 This guidance document (A Guide to Developing A Hazardous Materials Training Program – link at the bottom of this post) explains the training requirements in the Hazardous Materials Regulations, identifies those employees who must be trained, and provides a tool to help hazmat employers determine what type of training and training environment may be best for their employees.
Hazardous materials transportation is a process that involves people performing functions related to handling, packaging, storing, moving, loading and unloading of hazardous materials, and responding to emergency situations while such materials are in transportation. It includes employees responsible for the safe transportation hazmat. The process also incorporates functions to design, manufacture, fabricate, inspect, mark, maintain, recondition, repair, or test a package, container or packaging component used in transporting hazardous materials. With such a complex process, the United States Department of Transportation (DOT) has identified human error as a contributing cause for most hazmat transportation incidents.
Continue reading Guide to Developing a Hazardous Materials Training Program
Scott Schneider, director of safety for the Laborers’ Health and Safety Fund of North America and chairman of the work group that developed the New ANSI A10.47 Standard, provided a detailed overview, via a webinar, about this new standard on “Work Zone Safety for Highway Construction”. This comprehensive standard, effective February 24, 2010, covers practices including [...]
OSHA recently released 25+ years worth of industrial hygiene sampling data as a part of the “Open Government” initiative.
OSHA takes industrial hygiene samples as part of its compliance monitoring program. Many of these samples are submitted to the Salt Lake Technical Center for analysis. Sampling data represent personal, area, and bulk samples for various airborne contaminants.
Personal [...]
 A number of free OSHA applicable PowerPoint templates are available on OHShub.com. Below you will find some of the major OSHA topics that you can download and tailor to suit your needs.
Note: All presentations are in .ppt (PowerPoint) format. For a free Office PowerPoint viewer, click HERE.
OSHA is proposing to revise its Recordkeeping regulation (29 CFR part 1904) to restore a column to the OSHA 300 Log that employers would use to record work-related musculoskeletal disorders (MSD). The 2001 Recordkeeping final regulation included an MSD column, but the requirement was deleted before it became effective. The proposed rule would require employers to [...]
OSHA’s On-Site Consultation Service offers free and confidential advice to small and medium-sized businesses in all states across the country, with priority given to high-hazard worksites. Consultation services are totally separate from enforcement and do not result in penalties or citations.
Program Information
Using a free consultation service largely funded by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration [...]
Want to know what the general differences between a respirator and a surgical mask? Watch the following video.
In summary,
A respirator:
reduces exposure to airborne contaminants
specifically fits you
must be NIOSH certified, if required by your employer
protects against many airborne infectious diseases
A facemask:
loose fitting disposable mask
help stop large droplets from being spread by the person wearing it
help stop [...]
 While even the non-fatal injury can cost a company ten’s of thousands of dollars (as noted in OHShub.com’s post: The Hidden Cost of Unsafe Behavior: Running the Numbers, even more unbelievable is the cost of a fatality. NIOSH has produced a document entitled, The Cost of Fatal Injuries to Civilian Workers in the United States, detailing a decade of research (1992 – 2001) into the economic aspect of a workplace fatality.
The method used to calculate the economic burden was the cost-of-illness method: which sums indirect and direct costs. The cost-of-illness method was used to calculate the mean, median, and total societal costs for the fatalities reported in National Traumatic Occupational Fatalities surveillance system (NTOF).
Indirect costs are calculated for each incident by accounting for the probability of survival, median annual earnings at the time of death, home production costs, earnings growth rate adjustments, and real discount rate. These costs are then added to the direct cost of medical expenses to arrive at the societal cost of fatal injury. The addition of home production costs to this model represents an advancement in methodology over models which simply account for loss of income from wages and presents a point of departure from previous studies. Limitations of this study are varied and include lack of inclusion of some costs of insurance compensation, lack of comprehensiveness of data drawn from death certificates and pay equity.
After the calculations are preformed, over $43 billion dollars (in 2001 dollars) is the cumulative cost for occupational fatalities in the US.
Some of the major findings included:
Continue reading The Hidden Cost of Workplace Fatalities: 43 Billion Dollars
According to information provided in a report by a nationwide insurance company, approximately 60% of company executives figure that their companies save $3 for every dollar spent on safety programs. A $10,000,000.00 company that spends 1% of their budget on safety can figure to save approximately $300,000.00. OSHA puts the figure to be more [...]
 The Wall Street Journal has written an article based upon findings of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) indicating a rise in the occurrences of black lung in miners. Based upon the findings of NIOSH, approximately 9% of miners with 25+ years of experience were positive for black lung in 2005 and 2006, which represents a doubling of the percentage of those with black lung in the 1990′s. Black lung is serious health and safety issue in mines, even more so than mine accidents, with more than 10,000 dead since 2000, versus less than 400 from mine accidents.
New monitoring equipment may be potentially introduced by MSHA (Mine Safety and Health Administration) to allow real-time, continuous monitoring of an employee’s dust exposure, versus the standard 8-hour periodic exposure monitoring. The real-time monitoring would also take into account longer work shifts, which is quite common in the mining industry.
For more information on black lung, NIOSH has produced a video entitled, Faces of Black Lung
View Part 2 after the break:
Continue reading Black Lung Cases on the Rise
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