California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health (DOSH) reports that the owner and two employees of Foundations & Earth Retaining Systems of Lafayette were injured in an incident at a private-residence project Dec. 3. The workers were using a drilling machine with a six-foot auger to do foundation repair at a home in Orinda. Details …
California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health (DOSH) has proposed almost $700,000 in repeat and failure-to-abate penalties against a Vernon manufacturer of materials-handling equipment after two followup inspections earlier this year. Two of the proposed penalties totaled more than $225,000 each and another was more than $100,000 in the charges against Galaxie Universal Corp., doing …
Cal/OSH Appeals Board will determine whether an administrative law judge (ALJ) was correct in reducing a $5,000 penalty against an employer tenfold in a case involving failure to report a serious injury. The Order of Reconsideration was granted by the board on its own motion Nov. 30 in Imperial Highway Chevron and joins a growing …
The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration cautions construction contractors about the potential for collapse when raising “balloon framed” walls. Fed-OSHA recently issued an informational bulletin following 22 collapses between July 1999 and July 2004 in which five employees died and 28 were injured, 16 of whom required hospitalization. Balloon framing is the placement of …
Catastrophic emergency events, natural or man-made, are a fact of life in the modern world and something businesses must prepare for. UC-Irvine offers a short course early next year to introduce the concepts of planning to respond to events like earthquakes, fires, floods, hazardous materials spills, terrorist acts and sabotage and keeping your business running. …
Cal/OSH Appeals Board has ordered reconsideration of a recently decided case in which a citation was upheld against a general contractor for an incident that occurred to a subcontractor’s employee. On a 2-1 vote, with labor member Marcy Saunders voting no, the board on its own motion granted reconsideration in the Harris Construction Co. case, …
Fallout from a worker death at a construction site continues as a California appellate court rules that a subcontractor does not have to indemnify the general contractor for its portion of a $1 million-plus civil judgment. The case stems from the death of Frederick Kimbark, who was killed after he lifted a piece of plywood …
In response to our Nov. 18 article about the Cal/OSH Appeals Board working to eliminate a backlog of thousands of cases (“How to Turn Around a Bureaucracy: Appeals Board Embracing Change, Digging in to Backlog of Cases,” p. 8563), a compliance officer for Division of Occupational Safety and Health recently emailed Cal-OSHA Reporter. The inspector …