health and safety

By Laura Gottesdiener - Tom Dispatch, October 12, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

At 9 p.m. on that August night, when I arrived for my first shift as a cocktail waitress at Whispers, one of the two strip clubs in downtown Williston, I didn’t expect a 25-year-old man to get beaten to death outside the joint. Then again, I didn’t really expect most of the things I encountered reporting on the oil boom in western North Dakota this past summer.

“Can you cover the floor?” the other waitress yelled around 11 p.m. as she and her crop-top sweater sidled behind the bar to take over for the bouncers and bartenders. They had rushed outside to deal with a commotion. I resolved to shuttle Miller Lites and Fireball shots with extra vigor. I didn’t know who was fighting, but assumed it involved my least favorite customers of the night: two young brothers who had been jumping up and down in front of the stage, their hands cupping their crotches the way white boys, whose role models are Eminem, often do when they drink too much. One sported a buzz cut, the other had hair like soft lamb’s wool.

The rest of the night was a blur of beer bottles and customer commands to smile more. It was only later, after the clientele was herded out to Red Peters’s catchy “The Closing Song” -- “get the fuck out of here, finish up that beer” -- and the dancers had emerged from the dressing room in sweatshirts, that I realized everyone was on edge.

“What’s wrong?” I asked the scraggly bearded bouncer walking me to my dusty sedan, whose backseat would soon double as my motel room.

“The kid’s going to die,” he replied. Turned out one of the brothers had gotten his head bashed in by a man wielding a metal pipe. He’d been airlifted to the nearby city of Minot where he would pass away a few days later.

Catalysts for Instability

I hadn’t driven nearly 2,000 miles from Brooklyn to work as a cocktail waitress in a strip club. (That only happened after I ran out of money.) I had set off with the intention of reporting on the domestic oil boom that was reshaping North Dakota’s prairie towns as well as the balance of both global power and the earth’s atmosphere.

This spring, production in North Dakota surged past one million barrels of oil a day. The source of this liquid gold, as it is locally known, is the Bakken Shale: a layered, energy-rich rock formation that stretches across western North Dakota, the corner of Montana, and into Canada. It had been considered inaccessible until breakthroughs in drilling and hydraulic fracturing made the extraction of oil from it economically feasible. In 2008, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) announced that the Bakken Shale contained 25 times more recoverable oil than previously thought, sparking the biggest oil rush in state history.

Now, six years later, the region displays all the classic contemporary markers of hell: toxic flames that burn around the clock; ink-black smoke billowing from 18-wheelers; intermittent explosions caused by lightning striking the super-conductive wastewater tanks that hydraulic fracturing makes a necessity; a massive Walmart; an abundance of meth, crack, and liquor; freezing winters; rents higher than Manhattan; and far, far too many men.

Read the entire article here:

By Hilary Lewis - Earthworks, October 14, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

A new investigation by Houston Public Media and the Houston Chronicle shows Texas highways are now the nation's deadliest, and fracking is to blame.

Fracking requires thousands of truck trips to haul water, frack fluid and more recently, about 4% of fracked oil.

All the increased traffic has led to more accidents and fatalities. And not just in Texas.

Accidents

A 2014 AP report on roads and traffic fatalities found that fracking requires 2,300 to 4,000 truck trips per well to deliver fracking fluids, which is 33-50% more than conventional methods. With increased truck traffic comes more accidents. US census data in six drilling states shows that in some places, fatalities have more than quadrupled since 2004 — making vehicle crashes the single biggest cause of fatalities for oil and gas workers.

If you zoom in on North Dakota, recently deemed the deadliest place to work by the AFL-CIO, the numbers become starker (via AP):

In North Dakota drilling counties, the population has soared 43 percent over the last decade, while traffic fatalities increased 350 percent. Roads in those counties were nearly twice as deadly per mile driven than the rest of the state.

Another factor in the specific relationship between oil and gas workers and truck accidents (compared to other industries) is the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's (FMCSA) Hours of Service Oilfield Exception. This loophole allows the oil and gas industry to pressure truck drivers to work longer hours, an obvious safety hazard.

The New York Times exposed the drama and debate of the issue in Deadliest Danger Isn’t at the Rig but on the Road in 2012. Check out the annotated Documents on the Oil Field Exemptions From Highway Safety Rules for ignored testimony from truck drivers and the National Transportation Safety Board, and of course the industry defense, from a failed attempt in 2012 to close the loophole.

By Lauren McCauley - Common Dreams, October 13, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

Privatized U.S. hospitals are driving a "system failure" in the face of the Ebola epidemic, warn nurses, who say that healthcare facilities and workers across the country are ill-prepared because of poor training and oversight— putting those on the front lines at great risk.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed Sunday that a nurse at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital tested positive for the virus after treating Ebola patient Thomas Eric Duncan, who died of the disease last Wednesday.

Speaking on CBS' "Face the Nation," CDC Director Dr. Thomas Frieden blamed what he called a "breach in protocol" on the part of the healthcare worker for the spread of the infection.

However, nurses across the country have warned for weeks that hospitals are not doing enough to prepare for the epidemic.

"We're seeing that caregivers who are not being adequately trained are being blamed," said registered nurse Katy Roemer during a Sunday press conference hosted by the country's largest nursing union, National Nurses United (NNU). Roemer said that the organization has been asking hospitals to provide hands-on training during which nurses can ask questions about the precaution measures, to no avail. "We cannot blame the healthcare providers who are on the front lines, risking their lives to help patients and then face possible infection themselves," Roemer continued.

"You don't scapegoat and blame when you have a disease outbreak," agreed Bonnie Castillo, director of the Registered Nurses Response Network at NNU. "We have a system failure. That is what we have to correct."

Castillo and Roemer are among the voices expressing growing concern over the poor federal oversight of hospital preparedness, including proper staff training, in light of the Ebola crisis. "Because we have a privatized health care system it's all over the board," Castillo explained to CBS News. "There's no uniformity or enforcement mechanism."

By the CDC's own admission, they are unable to properly monitor hospitals and have no authority to make sure they comply with official guidelines.

By Mari Saito and Antoni Slodkowski - HR Reporter, October 8, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

HIRONO (Reuters) — Almost a year after Japan pledged to double hazard pay at the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant, workers are still in the dark about how much extra they are getting paid, if anything, for cleaning up the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.

Under pressure to improve working conditions at Fukushima after a series of radioactive water leaks last year, Tokyo Electric Power Co. president Naomi Hirose promised in November to double the hazard pay the utility allocates to its subcontractors for plant workers. That would have increased the amount each worker at the nuclear facility is supposed to earn to about $180 a day in hazard pay.

Only one of the more than three dozen workers interviewed by Reuters from July through September said he received the full hazard pay increase promised by Tepco. Some workers said they got nothing. In cases where payslips detailed a hazard allowance, the amounts ranged from $36 to about $90 a day — at best, half of what Hirose promised.

In some instances, workers said they were told they would be paid a hazard bonus based on how much radiation they absorb – an incentive to take additional risks at a dangerous work site.

One worker interviewed by Reuters said he was told he would get an additional $45 per day every time he was in so-called “hot zones” near Reactors No. 1 and No. 2. Another worker was told he would receive an hourly rate that worked out to $4,500 extra in hazard pay for being exposed to the radiation limit for Japan's nuclear workers over a five-year period. And a third worker said he was told the payout for that same exposure would be $36,000.

Assessing how much Fukushima workers are being paid is complicated by Tepco's insistence that pay is a private matter for its contractors. The power utility, which runs Fukushima and has been nationalised, sits at the top of a contracting pyramid that includes construction giants such as Taisei Corp. Tepco has declined to disclose details of any of its legal agreements with its subcontractors.

The top Tepco official at the plant conceded during a July press tour of the complex that he did not know how much of the increase in hazard pay was being disbursed. "When it comes to the pay rise, I don't have an exact understanding of how much money is getting directly to the workers," said Akira Ono, the Fukushima plant manager.

Tepco said in a statement to Reuters that it instructs subcontractors to ensure workers' pay is included in all contracts and it also asks companies working at the plant to submit documentation for all the subcontractors they use. The power utility said it had recently begun random checks of some of the smaller contractors to determine how much of the hazard pay is reaching workers. A worker who filled in a Tepco survey told Reuters in September that one of the questions was directly related to hazard pay.

Tepco still relies on some 800 mostly small contractors to provide workers for the cleanup after the tsunami that swamped the plant on March 11, 2011, sparked meltdowns at three reactors. Subcontractors provide almost all of the 6,000 workers now employed at the plant. Tokyo Electric employs only about 250 on its own payroll at the facility.

The workforce at Fukushima has almost doubled over the past year, mostly as part of an effort to protect groundwater from being contaminated and to store water that comes in contact with melted fuel in the reactor buildings.

Some of the workers who arrived recently at the plant have been building bunkers to store highly radioactive sludge, which is a byproduct of the process whereby contaminated water is treated. Others are installing equipment to freeze a ring of earth around four reactors at Fukushima to keep water from reaching the melted cores, an unprecedented effort directed by Kajima Corp and expected to cost nearly $300 million.

Kazumitsu Nawata, a professor in the University of Tokyo's department of technology who has researched conditions inside Fukushima, said that if workers do not receive pay that is commensurate with the risks they are taking, they will ultimately look elsewhere for employment. If more experienced workers leave for safer jobs in Tokyo where construction projects are accelerating ahead of the 2020 Olympic Games, it will also increase the likelihood of accidents at the plant, Nawata said in an interview.

"Until now, we have relied heavily on the goodwill of workers. But it's already been three years since the accident. This is no longer sustainable," he said.

By Dustin Bleizeffer - Wyofile, October 4, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

Web editor's note: This story bears an uncomfortabvle resemblance to the death of Louisiana-Pacific mill worker, R Fortunado Reyes, on September 14, 1989, detailed here.

Brett Samuel Collins, 20, was working his last few days at a construction job near Sheridan before heading back to college classes when a trackhoe bucket struck him in the head. He died Aug. 20, 2012.

“He was finally settling down and thinking school was the answer,” said his grandmother, Mary Jane Collins, of Sheridan. Up to that point, Brett Collins had worked several seasons for the U.S. Forest Service, requiring him to miss fall semesters. He’d attended two spring semesters at Sheridan College. “The construction company job was so he could go to school for the whole year,” Mary Jane Collins said.

The employer, COP Wyoming LLC, initially received five citations related to the accident that caused Brett Collins’ death. Two citations were dismissed, and the Wyoming Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) proposed $13,860 in fines for the remaining three. About a year later, the company and Wyoming OSHA settled on a much smaller fine; $6,773.

For the Collins family, the fine was an insult. They began to ask how a $6,773 fine was supposed to motivate companies to avoid violating critical workplace safety regulations.

By John Nicol and Dave Seglins - CBC News, October 8, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

• Rail companies fight rules to prevent crew fatigue video
• Proudlock conversation with CP Rail dispatcher audio

Canada’s major freight rail companies are fighting moves by the federal transportation regulator to curb “extreme fatigue” among railway engineers, a CBC News investigation has found.

CN Rail, CP and the Railway Association of Canada went on the attack two weeks ago at a “tense and heated” meeting of industry, union and government representatives, according to a number of people present.

The conflict was over research by Transport Canada that found high levels of exhaustion among workers driving freight trains, and proposals by the regulator to impose new limits on scheduling to help reduce their fatigue.

"The body language from industry was, 'You're not going to push us around,'" said Rob Smith of the Teamsters Canada Rail Conference recalling a meeting two weeks ago of the Fatigue Management Working Group, part of the federal government’s Advisory Council on Railway Safety.

He said industry was determined to ​discredit Transport Canada's research and thwart the regulator's proposals.

CBC received internal documents

CBC News has obtained internal Transport Canada documents, including meeting minutes and the working group's draft report that details widespread fatigue among freight engineers and proposes mandatory restrictions — some of which are already law in the U.S. — on how workers are scheduled to prevent exhaustion.

The government report concludes that rail lags behind the airline and trucking industries in dealing with fatigue. Reviews over the last three decades have always left it to the railway industry and its unions to sort out the problem.

In 2009, the regulator established the fatigue working group to address this longstanding issue.

Transport Canada's own analysis of CN and CP’s employee scheduling records from six different rail terminals across Canada concluded that, based on the timing and length of each shift, assigned through an unpredictable on-call system, that “extreme fatigue” was rampant:

• In four per cent of cases, employees were already “extremely fatigued” at the start of their shifts;
• 45 per cent of employees became extremely exhausted during work;
• and nearly all, or 99 per cent, were fatigued at least once during the month.

Combined with the results of a union survey, Transport Canada is now proposing enhanced safeguards and wants to harmonize Canada’s rail rules with requirements already in place in the U.S. that limit the hours and days railroaders can spend at work or on call.

By Eric de Place and Rich Feldman - Sightline Daily, October 8, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

The disaster in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec—where 47 people were killed by a Bakken oil train derailment—is commonly understood to have resulted from a train slipping its brakes and then rolling downhill into town where it crashed disastrously. It was a tragedy, but it should not be considered just a mechanical accident.

In truth, it was a self-reinforcing chain of events and conditions caused by underinvestment, lack of maintenance, and staff cutbacks. And it’s a lesson the Northwest should heed because it illuminates the risks of allowing small regional and short line railroads to pick up unit trains of crude oil from bigger railroads like BNSF and transport them short distances to refineries and terminals. The Northwest is home to at least two small railroads with big oil-by-rail aspirations. One already hauls oil trains several times a week through Portland and small towns in northwest Oregon while the other, plagued by a string of recent derailments, aims to service no fewer than three terminals at the Port of Grays Harbor.

The story from Quebec—of what happened to the Montreal, Maine & Atlantic (MMA) railroad—is the story of a disaster waiting to happen. MMA was a regional railroad assembled in 2002 by a holding company from the assets of bankrupt Iron Road Railways, which owned four small railroads operating in Maine, Vermont, and Quebec. MMA had struggled financially from the start just as its major customers in the forestry industry also struggled. It went through a series of cutbacks to staff and maintenance.

Increased traffic from oil-by-rail was going to be MMA’s ticket to financial stability. Instead, following the Lac-Mégantic wreck, MMA was forced into bankruptcy, leaving billions of dollars of cleanup and damage costs uncovered by its minimal insurance.

What happened was this. MMA picked up the ill-fated oil train of Bakken crude from the Montreal yard of a big player in North American rail, Canadian Pacific (CP), and was transporting it to a refinery in New Brunswick. After passing through Lac-Mégantic, the engineer parked the train on a hill above town for the night. He is now accused of setting an insufficient number of hand brakes that were acting as a back-up to the train’s air-brake system and of not performing a brake test effectively. The hand brake issue only became a problem because locomotive 5017, which was powering the air-brake system for the entire oil train, was shut down.*

And the reason this locomotive was turned off? Because when it had caught on fire earlier in the night the responding firefighters had to turn it off.

And the reason this locomotive caught on fire? Chronic underinvestment by the railroad. According to court documents, MMA’s own employees point to underinvestment by the railway that led to the company using second-hand locomotives, operating rundown equipment, tolerating damaged tracks, and performing minimal maintenance. One worker testified that “he saw little maintenance done on locomotives and that locomotive 5017 was in particularly poor condition.”

By Chris Hamby - Buzzfeed, October 8, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

After working underground in the coal mines of southern West Virginia for almost 35 years, Steve Day thought it was obvious why he gasped for air, slept upright in a recliner, and inhaled oxygen from a tank 24 hours a day.

More than half a dozen doctors who saw the masses in his lungs or the test results showing his severely impaired breathing were also in agreement.

The clear diagnosis was black lung.

Yet, when I met Steve in April 2013, he had lost his case to receive benefits guaranteed by federal law to any coal miner disabled by black lung. The coal company that employed the miner usually pays for these benefits, and, as almost always happens, Steve’s longtime employer had fought vigorously to avoid paying him. As a result, he and his family were barely scraping by, sometimes resorting to loans from relatives or neighbors to make it through the month.

Like many other miners, he had lost primarily because of the opinions of a unit of doctors at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions that had long been the go-to place for coal companies seeking negative X-ray readings to help defeat a benefits claim. The longtime leader of the unit, Dr. Paul Wheeler, testified against Steve, and the judge determined that his opinion trumped all others, as judges have in many other cases.

Today, however, there is final and overwhelming evidence that Wheeler was wrong: Steve’s autopsy.

On July 26, what was left of Steve’s lungs gave out. He was 67 years old. The doctor who performed the autopsy found extensive black lung. With the permission of Steve’s family, I shared his autopsy report with three leading doctors who specialize in black lung and related diseases. Each said essentially the same thing: Steve had one of the most severe cases of black lung they had seen.

“A majority of his lungs had been replaced by scar tissue with coal dust,” said Dr. Francis Green, a professor of medicine at the University of Calgary and one of the world’s top experts on the pathology of black lung.

Dr. David Weissman, who heads a federal agency’s division that certifies doctors — including Wheeler — to read chest X-rays, said it was “very concerning” that a certified reader would fail to recognize a case as severe as Steve’s.

Reached by phone, Wheeler said, “I’d love to talk to you, but the hospital has asked that everything be referred to the legal team.”

A Johns Hopkins spokesperson would not comment on Steve’s case, but noted that the black lung X-ray-reading program headed by Wheeler has been suspended, pending an internal review. The spokesperson refused to provide details about the review, saying only that it “is proceeding as rapidly as possible, and I can assure you that Johns Hopkins takes it very seriously.”

Eight months before he died, Steve filed a new claim for benefits, presenting evidence that the masses in his lungs had grown and his breathing had worsened even further. He underwent an exam by a doctor of the company’s choosing, and even this physician found severe black lung.

By Minnesota Public Radio News - Prarie Business, September 25, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

At least 18 times in the past three years BNSF Railway freight trains rolled west out of Minneapolis pulling cars filled with hazardous chemicals that were not on the trains’ official cargo list, according to train crew complaints.

That’s contrary to federal regulation because in case of an accident, local firefighters can be left in the dark, unable to take quick action to protect vulnerable residents.

In one case, a train traveled more than 20 miles through the western suburbs with six carloads of anhydrous ammonia, a toxic corrosive gas used as a farm fertilizer, before the train crew knew the chemical was on the train, a complaint said. In another, a complaint said a train traveled about 90 miles west to Willmar before its cargo list — called a manifest — was corrected to show an extra car of ammonia.

The complaints were filed with the Federal Railroad Administration, the federal agency that regulates railroads, and they provide a snapshot of one rail line across Minnesota, a BNSF Railway line from Minneapolis to Willmar. BNSF is the largest rail operator in Minnesota. Provided to MPR News by railroad union members, they are evidence of a problem the FRA said poses “unreasonable risks to health, safety and property.”

Hauling hazardous material without proper documentation is a problem federal officials have been aware of for years. When federal inspectors checked manifests of all rail haulers in Minnesota over a three-year period, one in five contained inaccurate information about cars hauling hazardous materials, according to FRA records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.

By Chris Halsne - Fox 31 TV, September 22, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

DENVER — FOX31 Denver has confirmed a May 9 crude oil train car derailment near LaSalle, Colorado polluted area groundwater with toxic levels of benzene.

Environmental Protection Agency records from July show benzene measurements as high as 144 parts per billion near the crash site. Five parts per billion is considered the safe limit.

Federal accident records also show six Union Pacific tankers ripped apart from the train and flipped into a ditch due to a “track misalignment caused by a soft roadbed.” One of the tankers cracked and spilled approximately7,000 gallons of Niobrara crude, according to the EPA.

FOX31 Denver’s investigative team also confirmed the oil car accident location, only about 75 yards from the South Platte River, is in the same spot as another Union Pacific derailment four years ago.

Reports show four rail cars full of wheat/grain derailed in October 2010. The cause of that accident was very similar: “roadbed settled or soft” and “other rail and joint bar defects.”

“They did have a derailment at the exact same point. I mean within feet!” witness Glenn Werning, a nearby farmer and local water supervisor, told FOX31 Denver investigative reporter Chris Halsne.

Werning wonders if Union Pacific was negligent in repairing the area after the first crash telling Halsne, “It would have been devastating if it had gotten into the water and flowed down. It would have been, whew! The oil spill would have been a mess to clean up because it would have been on both sides of the river for miles.”