New Solutions: The Drawing Board is a monthly feature produced by the journal New Solutions. Read more about it here. By Anne Fischel and Lin Nelson We write to you as teachers and researchers concerned about the environmental and occupational health hazards impacting communities living and working in mining sites across North America and the […]
Last week, a jury in Chicago awarded $30.4 million to chemical-flavoring plant worker Gerardo Solis, 45, who suffers from the disabling lung disease bronchiolitis obliterans. Solis had worked at the Flavorchem Corp plant from 1998 to 2006 and was exposed to the butter-flavoring chemical diacetyl, which is associated with severe respiratory illnesses. Solis’s attorney, Ken […]
Environmental Health
What Next: Assessing Deepwater Horizon damages and what we have yet to learn about the oil spill’s impacts
By Elizabeth Grossman On August 17th the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) held the first public discussion of plans for its Gulf Worker Study – also called the Gulf Long Term Follow-up Study – designed to assess short and long-term health effects associated with BP/Deepwater Horizon oil disaster clean-up work. “Since the spill,” […]
Earlier this month, Labor Secretary Solis proposed more than $16 million in penalties to 17 employers involved in the construction of the Kleen Energy Systems power plant in Middletown, Connecticut. The construction site was the scene of a massive explosion on the morning of February 7 in which Peter Chetulis, Ronald J Crabb, 42, Raymond […]
Before BP’s name was linked in everyone’s mind to the Gulf oil disaster, the company was infamous for its unsafe Texas City refinery, where a March 2005 explosion killed 15 workers and injured 170. In September 2005, OSHA cited BP for $21 million, and BP paid the fine and entered into an agreement with OSHA […]
Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health David Michaels has sent a letter to Occupational Safety and Health Administration staff laying out a vision for how OSHA can do a better job of protecting worker health and safety over the coming years. In “OSHA at Forty: New Challenges and New Directions,” Michaels gives […]
Back in February, an explosion at the Kleen Energy Systems plant in Middletown, Connecticut killed six workers and injured others. Workers had been finishing construction on the natural gas power plant, and natural gas under high pressure was being pumped through new fuel lines to remove debris. Much of this gas was vented into areas […]
The Oregonian’s Julie Sullivan has been following the story of the National Guard troops who were exposed to the carcinogen hexavalent chromium at the Qarmat Ali water plant in Iraq – which contracting giant KBR was tasked with rebuilding. (Oregonian stories are here; also see our past posts on the subject here, here, and here.) […]
Kyle Hopkins of McClatchy follows up on the question of how we learned from the Exxon Valdez disaster about long-term health effects experienced by cleanup workers. In short, we have no peer-reviewed studies on this important topic, even though occupational health experts called for long-term monitoring of workers. Hopkins writes: Exxon has consistently maintained that […]
By Elizabeth Grossman “I’ve never seen anything like it,” says David Willman, who has nearly 15 years’ experience captaining supply boats that support oil rigs and drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. “We’re seeing pods of whales and dolphins out in the oil and lots of dead things,” he tells me. “Things I’ve never […]