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Urgent recall of fall arrester system after
Queensland death
SALA Zorba Twin
Elastic Lanyard recall
Date:
05 November 2004
The Construction
Forestry Mining Energy Union is issuing an urgent
warning to construction workers after the failure of
a popular fall arrester system resulted in the death
of a Queensland building worker on a Leighton site
near Toowomba on Tuesday.
Thousands of units of the
arrester are in use across Australia,
The product is being temporarily recalled by the
producer after a worker fell from a high voltage
transmission tower while wearing the SALA Zorba Twin
Elastic Lanyard fall arrester, on which initial
investigations by the CFMEU reveal stitching failed,
resulting in the man's death.
Capital Safety Group, the producers of the
product, as well as Leighton Holdings have urgently
recalled all SALA products on site, however the
CFMEU is demanding that all workers conduct a
thorough check of all personal protective equipment
in use, even those from other producers.
CFMEU NSW Safety Coordinator Dick Whitehead said
the accident was a tragedy that could have been
avoided by thorough equipment checks prior to use on
the site.
"Having good safety equipment is the difference
between life and death in a situation like this, and
as this mans tragic death demonstrates, shortcuts
with safety, and a failure to conduct a thorough
examination of safety equipment before use can have
dire consequence," he said.
"We are requesting that construction workers
around the country heed this wakeup call, and demand
high quality, well maintained safety equipment from
their employers.
"The CFMEU has zero tolerance towards safety
shortcuts, and we are demanding regular, thorough
checks of all equipment to guarantee it is still
safe and in working condition.
"Every worker and every boss need to be serious
about preventing repeats of this accident, and if
faulty equipment is identified, workers should
refuse to conduct any further work until adequate,
safe equipment is provided.
"There are still far too many preventable deaths
occurring on building sites, and we need tough,
proactive policies in place that put the safety of
workers first so that no more Australian families
are forced to lose loved ones like this."
Date:
10 November 2004
JOHN HOLLAND GROUP PTY
LTD
URGENT
ANNOUNCEMENT: TWIN LANYARD FALL ARREST SYSTEMS
On Tuesday 2nd November 2004, a sub-contractor
employee engaged on a John Holland project near
Toowoomba in Queensland, fell from a high voltage
transmission tower and sustained fatal injuries.
The deceased was wearing a full body harness and
was using a SALA twin lanyard fall arrest system.
Following preliminary investigations on the site and
a series of destructive tests at the Capital Safety
NATA facility in Sydney today, John Holland and
Capital Safety have established that twin lanyard
fall arrest systems can fail under certain operating
conditions.
John Holland has withdrawn all twin lanyard
systems from use unless the lanyards are separate
and each has its own shock absorber in place, each
independently connected to the main fall arrest
attachment point on the harness.
This withdrawal from service applies to all twin
lanyard systems regardless of the manufacturer.
John Holland is continuing to investigate
alternative fall arrest systems.
Further Information:
Stephen Sasse
Corporate General Manager
HR/IR & Safety
John Holland Group Pty Ltd
61 2 9552 7437
0417 482 331
For more
information:
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Contact |
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Dick Whitehead - NSW Safety Co-ordinator |
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Phone |
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02 9749 0400
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Address |
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Locked Bag 1, Lidcombe NSW 1825
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Email |
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enquiries@nsw.cfmeu.asn.au
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May 2, 2005
With Little Fanfare, a New Effort to Prosecute Employers That Flout
Safety Laws
By DAVID BARSTOW and LOWELL BERGMAN
or decades, the most egregious workplace safety violations have
routinely escaped prosecution, even when they led directly to deaths
or grievous injuries. Safety inspectors hardly ever called in the
Justice Department. Congress repeatedly declined to toughen criminal
laws for workplace deaths. Employers with extensive records of
safety violations often paid insignificant fines and continued to
ignore basic safety rules.
Inside the Bush administration, though, a novel effort to end this
pattern of leniency has begun to take root.
With little fanfare and some adept bureaucratic maneuvering, a
partnership between the Occupational Safety and Health
Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency and a select
group of Justice Department prosecutors has been forged to identify
and single out for prosecution the nation's most flagrant workplace
safety violators.
The initiative does not entail new legislation or regulation.
Instead, it seeks to marshal a spectrum of existing laws that carry
considerably stiffer penalties than those governing workplace safety
alone. They include environmental laws, criminal statutes more
commonly used in racketeering and white-collar crime cases, and even
some provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a corporate reform law.
The result, those involved say, should be to increase significantly
the number of prosecutions brought against dangerous employers,
particularly in cases involving death or injury.
This new approach addresses a chronic weakness in the regulatory
system - the failure of federal agencies to take a coordinated
approach toward corporations that repeatedly violate the same safety
and environmental regulations. The E.P.A. and OSHA in particular
have a history of behaving like estranged relatives. Yet the central
premise of this unfolding strategy is that shoddy workplace safety
often goes hand in hand with shoddy environmental practices.
"If you don't care about protecting your workers, it probably stands
to reason that you don't care about protecting the environment
either," said David M. Uhlmann, chief of the Justice Department's
environmental crimes section, which is charged with bringing these
new prosecutions.
The effort is noteworthy in an administration that has generally
resisted efforts to increase penalties for safety and environmental
violations. It has declined to support such steps as making it a
felony for employers to commit willful safety violations that cause
a worker's death. Such violations are currently misdemeanors,
punishable by up to six months in jail. Instead, the administration
has emphasized a more collaborative approach, offering companies
increased technical assistance, for instance, on how to comply with
regulations.
The new initiative is already at an advanced stage of planning.
Hundreds of senior OSHA compliance officers have attended training
sessions led by Justice Department prosecutors and criminal
investigators from the E.P.A. In several regions of the country,
OSHA managers have begun making lists of the worst workplaces and
sharing them with E.P.A. investigators and prosecutors, who select
the most promising cases for investigation. Several criminal
inquiries and prosecutions are under way.
In March, for example, Motiva Enterprises, an oil refining company
partly owned by Shell Oil, pleaded guilty to endangering workers
negligently and committing environmental crimes in Delaware. The
company was ordered to pay a $10 million fine and sentenced to three
years' probation.
Even so, it is difficult to gauge the degree of political support
for more prosecutions. The initial planning won the blessing of John
Ashcroft, then the attorney general. His successor, Alberto R.
Gonzales, has been briefed on the initiative and is said to be
supportive.
But in March, a news conference to announce the initiative was
canceled. The name of the program was also changed. What was to have
been called the Worker Endangerment Initiative is now described as a
"policy decision" - not an "initiative" - aimed at achieving
"environmental protection in the workplace."
Neither Jonathan L. Snare, the acting OSHA administrator, nor Howard
Radzely, the Labor Department's top lawyer, would agree to be
interviewed about it. But Richard E. Fairfax, OSHA's director of
enforcement programs, described the initiative as part of a broader
effort by the agency to crack down on companies that persistently
flout workplace safety rules.
"This is important to the agency," he said.
If some hesitation exists at the political level, enthusiasm is high
in the trenches of OSHA and the E.P.A. Andrew D. Goldsmith,
assistant chief of the environmental crimes section, has led most of
the OSHA training sessions, in which he describes the many ways
criminal and environmental statutes can be brought to bear. It has
been a revelation of sorts, he says, to watch agency compliance
officers grasp the chance at last to seek significant criminal
penalties against defiant employers.
"You see a glint in these people's eyes, and you see them getting
very enthusiastic," Mr. Goldsmith said. "You see hands start
shooting up. They view us like the cavalry coming over the hill."
If sustained, the enthusiasm would represent an important cultural
shift inside OSHA, which has traditionally shied away from referring
even the most deliberate of safety violations to prosecutors.
>From 1982 to 2002, for example, the agency investigated 1,242 cases
in which it concluded that workers died because an employer
committed willful safety violations. OSHA declined to seek any
prosecution in 93 percent of those cases, The New York Times
reported in a 2003 series that described a bureaucracy in which
aggressive enforcement was thwarted at every level. But as the
series also demonstrated, OSHA's reluctance to seek prosecution had
also been fed by an assumption inside the agency that federal
prosecutors have little interest in cases that have rarely resulted
in prison sentences.
By fusing the technical skills and regulatory powers of the E.P.A.
and OSHA with the Justice Department's environmental crimes section,
the administration has created a potentially potent means of
changing that dynamic.
All federal environmental crimes carry potential prison sentences,
including up to 15 years for knowingly endangering workers. And
unlike OSHA, the E.P.A. has some 200 criminal investigators with
extensive experience building cases for federal prosecutors. In 2001
alone, the agency obtained prison sentences totaling 256 years.
OSHA, meanwhile, has wide jurisdiction over American workplaces, and
its inspectors routinely wander the floors of the nation's dirtiest
and most dangerous manufacturing operations. Unlike E.P.A.
inspectors, they also investigate hundreds of workplace deaths and
injuries each year. In short, they are well positioned to spot
potential environmental crimes, particularly those that harm
workers.
With nearly 40 prosecutors, the environmental crimes section of the
Justice Department has a long record of bringing complex criminal
cases against major employers. By contrast, before this initiative,
only one prosecutor at the Justice Department focused full time on
workplace safety crimes. Now, after identifying promising cases from
the lists sent by OSHA, prosecutors are also checking for
significant records of environmental infractions. If a plant is part
of a larger conglomerate, they are checking the records of sister
plants, too.
"We can see all the pieces," Mr. Goldsmith said. "We can
coordinate."
The value of that coordination became obvious, he and other
officials said, during a recent federal investigation into a New
Jersey foundry owned by McWane Inc., the nation's largest
manufacturer of cast-iron pipe. The investigation was prompted by
articles in The Times and a companion documentary on the PBS
television program "Frontline" that described McWane as one of the
most dangerous employers in America.
Senior officials at OSHA, the E.P.A. and the Justice Department saw
a way to produce an indictment that would "tell the whole picture"
of how a company could put profit ahead of all other considerations,
said Mr. Uhlmann, the chief of the environmental crimes section.
In December 2003, several senior managers at the New Jersey foundry
were indicted on charges of conspiring to violate safety and
environmental laws and repeatedly obstructing government inquiries
by lying and altering accident scenes. The case is pending, but
Justice Department officials called it a "pioneering indictment."
The partnership was cemented in a meeting last summer between Thomas
L. Sansonetti, then an assistant attorney general, Mr. Radzely, the
chief Labor Department lawyer, and John L. Henshaw, then the
administrator of OSHA.
In a recent interview before he left the Justice Department to
return to private practice, Mr. Sansonetti said he made it clear at
the meeting that the Justice Department was prepared to offer
training nationwide and a firm commitment to go after the worst
cases as a way to send a message of deterrence to other employers.
Mr. Henshaw and Mr. Radzely, he said, responded enthusiastically.
"That's where we agreed to take off on this," Mr. Sansonetti said.
John Hettish
615-418-7011
Middle Tennessee Two-way Inc.
www.mt2w.com
www.Tower-pro.net
jhettish@mt2w.com
OSHA Case
A 55 foot tower fell at a construction site, hitting a wall
and causing minor damage. No one was on the tower or near
enough to be hurt.
Not an OSHA issue RIGHT or WRONG?
A bystander contacted OSHA who reported to the scene. The
construction supervisor told the OSHA compliance "no problem" no one hurt
here.
The OSHA officer disagreed. Inspection revealed that some of
the bolts had been repaired and the foundation was inadequate. OSHA
levied 5 serious violations against the contractor for $224,000.00.
The company fought the citation and lost. The judge said
"everyday workers are killed or injured at construction sites because
companies don't follow OSHA instructions" OSHA must come down hard on
employers who violate safety requirements, regardless of whether there are
injures or not.
Fatal fall
from elevated forklift platform leads to over $50,000 in proposed
penalties
OSHA has cited
a Georgia agricultural services company for exposing workers to fall
hazards at the company's bulk fertilizer warehouse. The agency is
proposing penalties totaling $51,250. "Falls are preventable," said
John Deifer, OSHA's Savannah area director. "This tragic accident
would not have occurred if management had used safety equipment
readily available."
OSHA began an
investigation on August 26 after being notified that a worker had
died from injuries sustained in a fall from an elevated forklift
platform. According to the OSHA investigative report, the employee
was struck by a piece of electrical conduit as it was being removed
from overhead beams, causing him to lose his balance and fall eight
feet to the floor below.
The company
received one willful citation, with a proposed penalty of $49,000,
for failing to provide standard guardrails on the pallet or fall
arrest equipment for the employee. A "safety cage" equipped with
standard guardrails was available in the warehouse. OSHA issues a
willful citation when an employer has shown an intentional disregard
of, or plain indifference to, the requirements of the Occupational
Safety and Health Act and regulations.
OSHA also
issued two serious citations unrelated to the fatal accident, with
total proposed penalties of $2,250, for failing to have a "lockout-tagout"
program that would prevent workers from being caught in or struck by
energized equipment during repair or maintenance, and for operating
a forklift with a defective safety signal.
The company has
15 working days to contest the citations and proposed penalties
before the independent Occupational Safety and Health Review
Commission.
MIOSHA Civil
Case
On May 24,
1999, a crew from the construction company was installing sewer pipe
when a cave-in occurred. The employee, a 52-year old pipe layer, was
pronounced dead at the scene after rescuers worked for several hours
to extricate him from the trench. The fatality occurred in an area
of the excavation that was approximately 18 feet deep, with vertical
walls, and without any protection to guard against cave-ins.
The
investigation revealed that the company knew of the substantial risk
of injury to employees engaged in trenching work, and failed to
provide trenching support to prevent injury to their employees.
Company officials were at the job site and made no effort to protect
their employees. Additionally, they failed to furnish the employee a
place of employment free from recognized hazards that were likely to
cause death or serious physical harm.
On March 2,
2000, 30 citations for civil violations of the Michigan Occupational
Safety and Health Act were hand delivered to the company, including
12 alleged willful serious violations, 12 alleged serious
violations, and six alleged other-than-serious violations. Six of
the 12 alleged willful violations relate directly to the fatality.
The proposed penalties totaled $657,500. The company has appealed
the 30 civil citations resulting from this incident, and the MIOSHA
administrative appeal concerning the civil violations has been held
in abeyance until the conclusion of the criminal case.
Now that the
criminal case has concluded, MIOSHA will pursue the civil case. In
addition to the employee’s fatality, there are 10 outstanding cases
(subsequent to the fatality) that are in the MIOSHA appeal process,
with 115 proposed violations and $573,977 proposed penalties. Total
proposed penalties, including the employee fatality, for the company
exceed $1.2 million.
02/15/2005
Maguire Iron Faces Fines
A Sioux Falls
company faces nearly $100,000 in fines as the
result of a deadly accident at a Southwest
Minnesota water tower.
The accident in August of last year, killed
David Karst, of Sisseton, South Dakota, and hurt
two of his coworkers.
The three men worked for Maguire Iron and were
painting a water tower in Marshall when their
scaffolding gave way, and two of the men fell to
the ground.
The case is still open, but according to OSHA,
Maguire Iron was aware that there were problems
with the scaffolding.
Anna Peters
© 2005 KELOLAND TV. All Rights Reserved.
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