REPS DEMAND BUSH OSHA ACT AGAINST COMBUSTIBLE DUST

Friday, March 28, 2008

(PAI)

HUNTINGTON, Ind. (PAI)--Nobody should die on the job, and, especially nobody should die the painful, searing way Shawn Boone died almost five years ago in Huntington, Ind.

And now his sister, Tammy Miser, and congressional Democrats want the anti-worker GOP Bush regime’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration to order industries to combat the hazard that killed Boone, combustible dust. They especially want it to move in the wake of a fatal sugar refinery explosion in Georgia in February, from the same cause.

Bush’s OSHA, true to form, is refusing to move. The investigation into the Georgia blast is incomplete, its administrator says. And it published an advisory pamphlet to industries warning of the hazard, but not ordering them to do anything.

The issue came to a head at a House Education and Labor Committee hearing earlier in March, where Miser told lawmakers what happened to her brother at the Hayes Lemmerz plant in Huntington the night of Oct. 28, 2003.

“Shawn and a couple of coworkers went in to relight a chip melt furnace and decided to stick around a few minutes to make sure everything was OK, then went back to gather tools. Shawn’s back was toward the furnace when the first explosion occurred. Someone stated Shawn got up and started walking toward the doors when there was a second and more intense blast. The heat from that blast was hot enough to melt copper piping.

“Shawn did not die instantly. He laid on floor smoldering while the aluminum dust continued to burn through his flesh and muscle tissue. The breaths he took burned his internal organs and the blast took his eyesight. Shawn was still conscious and asking for help when the ambulance took him.

“Hayes Lemmerz never bothered to call any of my family members to let them know that there was an explosion, or that Shawn was injured. The only call we received was from a friend of my husband,” who told the family Shawn was being taken to a burn unit in Fort Wayne--5 hours away. “We arrived only to be told that Shawn was being kept alive for us,” she added.

“The on-site pastor stopped us and told us to prepare ourselves, adding he had not seen anything like this since the war. The doctors refused to treat Shawn, saying even if they took his limbs, his internal organs were burned beyond repair. This was apparent by the black sludge they were pumping from his body.”

Boone’s family had to make the wrenching decision to disconnect him from life support and then sit and watch him die, his sister said--from an accident that could have been prevented. Boone’s last words, she added, were “I’m in a world of hurt.”

That same “world of hurt” hit the families at the Imperial Sugar plant in Savannah on Feb. 7--and combustible dust that catches fire caused that, too. UFCW reports one-fourth of combustible dust-caused fires over the last several years have been in food processing plants, including sugar refineries, wet corn millers, distilleries, and cocoa, chocolate, coffee and flour plants.

But the evidence did not lead Bush OSHA administrator Edwin G. Foulke to promise lawmakers his agency would immediately move against the dust hazard, a common one in factories nationwide. It maybe might consider writing a rule to force firms to curb the dust, he said, but only after the investigations are done.

That led committee chairman George Miller (D-Calif.) to call OSHA’s inaction ridiculous and to promise to push legislation, introduced just before, forcing the agency to act and set a rule that firms must follow to cut down the combustible dust.

Foulke said OSHA alerted 30,000 firms of the hazard, and took other measures in the wake of a 2006 report by an independent federal safety board--a report that recommended OSHA put in rules industries must follow to control the flammable dust.

“We have a number of standards that apply to situations where combustible dust hazards may be found,” Foulke said. “These include…general requirements for house-keeping, emergency action plans, ventilation, hazardous locations, and hazard communication. If employers follow existing requirements established by these standards, employees will be protected from combustible dust hazards.”

But if the Savannah accident probe or “our forthcoming inspections” of other hazardous plants “indicates that our existing standards do not adequately mitigate the potential for combustible dust hazards, we will assess the need for regulatory changes,” Foulke stated. That wasn’t good enough for Miller, or for Miser. OSHA would be fine “if it is working, but in this case it has failed and failed miserably,” she said, and concluded:

“Everyone already knows what caused the explosion at the Imperial Sugar plant. But it would have been nice to prevent this from happening in the first place. We know it’s feasible to prevent these explosions. It is beyond negligent to expect a company that knows about these hazards to voluntarily comply, instead of making it a requirement.”

“OSHA put out a bulletin on combustible dust, but at the very beginning it says ‘This Safety and Health Information Bulletin is not a standard or regulation, and it creates no new legal obligations.’ How seriously do you think companies will take it?” ###