Employee death leads to six-figure OSHA sanction

July 19th, 2016 by Dakota Software Staff Industry News

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has recently made news by responding to workplace fatalities in the fossil fuel industry. A spate of serious injuries and deaths in North Dakota's energy-rich Bakken Formation attracted the regulator's attention. Now, a fatal accident that occurred at the beginning of 2016 at a Buffalo, New York, coal plant has been assessed by OSHA. The federal safety agency issued an especially high fine to the business for what OSHA said were a number of serious and repeated violations. In all, OSHA cited the coal company for two repeat and six serious safety infractions.

The incident and the aftermath
In January, an employee of the coal company was performing regular maintenance on a coal transport elevator when his clothing became tangled in a moving part of the machine, pulling him into the rotating shaft, according to local NBC affiliate WGRZ. OSHA said the fatal incident could have been prevented if the company had taken certain normal precautions before and during the service procedure to limit the chance of injury and death to workers. Specifically, OSHA's report said the coal business failed to make sure power sources for the elevator were shut down and lockout tags were used, guard areas of the elevator from human contact, properly train staff on hazardous energy control procedures and maintain clean and dry working surfaces, among other issues.

"Training employees on lockout procedures and ensuring those procedures are used would have prevented this needless loss of a worker's life," said Michael Scime, OSHA's area director for Buffalo, in a statement shared by WGRZ. "Compounding this tragedy is the disturbing fact that OSHA cited [the company] in the past for not following the requirements of the lockout standard."

The penalty facing the coal company is significant, totaling $175,000 for the eight violations, according to The Buffalo News. The two issues classified as repeated violations involve health and safety problems cited by OSHA inspectors during inspections in 2010 and 2014 that weren't corrected. The company has the standard set of options available in response, including paying the fines, contesting the findings or having a conference with local OSHA leadership. The organization hasn't yet chose which course of action it wants to take, and it only has 15 days to make that decision.