Elaine’s Combustible Bubble Boy Stalling on Safety
Elaine’s Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health, Edwin Foulke, Jr., traveled on Monday to Georgia examining the Imperial Sugar Co. refinery where an explosion recently killed twelve workers.
As the local Savannah press noted:
Mr. Fouke says OSHA is anxious to set a standard for businesses that deal with combustible dust but he says those standards can not be set until the investigation in Port Wentworth wraps up. A task that could take up to 6 months.
Employees working in dangerous conditions don’t have 6 months to wait for OSHA to get its act together. In fact, unions representing refinery workers, along with the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, have been asking OSHA to set a combustible dust standard for quite some time, only to be ignored by Elaine and Foulke.
Meeting with the Savannah Morning News’ editorial board, Foulke stated that standards for housekeeping, ventilation and electrical wiring can significantly lower the chances of a dust explosion. The problem runs deeper than housekeeping, though; combustible dust is a serious workplace threat, and there’s accepted standards that Elaine Chao and Ed Foulke could implement temporarily until this investigation is finished.
Elaine and Edwin: stop stalling, implement standards, and make workplaces safe.
March 12th, 2008 at 1:46 pm
Port Wentworth is right near beautiful Savannah, Georgia. I thought about working at that plant — good thing I didn’t.
Plant explosions are certainly ugly, and are a reminder of how far astray our society has gone; death from fire is the most horrendous.
But, and this is a “big but,” these explosive environments kill far more, and disable far more, from the toxic effects on the lungs. Lung damage is the most common lethal occupational hazard. Added to these explosive gases are all the other bad environments especially in the concrete business — I was a mixer driver and a batch plant operator when I was living near Savannah.
Lung disease is where the majority of the labor safety effort has to be concentrated. Somehow these more dramatic problems have to be translated into the more significant ones, even if the significant ones are more mundane and less spectacular.
My 2 cents.