at the state psychiatric hospital, which was fined more than $100,000 last week for a series of worker safety violations related to the strangulation death last October of psychiatric technician Donna Gross.
In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report a steady decline in Hepatitis B (HBV). The decline is attributed to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulation of bloodborne pathogen exposure risks and increased childhood vaccinations. While today’s rates are the lowest ever reported, it is important to remember that HBV has not been eradicated.
I have come on as a producer of a project I feel very strongly about and I know this community will as well. It is about worker safety and the unnecessary deaths that occur every day across America and what we can do to change it. I have teamed up with Cavelight Films to finish Cost of Construction. The film uncovers the national scandal surrounding a series of controversial deaths that happened on the most expensive commercial construction project in United States history — all happening on the Las Vegas Strip, called CityCenter.
On college campuses, the annual race for summer internships, many of them unpaid, is well under way. But instead of steering students toward the best opportunities and encouraging them to value their work, many institutions of higher learning are complicit in helping companies skirt a nebulous area of labor law.
Notre Dame University administrators on Monday released the results of its internal investigation into the death of a student videographer. Schools officials said Monday that “no one acted in disregard for safety” leading up to Sullivan’s death, and the school “reacted on the best information available at the time.”
A North Bergen company that has seen its share of fines in the past few years, given by North Bergen Township’s fire code officials and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), has been hit with a half million dollar fine by a federal judge in New York. On Monday, April 11, Eagle Recycling, owned by Lieze Associates, a solid waste management facility, pleaded guilty in a Utica, N.Y. federal court for allegedly conspiring to violate the Clean Water Act and to defraud the United States.
Lowe’s Home Centers has been cited for 13 alleged safety violations at its Castle Rock store following an inspection by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. OSHA is proposing $82,700 in penalties for violations that include inaccuracies in records on worker injuries and illnesses, electrical safety issues involving access to equipment, and damage to wire insulation.
