“The reason I talk to myself is because I’m the only one whose answers I accept.” — George Carlin I was recently astonished to hear someone talking about OSHA-required hard hat color codes. “Yeah, and green is for any who works in forestry,” they said. I wanted to contradict them on the spot but stopped. [...]
“Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” — Charles Dudley Warner A few weeks ago, we were treated to the sight of icicles hanging from NFL Coach Andy Reid’s moustache during the Chiefs-Dolphins playoff game in Kansas City. That gut punch of arctic air to the Midwest overwhelmed us. Here, our [...]
“Automation is driving the decline of banal and repetitive tasks.” — Amber Rudd Five years ago, I had the opportunity to give a TED talk called “Deadly Jobs”. I talked about the hazards that consistently contribute to work-related fatalities and the deadly occupations in the United States. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) recently released [...]
“…I can feel it in my toes. Christmas is all around me. And so the feeling grows.” — Bill Nighy in Love Actually Although I have on a couple of occasions, I don’t usually give protective footwear as a gift during the holiday season. Most people don’t consider protective footwear to be very festive. However, [...]
“Rather than a prosecutor saying, ‘you have nothing to fear if you have done nothing wrong,’ a more accurate portrayal would be ‘if I decide you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear.’” — Sidney Dekker There are thousands of work-related fatalities in the United States every year. Every few weeks, an intrepid [...]
“Love is like oxygen. You get too much, you get too high; not enough and you’re gonna die.” — Andy Scott, of Sweet OSHA standards define safe lower and upper limits to the concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere to which workers are exposed. The limits are a minimum of 19.5% and a maximum of [...]
“Representation not only reflects, but actually changes reality.” — Angela Chen OSHA has several regulations that allow or require employee participation in activities regarding workplace safety. For instance, there is employee participation during OSHA inspections and in the development of the elements of the Process Safety Management (PSM) standard. And those regulations don’t stop at [...]
“Meetings should have as few people as possible, but all the right people.” — Charles W. Scharf Ever been in a Process Hazard Analysis (PHA) meeting where there were over a dozen people? Wasn’t it excruciating? Either you wondered why you needed to be there, or you wondered why some of the other people needed [...]
“OSHA has determined that…the Form 300A data are sufficient for enforcement targeting and compliance assistance at this time.” — OSHA in 84 FR 392, 25-Jan-2019 Many have a hard time distinguishing between an injury that is OSHA “recordable” and an injury that is OSHA “reportable”. “Recordable” means that an employer must complete a Form 301 [...]
“I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” — T.S. Elliot OSHA does not have a combustible dust regulation. Instead, it relies on a hodge-podge of regulations combined with the General Duty Clause. If someone wants to understand what OSHA expects in terms of combustible dusts, they must turn to OSHA’s Combustible Dust [...]
