The number of violations in the top 10 increased almost 30% over the same time period in 2008.

The violations are:

1. Scaffolding: 9,093
2. Fall protection: 6,771
3. Hazard communication: 6,378
4. Respiratory protection: 3,803
5. Lockout/tagout: 3,321
6. Electrical (wiring): 3,079
7. Ladders: 3,072
8. Powered industrial trucks (forklifts): 2,993
9. Electrical: 2,556
10. Machine guarding: 2,364.

OSHA will update these numbers later in 2009. The preliminary list was released at the National Safety Council’s annual congress.

In April, Charles Sittig was killed at the CES Environmental Services facility in Port Arthur, TX.

Three men have died at CES plants since December 2008.

OSHA cited the company for 34 violations, including a willful citation for failure to establish a rescue team capable of assisting a worker who becomes incapacitated while cleaning out chemicals tanks.

Other citations include raised platforms without railings, poorly maintained ladders and failure to develop decontamination procedures.

The company has 15 days to decide whether to contest the citations.

Two workers died recently at CES’ Houston plant. In December 2008, one worker died in an explosion that sent metal debris into nearby properties. In July 2009, a CES employee died when an explosion and flash fire at the Houston plant knocked him from the top of a mobile tank he was filling with water. OSHA is still investigating that death.

An OSHA investigation says Ismael Octtaviani-Mercado died from a 31-foot fall at the Palm Beach International Airport.

Octtaviani-Mercado had jury-rigged a stool to remove a light fixture, then tumbled over a rail and fell three stories.

Using the stool placed him higher than the nearby rail. Investigators believe he lost his footing and went over the rail.

Octtaviani-Mercado was working on an air surveillance radar tower that had been decommissioned after heavy damage caused by hurricanes in 2004.

He decided on his own to go to the third level to salvage light fixtures for use on an active tower. The fixtures are expensive, and it was common practice to salvage them for use elsewhere.

He was working alone when he fell.

OSHA doesn’t have the authority to fine other federal agencies, but it can perform investigations like this one.

Men’s Health magazine has ranked 100 U.S. cities from least to most accident prone.

The most accident-prone: Charleston, WV, followed by Jacksonville, FL, and Corpus Christi, TX.

Safest cities: Rochester, NY, Burlington, VT, and Los Angeles.

The magazine also provides break-outs by category. Most fatal workplace accidents: Cheyenne, WY, Bangor, ME, and Modesto, CA. Highest number of fatal falls: Charleston, WV, Denver and Baltimore.

Men’s Health used stats on fatal workplace accidents (Bureau of Labor Statistics); deaths from car crashes, poisoning, drowning, falls and fires (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention); emergency-room visits (American Hospital Association); and bandage sales.

Check stats for your city, here.

The site, DeathRiskRankings.com, was developed by researchers and students at Carnegie Mellon University.

It compares mortality risks by gender, age, cause of death and geographic region.

For example, men ages 40-49 are more likely to die from a fall than of eight types of cancer. The No. 1 cause of death among women 20-29 is transportation incidents. For 20-year-old males, 80% of their deaths are from accidents, homicides and suicides.

That’s what happened to Sims Bark Co. and Sims Stone Co. in Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi.

OSHA received a complaint about safety at one of Sims’ locations and determined that similar hazards might exist at its other locations.

Result: $576,750 in OSHA fines after inspectors visited six Sims facilities.

Willful citations were issued for:

• allowing workers to service, unjam and clean machinery without procedures to ensure they wouldn’t be caught in or struck by equipment or burned by machines’ heat strips, and
• exposing workers to dangers associated with being caught in fast moving machinery.

OSHA issued serious citations for:

• lack of employee training
• exposure to electric shocks
• lack of fall protection
• lack of machine guards
• exposure to noise hazards
• struck-by dangers, and
• accumulation of combustible dust.

Sims also faces other-than-serious citations for failing to keep injury/illness logs according to OSHA rules.

The company has 15 business days to comply with or contest the citations.

A rope broke on the scaffolding, but both men were prevented from falling by their safety harnesses.

A rescue team was able to pull one man to safety quickly, but the second dangled from the side of the building for about 45 minutes before he was pulled up to the roof.

While that may sound scary, it also shows how strong the fall protection was — it was able to keep the man from falling for almost an hour.

Neither worker was seriously injured.

Watch KTLA video of one man’s rescue here. (Better yet, show it to workers who use fall protection to drive home the message of why it’s needed.)

Last week, a worker was killed when he fell more than 20 stories from a high-rise construction site in Dallas.

Jose Aguila, 37, was installing metal louvers on the side of the building. A scaffold collapsed, and the worker’s safety harness failed, according to a report by NBC-5 in Dallas.

In June, OSHA announced an increase in construction-site inspections in Texas due to the high rate of worker fatalities and serious injuries.

Raleigh Roussell, with contractor organization TEXO, complains that some OSHA inspectors arriving at construction sites are transfers from other OSHA areas who don’t have construction experience. “The hazards are much different than those in a plant,” he said.

Personal injury attorney Mark Werbner is also critical of OSHA’s inspections, but for a much different reason.

Werbner says the agency is still far too easy on contractors and the fines for violations aren’t high enough.

What do you think? Let us know in the Comments Box below.

Employee Noel Collins was injured due to a fall while installing ceiling tile in a movie theater owned by West 13th Street Owners Corp. He sued, claiming he wasn’t provided with an appropriate safety device, in this case a scaffold.

Collins had constructed a makeshift scaffold consisting of one piece of plywood on top of an A-frame ladder with the other end of the plywood resting on a wall that was the same height as the ladder.

The company argued that Collins was the sole cause of his injuries because he didn’t use materials on hand to construct a proper scaffold.

But the court said expecting the employee to build his own scaffold from scratch “improperly shifted the responsibility for creating a proper safety device” from the employer to the employee.

Now a jury will decide on damages.

Cite: Collins v. West 13th Street Owners Corp., Supreme Court, Appellate Division, First Dept., NY, 6/30/09.

A worker slipped and fell into a vat of hot melted chocolate and died at a factory in Camden, NJ.

29-year-old Vincent Smith II was one of four workers on a platform above the vat at the Lyons & Sons facility. They were dumping solid chocolate into the vat to be melted.

After falling, he was hit by an agitator that’s used to mix the chocolate and killed.

The man appeared to have died instantly from the blow to the head from the agitator.

A co-worker slammed on an emergency shutoff switch, but it was too late.

News media accounts haven’t included details about the quality or presence of guardrails around the vat. OSHA is investigating.

“Make no mistake about it: The Department of Labor (DOL) is back in the enforcement business,” Solis told an audience of safety professionals in San Antonio, TX, attending Safety 2009.

She acknowledges that in these difficult economic times it’s more difficult for safety professionals to sell employee safety and health to their companies. For that reason, Solis said the agency wants to work with more companies to help them provide safer workplaces so that mothers and fathers can return home, uninjured, to their children each day.

But the current recession isn’t stopping OSHA and its parent department, DOL, from stepping up enforcement.

Solis noted that OSHA’s 2010 budget request calls for 130 more inspectors. In comments to reporters after her speech, Solis said, “I’d like to have more [inspectors], but we’re not in that position,” due to the economy.

The Secretary was asked about the lack of a permanent administrator for OSHA. Jordan Barab is the acting administrator and will assume the No. 2 position at the agency once a permanent head is confirmed. Solis expressed frustration with the U.S. Senate confirmation process. She noted that there are other nominees to DOL positions who have been in the pipeline for four months without being confirmed. She said it was important to have a new leader of OSHA, and that’s why Barab was appointed interim administrator, which doesn’t require Senate confirmation.

Solis said she hasn’t yet read the Government Accountability Office (GAO) report that found deficiencies with OSHA’s Voluntary Protection Program. She said she agrees with the concerns expressed by the GAO and by members of the House and Senate regarding OSHA’s enforcement capabilities.

The Secretary also took the opportunity during her speech in front of thousands of safety professionals in San Antonio to announce a new initiative to decrease construction fatalities and injuries in Texas. Since 2007, there have been 145 construction fatalities in Texas, a number Solis called “intolerable.”

Beginning in July, OSHA will increase the number of inspectors in Texas for a concentrated effort aimed at construction sites. If an inspector sees scaffold, fall, trenching or other hazards, they’re empowered to launch an immediate investigation.

Check back with SafetyNewsAlert.com often this week for updates from the ASSE Safety 2009 conference.

Leonidas Gomez was performing demolition work on a building in New York City.

The building was already partially demolished, and he had to remove a window from the remaining structure.

The only way for him to do that was to stand on a fire escape.

While he was trying to remove the window, the fire escape detached from the building, and Gomez fell to the ground.

The worker sued for his injuries, claiming that the fire escape should be considered a scaffold under New York law.

The court agreed. It said the fact that a fire escape is usually a permanent structure and a scaffold is a temporary one didn’t matter in this case.

Since a scaffold couldn’t be erected on the partially demolished building, the fire escape acted as a scaffold and the law applied.

New York’s unique scaffold law requires building owners and general contractors to provide workers with proper scaffolds, hoists, harnesses and other appropriate PPE for use when working at elevations.

Cite: Gomez v. City of New York et al, New York Supreme Court, 6/11/09.

California authorities have made massive allegations of workers’ comp fraud against an employer.

The Orange County District Attorney has charged the owners of three California roofing businesses with $38 million in workers’ comp fraud.

Michael Petronella and Devon Kile are accused of skirting comp payments by under-reporting the number of employees working for their companies and by discouraging their workers from filing claims. They both face between five and 102 years in prison.

Officials started an investigation when an employee of one of the companies fell off a roof and collected $6,000 in workers’ comp coverage.

The employee said he was working for Petronella Roofing, which had workers’ comp coverage. In fact, he was on a different company’s payroll, Western Cleanoff. Western had no comp insurance because it claimed it didn’t have any employees.

The indictment cites 41 other instances of employees who filed comp claims while on the payroll of uninsured companies owned by Petronella and Kile.

The district attorney accuses the two owners of playing a shell game of shuffling payrolls to make fraudulent claims for uncovered workers who were injured.

Why should other companies care?

Does comp fraud by some companies impact others who do the right thing and purchase proper insurance coverage?

One obvious reason it does: Companies without proper comp insurance have lower costs and can charge less than competitors.

Here’s another reason: Fraud is a key factor behind high comp insurance rates for other companies. When employers under-report the number of insured workers to reduce their comp premiums, it looks like there are fewer workers in a particular industry.

Comp premiums are based on injury rates in an industry. If the number of total workers is too low, but the number of injured workers stays the same, it appears that an industry has a higher accident rate than it actually does.

In California, where this case took place, the state Workers’ Compensation Insurance Bureau recently recommended a 24% average increase in comp premiums.

In a recent poll on Safety News Alert, only 19% of respondents said the current workers’ comp laws were just about right.

What do you think about the state of workers’ comp? Let us know in the Comments Box below.

The Orange County Register has more about this fraud case here and here.

ANC roofing owner Kenneth Alton entered a no contest plea to the charge of failing to protect employees from a hazard. He was sentenced to nine months in jail and fined $248,000.

Company supervisor Robert McAfee plead no contest to a single misdemeanor violation and was sentenced to 30 days in jail.

Another former ANC owner will be sentenced in May.

On May 11, 2006, ANC employee Antonio Serrano backed into an unguarded skylight and fell 21 feet to his death while performing roofing work. Cal/OSHA fined ANC $14,400 for not providing a barrier to prevent a fall through a skylight opening in that incident.

Four months later on Sept. 21, 2006, ANC employee Jose Maya suffered major head trauma when he fell 19 feet from an unprotected skylight while working on a different roofing project. Cal/OSHA fined ANC $70,000 in that incident and referred the case to the Sonoma County District Attorney’s office.

An investigation revealed that ANC continued to operate in flagrant violation of the California Labor Code after Serrano died in the first incident.

California law requires that employees have fall protection if they’re working within six feet of a skylight.

Slips, trips and falls are routinely one of the top causes of injuries in workplaces. They also subtract from a company’s bottom line due to medical and workers’ comp insurance, lost productivity and retraining costs.

Here are 12 common mistakes made by companies when it comes to slip, trip and fall prevention:

• Mistake #12: Starting from scratch. There’s no need to. One place to start: consensus standards, such as ASTM’s Practice for Safe Walking Surfaces and ANSI’s Standard for the Provision of Slip Resistance on Walking/Working Surfaces.
• Mistake #11: Missing the opportunity to control walking style. Employees need to be reminded not to run and to keep their eyes on their walking path, especially while carrying items.
• Mistake #10: Relying on ineffective measurements. Best practice: Test flooring as it will be installed and used, under expected conditions (including wetness).
• Mistake #9: Short flight stairs and other elevation changes. Stairs with three or fewer steps need to be marked with contrasting color to other walking surfaces and be well lit. Seriously consider eliminating any change in level that’s 1/4 inch or greater.
• Mistake #8: Footwear. Shoes meant for both indoor and outdoor working conditions may not provide the best protection against slip, trips and falls in either circumstance because of their design compromises. Shoe features that need to be considered are: tread pattern, tread composition, sole height, support, lacing and adjustment method.
• Mistake #7: Ignoring pre-loss indicators. Slippery floors often lead to a lot of near-misses without injury before an incident with injury occurs. Attention needs to be paid to near-misses.
• Mistake #6: Less than adequate housekeeping. Any slip, trip and fall prevention program needs to include a serious statement of commitment to keeping walking/working surfaces clean.
• Mistake #5: Relying on single-factor solutions. While it may seem prudent to focus on the largest potential cause of slips, trips and falls in a particular facility, secondary factors shouldn’t be ignored after the primary one is addressed. Example: If a floor’s finish is addressed, the facility should still look into floor treatments, footwear, warnings and spill response.
• Mistake #4: Unresponsive contaminant control. Contaminants aren’t just chemicals. In some facilities they may be weather-related or food. Elimination of the contaminant should be considered first, followed by reduction and then dealing with the contaminants once they’re present.
• Mistake #3: Lack of proper cleaning procedures. Problems with cleaning range from poor spill response to improper daily cleaning to insufficient or nonexistent deep cleaning.
• Mistake #2: Selecting flooring inappropriate for the application. If a flooring sample can be installed to test under actual conditions, that’s ideal. If that’s not possible, find other examples of similar installations to yours.
• Mistake #1: Lack of proper follow-up. Selecting the proper flooring and establishing policies to prevent slips, trips and falls are the right places to start. But policies must be reinforced and updated if necessary. Companies should follow up on near-misses as well as injuries.

Adapted from a presentation by Keith Vidal of Vidal Engineering in St. Louis and David Natalizia of Dynamic Safety in Costa Mesa, CA, at the 2008 ASSE Safety Conference. For information on ASSE’s 2009 Safety Conference, click here.

A Phoenix police officer tripped over an electrical cord at work. She required knee and back surgery.

Afterward, she could only get around with crutches or a wheelchair.

Her doctor recommended that she be provided with housekeeping services, and she sought that as a benefit from her employer’s workers’ comp insurer.

The insurer fought the claim. The worker said housekeeping would be “other treatment” under state comp law. The court didn’t see it that way.

However, this isn’t the case in all states. California has awarded injured employees workers’ comp payments for housekeeping.

Court Cite: Patches v. City of Phoenix, Arizona Court of Appeals, No. 1 CA-IC 08-2008, 2/24/09.

Not only is this a bizarre OSHA fine, it could set a dangerous precedent. The agency has fined a company for an employee’s fatal injury that happened while he was away from his home office on assignment.

Buffalo News sportswriter Tom Borrelli fell while climbing a steep set of stairs on Nov. 8, 2008, at Buffalo’s All High Stadium where he was covering a football game.

Borrelli was trying to enter the stadium’s press box. To get there, reporters have to climb 13 steep metal stairs, prop open a hatch and walk across an unprotected walkway on the stadium roof.

Borrelli apparently hit his head at the top of the stairs and fell down them.

The reporter was paralyzed from the neck down after the fall and died of his injuries 12 days later.

Now OSHA has issued a fine — not against Buffalo public schools, but against the newspaper for sending Borrelli to cover the game. Total fine: $31,500.

OSHA found that:

• fixed stairways were less than 22 inches wide
• fixed stairs were installed at an angle to the horizontal greater than 50 degrees
• stair railings and handrails were not installed according to regulation; instead there was a single pipe-rail 26 inches above the stair tread
• fixed stairs did not have at least 7 feet of vertical clearance between the stair treads and the overhead obstructions, and
• a side-hinged door was not used at the top of the stairs; instead, there was a hatchway.

Obviously, the newspaper had no control over any of that. So what’s the reasoning behind fining the newspaper?

“Reporters were exposed to the hazards of falls and head injuries whenever they used the press box,” said Arthur Dube, regional director of OSHA’s Buffalo office.

“The newspaper was aware of these conditions. [It] should have prevented the reporters from using the stairs and the press box until they were corrected,” Dube said.

Buffalo News editor Margaret Sullivan called OSHA’s fine “illogical.”

She notes that reporters are sent into all sorts of situations, including covering wars, that newspapers can’t control.

A lawyer for Borrelli’s family says a lawsuit against the school district is pending. The family says it has no intention of suing the newspaper because Borrelli was just performing the job he loved on the day of his fatal injury.

The school district has been cited with serious violations by the state and is under order to repair the stairs by July.

Reporters aren’t the only workers who are sent to conduct their jobs off-site. All sorts of contractors and repair people do this every day, as do salespeople.

Imagine being fined by OSHA because your employee suffered a work injury that didn’t happen on your property.

What do you think of this case? Let us know in the Comments Box below.

Which types of on-the-job injuries cause employees to miss the most time from work?

Liberty Mutual Insurance has released its annual Workplace Safety Index that identifies the leading causes of the most disabling workplace injuries.

Overall, the estimated direct U.S. workers’ compensation costs for these top ten injuries totaled $48.6 billion in 2006.

These 10 categories account for 87.9% of the cost burden of disabling workplace injuries.

Here’s the breakdown on the top 10:

1. Overexertion (injuries caused by excessive lifting, pushing, pulling, holding or throwing): $12.4B, 25.7%
2. Fall on the same level (such as slips and trips): $6.4B, 13.3%
3. Fall to lower level: $5.3B, 10.8%
4. Bodily reaction (injuries caused from slipping or tripping without falling): $4.8B, 10.0%
5. Struck by object (such as a tool falling on a worker from above): $4.3B, 8.9%
6. Struck against object (such as a worker walking into a door): $2.5B, 5.1%
7. Highway incident: $2.4B, 4.9%
8. Caught in/compressed by: $2.1B, 4.4%
9. Repetitive motion (injuries due to repeated stress or strain): $2.0B, 4.0%, and
10. Assaults/violent acts: $0.4B, 0.9%.

Between 1998 and 2006, the costs of repetitive motion injuries declined the most: 35.3%. The costs of fall on the same level and fall to lower level each showed the largest increase: 17.9%.

Have you had success recently in reducing any of these types of injuries? If so, let us know about it in the Comments Box below.

OSHA has fined LandCoast Insulation, Inc., $72,000 for alleged safety violations in a scaffolding collapse that left one worker dead and six injured.

The scaffold collapsed inside a plant in Mississippi.

OSHA issued one willful citation for $63,000 for substituting weaker horizontal scaffold components.

LandCoast also faces two serious citations for $9,000 for using damaged scaffold components and for failing to provide employees with effective training.

An OSHA official says the company’s use of weaker parts directly led to the structure’s collapse and the worker’s death.

The company has 15 days to decide whether to contest the fines.

You can read more about this case here.

That’s the on-screen message at the end of each of the safety videos on YouTube. Warning: They’re disturbing.

Each short story addresses different safety topics in a variety of workplace settings:

1. Restaurant: Slip-and-fall and burn hazards.
2. Construction: Falls from heights and combustible materials.
3. Factory: Forklift and storage safety.
4. Retail: Ladder safety.
5. Electricity: A dead worker speaks from a coffin.

A federal court has upheld OSHA’s multi-employer policy, which says controlling employers may be responsible for the safety of other employers’ workers, including when a general contractor hires subcontractors.

The court has overturned the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission (OSHRC) which previously ruled the policy violated OSHA regulations.

Specifically, OSHRC had said the “controlling employer” part of the policy wasn’t valid when applied to general contractors who neither created hazards nor exposed employees to hazards on projects they control. But the court disagreed.

Summit Contractors had subcontracted almost all work on a construction project.

Subcontractors’ employees had been working on scaffolds without personal fall protection or guard rails. Summit’s project superintendent warned the other companies’ employees about using fall protection.

After an inspection, OSHA cited Summit for violations involving the subcontractors’ workers.

Now, the court has upheld OSHA’s ability to cite Summit.

Cite: Solis V. Summit Contractors, Inc., 8th Circuit, No. 07-2191, 2/26/09.

Since we started SafetyNewsAlert.com several months ago, we’ve heard from many readers that OSHA needs to hold employees as well as employers accountable for safety to reduce injuries and fatalities. Now, OSHA has taken steps with one company to do just that.

OSHA has fined 160 Broadway Corp., dba Broadway Concrete, $750,000 as part of a settlement agreement for 13 repeat violations involving fall hazards.

The amount of the fine is enough to get any company’s attention. But that’s not all Broadway agreed to.

Broadway has also agreed to reduce the salary of senior job superintendents who fail to comply with applicable OSHA and job safety practices.

So if these supervisors don’t enforce safety rules, their pay will get docked.

More costs than just a fine

Broadway will have to spend even more money as a result of this settlement. It’s also agreed to:

• Employ a full-time chief of construction operations and a corporate safety director to have authority over senior job superintendents in safety and health issues.
• Employ a full-time site safety director on each large project and have a safety director inspect smaller projects at least once a week.
• Provide safety and health management training to superintendents and supervisory personnel working on each site, and train company and subcontractor employees on each site’s safety and health plan.

Is this a good first step to make supervisors accountable for the safety of the people they manage? Should OSHA go further to dock rank-and-file workers’ pay for safety infractions? Let us know in the Comments Box below.

A drunk construction worker jumped off the 36th floor of a building in Lower Manhattan into protective netting one floor below.

He wasn’t injured, but the unidentified worker was fired immediately, according to the Downtown Express. No word on why he jumped.

As the worker made his way up the building, his boss told him to put on a harness. The worker yelled back that he didn’t need one.

Police may charge the worker with reckless endangerment.

The incident happened at the W Hotel construction site. The building previously located at the construction site was damaged and contaminated during the 9/11 attacks and had to be demolished.

Certified Painting Co., Inc., of Alsip, IL, faces $225,000 in fines for 17 alleged violations — eight willful and nine serious.

That’s bad enough. But this is the 16th time the company has been inspected by OSHA since 1976. It’s been cited for more than 100 safety and health violations.

In the latest case, Certified has cited for failure to:

• have proper carbon monoxide monitoring devices
• provide and ensure workers were using personal protective equipment
• provide required hygiene facilities
• ensure workers conducted required hygiene practices after possible exposure to lead or other hazardous materials
• provide U.S. Coast Guard-approved life jackets and have a lifesaving skiff immediately available at locations where employees were working over or adjacent to water
• provide proper fall protection for employees working on scaffolding
• maintain a safety and health program
• provide a required training program before employee exposure to lead, and
• conduct regular inspections of the job site by a competent person.

You can read more about OSHA’s citations against Certified here.

Peach State Roofing of Rock Hill, SC, was issued just one citation by OSHA from a recent inspection.

But that citation will cost the company $50,000 because it’s a repeat of one it was cited for previously.

OSHA visited a worksite in Sicklerville, NJ, where two Peach State employees were performing roofing work.

After the inspection, the company received one repeat citation for failure to provide fall protection for employees working approximately 13 feet above ground.

American Bridge, based in Pennsylvania, faces $90,000 in fines after an employee fell 70 feet to his death from a girder at a construction site.

The victim fell at the site of the Highway 62/641 bridge being built over the Tennessee River below Grand Rivers, KY. He was wearing a harness and lanyard but wasn’t anchored.

OSHA is citing the company with one willful violation for failing to eliminate employee exposure to fall hazards and failing to ensure that employees properly used personal protective equipment while working above heights of 6 feet. That carries a $70,000 penalty.

The agency is also issuing four serious citations to the company for:

• using pulleys that weren’t guarded on the winch gear
• failing to barricade the swing radius on the cranes
• not securing material against accidental displacement, and
• failing to use conforming fall protection systems.

Each of those citations carries a $5,000 penalty.

OSHA said American had a fall protection plan, but management failed to enforce its own policy.