In 2016 and 2017, The General Accountability Office (GAO) reported that meat and poultry workers faced multiple occupational hazards. OSHA is responsible for ensuring worker safety and health, Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) is responsible for ensuring the safety of meat and poultry products, and employers are responsible for providing safe and healthful workplaces. […]
A private hospital company has been fined £160,000 for breaching health and safety regulations after three (3) people were injured during a chlorine leak. The company pleaded guilty to two (2) charges of failing to discharge general health, safety, and welfare duty in relation to an incident on March 11, 2021, when a chemical reaction
A natural gas processing plant is a facility designed to clean raw natural gas by separating impurities and various non-methane hydrocarbons and fluids to produce dry natural gas. Processing raw natural gas begins at the inlet gas piping or gas stream of a natural gas processing plant. This piping delivers the raw natural gas to
The Washington State Department of Labor & Industries (L&I) is proposing updated workplace safety rules for petroleum refineries designed to prevent catastrophic events like the 2010 explosion that killed seven workers at the former Tesoro refinery in Anacortes. The proposed update addresses what’s known as process safety management (PSM), which describes the way workplaces handle
To say that accidents are due to human failure is not so much untrue as unhelpful for three reasons: Every accident is due to human error: someone, usually a manager, has to decide what to do; someone, usually a designer, has to decide how to do it; someone, usually an operator, has to do it.
A federal investigation has found that the operator of a specialty frozen pizza manufacturing plant in Illinois could have prevented the death of a 29-year-old sanitation worker by following proper machine safety procedures. OSHA CSHOs learned the sanitation worker suffered fatal injuries while working on the overnight shift under the supervision of the Pizza Company
A 29-year-old worker suffered the amputation of a fingertip while reassembling a pump, an injury the employer could have prevented by ensuring to shutdown and lockout the equipment to prevent it from unexpectedly starting during maintenance. OSHA investigated after the company reported the December 2022 injury and found the employer did not train workers on
This posting is a spin-off of information presented in the white paper from the UK’s Chartered Institute of Ergonomics and Human Factors. That paper focused on concerns with treating human factors in Bowtie’s analysis. I have modified their wording to make their valid points reflect all recognized PHA methodologies. The paper mentions eight (8) concerns
That would have been my headline as a safety professional with over 30 years of experience investigating serious accidents. I am always amazed at how society sees failures like organizations do. If the DOJ truly believes what they claim to have found in the 2-year investigation of the MPD, then why did they prosecute the
The pandemic is chocked full of LEARNING opportunities that we can translate into our effort to improve safety at our facilities. The one that screams at me the most is one of how our elected leaders (and I use that term loosely) behaved. I said back in the middle of the pandemic that we needed
Imagine a room of 100 adults, and I am teaching these adults basic math for the first time. I write on my whiteboard that 2+2 = 4. And I repeat this over and over. Out of these 100 adults, there will be 10% that believe me because I am the teacher, and they understand they
The recent release of a report regarding the catastrophic collapse of Champlain Towers South is a “storybook” of how Latent Organizational failures set the stage for an accident. And like all the bad accidents before this one, everyone from the government to the media is looking for someone or some people to blame (i.e., Active
