Striving for Safety Excellence

September/October 2015

The ReMA Safety and Environmental Council’s spring conference in New Orleans showcased both the human and the economic benefits of safety compliance.  

By Theodore Fischer

A wealth of environmental, safety, and health expertise came together for the spring meeting of ISRI’s Safety and Environmental Council. The event took place in New Orleans June 2–4, with Paul Brenner, ISEC chairman and president of Brenner Recycling (Hazleton, Pa.), serving as master of ceremonies. Demonstrations, case studies, and interactive experiences enlivened the sessions, which aimed to inspire excellence in safety and environmental practices industrywide.

Moral and Economic Benefits of Safety
Scrapyard accidents have both moral and economic consequences, said Janice Nicolosi, an assistant loss prevention manager with the Lackawanna Insurance Group (Wilkes-Barre, Pa.). She and her husband, Benjamin A. Nicolosi Jr., a lawyer, spoke about the financial side of safety after she first illustrated the moral side with intensely dramatic details of the human costs of a shear accident, a forklift injury, and a welding explosion. She insisted that the only acceptable accident-rate goal is zero “because if you don’t tell me that, you’re going to have to tell me how many you want hurt in your organization, who you want hurt, and how badly you want to hurt them.”

If you can’t get passionate about the need for safety due to the potential for injury or death, “get passionate on the economic side,” Janice Nicolosi said. She addressed three factors that determine a company’s workers’ compensation insurance premiums: class rate (set by the state), payroll, and accident history, which determines its experience modification factor, or mod. For example, the annual premium for a company with a $5 million payroll could range from $200,000 to $400,000, depending on the mod. “Can your organization withstand an extra $200,000 surcharge just for insurance?” she asked. “I don’t think you can.”

When accidents happen, in addition to reporting them to your insurer as soon as possible (Pennsylvania, for example, requires completed claims within 48 hours for a fatality and not more than seven days for other injuries), maintaining contact with the injured employee and the claims adjuster is vital. Don’t disregard the value of that contact to the injured worker, she said. “It is the hand-holding; it is feeling like I am being cared for, which is tremendous.” In some instances, “the psychological aspect of the claim is far greater than the injury itself.”

Ben Nicolosi, an attorney with Marshall Dennehey Warner Coleman & Goggin (Phila­delphia), discussed worst-case economic scenarios after an accident. He defined the main threat, punitive damages, as “damages other than compensatory or nominal, designed to punish a person for his outrageous conduct and to deter him and others from engaging in similar conduct in the future.” In the end, however, an effective safety program is the best defense against possible claims, he said. “What really gets people’s attention is when they have to pay millions and millions of dollars of their own money because they were too busy to do the job safely.”

Travis B. Cowart Jr., safety and environmental manager at Southern Metals Recycling (Savannah, Ga.), agreed that one reason for having an effective safety program is humanitarian. “We don’t want our employees leaving our job site in any condition [worse] than they came with,” he said. But other bottom-line reasons might be more tangible to employers: Actual injury costs are five to 50 times the size of the obvious direct costs of an injured worker’s medical expenses and salary, he said.

Cowart offered several tips to bolster workplace safety and augment your bottom line, such as adopting written safety, health, and substance abuse programs. “When I say ‘adopt,’ I mean take it, make it your own, support it, abide by it, and enforce it,” he said. When it comes to writing a safety program, Cowart contends plagiarism is the highest form of flattery. “Go online, search for ‘safety programs,’ and you will have a plethora of plans to choose from—and if you don’t see one you like, you can copy and paste” parts from others to create your own.

He urged attendees to remain constantly vigilant about scrapyard operations. “You cannot run a safety program sitting behind a desk eight hours a day,” he said.

Avoiding OSHA Violations
Joe Bateman, an ReMA safety outreach director, outlined which specific standard violations were most prevalent among the 868 citations and $1,413,898 in fines the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Washington, D.C.) gave to recyclers from October 2013 to September 2014.

Violations involving permit-required confined spaces topped the list, generating 31 citations and $227,411 in fines. Next were the control of hazardous energy, or lock-out/tag-out, violations (60 citations totaling $226,140); machine guarding (45 citations totaling $108,691); powered industrial trucks (88 citations totaling $105,459), “where most violations are the result of lack of training,” according to Bateman; and lead (47 citations totaling $81,745).

The next five most common violations consisted of those related to guarding floor and wall openings (27 citations totaling $77,027)—“most of these violations are about shredders, or shears where catwalks get knocked off,” Bateman said; OSHA’s general duty clause (27 citations totaling $71,907)—“a catchall, … mostly heat-illness related”; wiring methods, components, and equipment (67 citations totaling $55,664); general electric requirements (44 citations totaling $52,485); and hazard communications (83 citations totaling $38,661).

Bateman addressed why and how to avoid the top citation-generating issue: permit-required confined spaces, particularly in relation to horizontal balers. “What turns a baler from a non–permit-required confined space into a permit-required confined space are inwardly converging walls,” Bateman said. “OSHA assumes … that every confined space you have requires a permit unless you reclassify, [but] … they may begin calling them all permit-required confined spaces,” he cautioned.

Bateman endorsed effective safety programs as the best strategy for dealing with OSHA.

Employers are responsible for following all relevant OSHA safety and health standards, said Wilfred Hebert, a compliance assistant specialist in OSHA’s Baton Rouge, La., office who has spent 25 years with the agency. “That’s pretty broad,” he said. “And I’m sure you’ll take a look and wonder, ‘How do you expect me to know all this?’” He offered some advice about dealing with OSHA and avoiding its penalties through regular, frequent safety inspections; clear labeling of hazards; enforcement of PPE use; training; and documentation.

 “Your responsibility is to make sure everybody is safe—whether they want to be protected or not,” he said. If you see a safety problem, you should correct it at once, he added. “We reduce citations based on what your corrective action is; that makes a big difference. But do not tell an untruth, because an untruth can often get you in trouble.”

Preventing Falls and Protecting Workers
Caught on grainy but dramatic security-camera video, a female worker plunges through a trapdoor in the floor of a crowded workspace as her co-workers obliviously mill about nearby. Tony Smith, an ReMA safety outreach director, screened this video to capture the audience’s full attention. “What I want to talk about—beyond just wearing harnesses, harness inspection, anchorage inspection, and lanyard inspection—is full-on fall protection, and that involves walking, working surfaces, ladder safety, and much more,” he said.

Falls are the second-leading cause of work-related injuries and fatalities in general industry. OSHA requires companies to provide all employees with fall protection when they are working at heights of 4 feet or more in general industry and 6 feet in construction. Using Commodor Hall, ISRI’s director of transportation, as a model, Smith demonstrated the correct way to don and use a harness and highlighted the importance of inspecting for frays, rips, cuts, tears, chemical burns, damage to hardware, and damage from ultraviolet radiation, or sunlight. “If you’re going to put somebody in one of these, training needs to include equipment inspection,” he said.

Smith outlined the three crucial elements of a personal fall-arrest system: First is bodywear—that is, the harness. Second is the lanyard attached to it and its “yo-yo.” As Smith explained, “It’s a lot like a seat belt; if you fall real quick, it will snap tight and hold.” Third are the anchor points, which must be able to support 5,000 pounds of static force, according to OSHA standards.

And when your PFAS devices reach the end of their useful life, don’t just wrap them up and toss them in the dumpster. “Somehow destroy them, or somebody’s going to use their ingenuity to use them again,” Smith said.

Ladder safety has become a major consideration for scrapyards in the wake of a $2.4 million settlement recently bestowed on a scrapyard employee who broke his leg falling from one, Smith said. Ladder hazards range from falling or slipping from one, or reaching too far on one, to weather-related problems and contact with electricity.

Smith urged scrapyards to implement ladder inspection programs. “Look at your ladders, inspect them, and if they’re bad, take them out of service,” he advised. Employees should adhere to the “belt buckle rule”—“Keep your belt buckle between the side rails when you’re climbing on and off.” Workers also can download a free smartphone app from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (Atlanta) that checks whether they have positioned a ladder at a safe angle. The app now also covers stepladder safety, according to NIOSH.

The Hazards of Orphan Cylinders
Orphan cylinders are compressed-gas cylinders that may or may not contain material, have no visible holes, and may or may not have the valve intact. The Chlorine Institute (Arlington, Va.) contacted ReMA recently to report it was receiving numerous calls from scrap processors asking what to do when they receive such cylinders.

“If you get an orphan cylinder in your yard that hasn’t been properly processed, you shouldn’t be handling it. Actually, you shouldn’t even take it,” said Commodor Hall. “But if you do [take it], you’re going to need a professional to come out to process that cylinder.”

Hall cited scrapyard orphan cylinder accidents in Smithfield, N.C.; Kalamazoo, Mich.; and Tulare, Calif. In the last incident, when a scrapyard worker cut into a 1-ton tank that was reportedly empty, he released chlorine gas that sent 23 employees, customers, and workers at nearby businesses to the hospital. “The fortunate thing is that no one has been killed—to our knowledge,” Hall said. But the problem of orphan cylinders is not going away. “So we really need your help to get some information out to front-line employees and to management so folks can be properly trained.”

ISRI and The Chlorine Institute plan to jointly create a handout for front-line employees that the two organizations will distribute to members and post on their websites. The organizations also will work with the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Admin­istration (Washington, D.C.) to educate employees. The outreach will stress that workers should treat all cylinders as full and dangerous, that only trained professionals should remove valves or the contents of cylinders, that cylinders must be secured in restricted areas while you’re awaiting assistance, and that, if cylinders leak, you should contact a reputable hazardous-materials contractor for remediation.

Oil Industry Lends a Hand with Hand Safety
Felipe J. Guerra, environment, health, and safety coordinator at Sierra International Machinery (Bakersfield, Calif.), introduced the audience to the Hands On Safety Team, an organization very similar to ISRI’s Circle of Safety Excellence™. Both consist of like-minded companies that share safety data and best practices aimed at improving worker safety industrywide, he said.

A group of behavior-based safety professionals in the oil industry in California formed HOST in 2009 principally to reduce hand injuries. “Hand injuries accounted for the majority of injuries in the industry, and nothing was really being done out there,” Guerra said. During HOST’s first year, improved communication and the introduction of best practices reduced hand injuries by 50 percent—and such injuries have not increased since. HOST today consists of representatives of 60 companies who meet monthly to discuss safety exclusively. The group publishes monthly HOST Safety Alerts based largely on data that employees volunteer to gather by completing observational data sheets on other employees’ workplace practices. “No management is involved in this,” Guerra said. “Employees will just grab this sheet and go out and talk to one of their co-workers they’re observing, step back 20 to 30 feet, and watch him for 10 to 15 minutes.” Why that length of time? Guerra explained that “for the first five minutes, the employee will try to do everything the best he can, but after five minutes or so, a lot of them start to go back to their old ways.” The observer logs “safe” and “at risk” behaviors—“all the good things that he did and what needs improvement”—offers on-site, on-the-spot coaching when appropriate, and records action items.

Guerra emphasized that workplace safety doesn’t necessarily come naturally. “Remember, there’s no such thing as common sense,” he said. “Everything we know how to do we learned: walking, talking, everything. Our parents, or whoever raised you, were your first safety people.”

The ISEC spring meeting also covered the role of effective communication in emergency preparedness, the role of transformational leadership in developing safer operations, technologies for improving dust control, the management of stormwater runoff at scrapyards, environmental regulations affecting appliance recyclers, and ways to work with the community and law enforcement officials to prevent metals theft. ISEC will hold its fall meeting in San Antonio Nov. 10–12.  

Theodore Fischer is a writer based in Carrboro, N.C.

Reflections on an OSHA Inspection
On June 15, 2012, sometime before 8 a.m., an OSHA inspector appeared with no advance notice at Rocky Mountain Recycling, a midsized recycling company in the Denver suburb of Commerce City, Colo. “I wasn’t fearful, I wasn’t worried,” said Brian Henesey, RMR vice president, general manager, and part owner. Managing the inspector’s visit “was just another thing I need to do.”

The inspector explained that OSHA’s Denver office was targeting torchcutting operations, not recycling facilities in particular, with a focus on exposure to hexavalent chromium VI, a human carcinogen to which workers can be exposed when doing “hot work” such as welding or torchcutting stainless steel or other metals. The tour of RMR’s ferrous and nonferrous operations seemed to be going well until the inspector asked to see the company’s torchcutting documentation. “It went downhill from this point, and ‘downhill’ is an understatement,” Henesey said. He couldn’t find the recent air-sampling records kept by a now-departed safety manager, even though he had taken on safety management.

On June 20, the inspector returned to conduct air sampling of RMR’s torchcutters in action, and on July 17 he called with good and bad news. Good: There was not a trace of hexavalent chromium VI. Bad: RMR exceeded the permissible exposure limits for iron oxide and copper oxide and, even worse, those for lead and cadmium, which made the exposure a serious violation, Henesey said.

In early August, RMR received a 63-page citation and notification of penalty by certified mail. “I couldn’t understand it,” Henesey said. “I knew there were things we needed to do, but this was War and Peace!” The report characterized 12 groups of penalties as serious, among them “Did not identify and evaluate the respiratory hazards in workplace”; “Did not provide medical evaluation to determine employees’ ability to use respirator”; and “Change rooms not equipped with separate storage facilities for work clothes and street clothes—two different rooms.”

“What OSHA was saying is that we put our employees at risk—and, personally, I think they’re right,” Henesey said.

On Aug. 24, he went to OSHA’s Denver office for an eight-hour conference where they reviewed every single violation and citation, discussed the rationale for each penalty, and negotiated a dollar amount for every violation. The upshot was a $21,000 fine (reduced from $41,000), which RMR paid immediately, and an abatement process that ran from Sept. 12, 2012, to July 8, 2013. On July 9, the case was officially closed.

One lesson learned from the ordeal, Henesey said, is to “never allow employee turnover to compromise your safety program. It’s a poor excuse and a reflection of bad management.” Also, he said, “don’t become complacent. Train, train, and train your employees about your safety program. Stay focused and maintain your discipline—particularly in the areas of documentation but also in the areas of reporting, training, and safety culture. And never forget: The safety of your operations starts at the top.”