Thierry Godfrind, 39, was killed when he was struck by a reversing fire truck while responding to a residential call. The truck started backing up after it drove past the address of the home. Godfrind and two other firefighters had exited the fire truck and were walking towards the home when the truck struck him.

According to the CSST, the City of Montreal fire department was at fault for not having safe work methods in place and for failing to provide adequate training and supervision of firefighters. The city will be fined for the infractions at a later date.

The fire department has reportedly improved its training regarding protecting workers in the vicinity of reversing fire trucks since Godfrind’s death. Also, new fire trucks will be equipped with cameras so that drivers will have a full view of the area behind their vehicles when reversing.

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Share this safety talk on pedestrian safety in workplace traffic with your workers.

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Bangladesh’s government has agreed to let the country’s four million garment worker form trade unions without requiring permission from garment factory owners. Garment workers were being paid as little as $38 per month before the illegally constructed building, which had been modified by adding additional floors and installing heavy equipment that further taxed the structure’s stability, pancaked in a suburb of Dhaka, Bangladesh on April 24, 2013.

Along with permitting workers to join unions, the government also announced that the minimum wage for garment workers would be increasing, with the amount to be determined by a minimum wage board within the next few months.

Sohel Rana, owner of the destroyed Rana Plaza building, which housed several garment factories, was arrested following a four-day manhunt. He is accused of forcing garment workers to work in the building on the day of the collapse, in spite of the fact that alarming structural cracks had appeared a day earlier. Reports indicate that the building lacked emergency exits.

Along with making some of the lowest wages in the world, garment workers in Bangladesh have until now been forced to work up to 16 hours per day, seven days per week, in cramped and often unsafe conditions.

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If you are in Canada: This article on Canada’s recent Emergency Planning Week can tell your workers three things they need to know to better prepare themselves for a workplace emergency.

If you are in the United States: This frightening photograph shows an emergency exit that could seriously impede workers from getting outside quickly and safely during a fire or other emergency.

The US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) reached a settlement with Imperial Sugar in July 2010 that included an order for the company to pay approximately $6 million in administrative penalties. OSHA later referred the case to the United States Attorney’s Office for consideration of whether criminal prosecution for a violation of OSHA’s general housekeeping standards could be brought against Imperial Sugar.

“A housekeeping offense is a misdemeanor. There is no felony provision under the statute,” according to a statement from the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Georgia. “In addition, the applicable regulation and statute permit only employers to be charged. Officers and employees of a corporate employer cannot be charged under the statute.”

The US Attorney’s Office says that when the death of an employee has occurred, any violation of a good housekeeping regulation must be willful in order to support a criminal prosecution.

“Willfulness is an intentional disregard or plain indifference to the requirements of a regulation. Recklessness or negligence is not sufficient. A failure to do enough, or a failure to be more thorough, which may suffice for civil liability, is not enough to meet the criminal standard,” says the office.

It adds that there was insufficient evidence of intentional disregard or plain indifference to the requirements of OSHA’s general housekeeping standards to charge Imperial Sugar with a criminal violation.

After failing to make a planned course change, the ship, carrying 101 passengers, slammed at full speed into Gil Island and sank. Two passengers were missing and presumed drowned in the incident.

Karl Lilgert, a former BC Ferries navigation officer, was convicted of two counts of criminal negligence causing the deaths of passengers Gerald Foisy and Shirley Rosette. The maximum penalty for criminal negligence causing death in Canada is life imprisonment.

Orris told the jury trial in Vancouver that Lilgert was performing his job to the best of his ability in rough weather and there was no evidence that he had shown wanton disregard for the safety of his passengers and crew. However, Crown Prosecutor Robin Wright said that electronic records revealed that the ship did not alter its course in the 20 minutes before it struck Gil Island, contradicting Lilgert’s testimony that he made two course corrections moments before the ship ran aground.

The Crown argued that Lilgert was distracted by female crew member Karen Briker, with whom he had recently ended an affair, and was not paying attention to navigating the ship. But defense lawyers claimed that unreliable equipment on the then 37-year-old ship contributed to the crash.

Both Lilgert and Briker testified that they had little conversation on the night of the incident.

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If you are in the United States: This article can help you manage fatigue risks in your workplace.

Scaffold safety has plunged to a new low in this photo. Barrels and boards stacked high have created a precarious working platform for these two workers. Like a house of cards, everything could come crashing down at any moment. (Source unknown)

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• Not a subscriber to SafetySmartCompliance? Sign up for a free trial.

If you’re in Canada, visit OHSInsider.com:

• Read about a huge fine imposed on a mine after a worker died in a scaffold collapse incident.
• Falls aren’t the only hazard associated with scaffolds, as this article shows.
• Here’s a hazard alert on the safe use of carpenters’ bracket scaffolds.
• Not a subscriber to OHSInsider.com? Sign up for a free trial.

If you were fortunate, one of your more experienced co-workers caught you doing something unsafely, stopped you and showed you the right way. If you were less fortunate, you suffered an injury or caused property, equipment or product damage as a result of not knowing what you were doing.

Fast-forward several years to today, when you have young workers joining your company or organization. While much has changed since your time as a young worker, one thing has not: Just as you wanted to make a good impression, so do they. And just as you didn’t want to look like a greenhorn by asking too many questions, they may be equally reluctant to ask questions of you.

You can’t afford to let a young worker stumble through procedures in an effort to avoid asking a “dumb” question.

Here are seven things you can do as a supervisor to ensure that your young workers have a job they’ll remember for all the right reasons:

1. When new workers are undergoing orientation in your workplace, tell them that if they are ever confused about any procedures, they are to come to you rather than attempt to figure out the problem on their own. Never criticize or belittle them if they come to you with a question you cannot believe they are asking.
2. Tell them how to report unsafe or unhealthy conditions and reinforce your expectation that they will do so without delay.
3. Ensure they are properly trained on safe procedures, personal protective equipment they need to be using and the hazards that they could face on the job. Don’t take a young worker’s word that he or she is clear on the procedure. Have that person explain and demonstrate to you the tasks they will be required to perform.
4. Don’t overload them with information. Provide training in manageable chunks so they can absorb and retain the information.
5. Closely supervise young workers. Also ask other experienced workers to watch out for them and intervene if they see a young worker performing a task unsafely or incorrectly.
6. Give them written information on the tasks they will be performing, the potential hazards and the steps they need to take, including wearing PPE, to keep themselves safe.
7. Be a good role model. If you aren’t wearing required PPE or are taking unsafe shortcuts, what sort of example are you setting?

Related content:

Here’s what can happen if a new or young worker isn’t properly oriented to a new job and is left on his or her own.

Expecting workers to use “common sense” to avoid injury could land you and your company in trouble. Here’s why.

If you are in Canada: Here’s a young worker orientation checklist you can use

If you are in the United States: Here’s an eight-step compliance plan for hiring young workers in the United States

Acting in response to a complaint, OSHA has cited an Englewood, NJ, surgical center for 10 serious violations of its bloodborne pathogens standard. The violations being alleged against CTO Management LLC, doing business as Health East Ambulatory Surgical Centre in Englewood, NJ, include failure to counsel an employee who was stuck with a contaminated needle, test the employee’s blood in a timely manner and provide the appropriate medicine to the employee to prevent contracting a potential disease.

“If an employee is stuck with a needle, they must be afforded appropriate follow-up medical care to minimize any potential effects. All medical facilities have a duty to provide a safe and healthful workplace for their employees,” says Lisa Levy, director of OSHA’s area office in Hasbrouck Heights, NJ.

OSHA is proposing $68,000 in penalties against CTO Management LLC. The company reportedly is contesting the violations, with Attorney Anthony Rainone stating that “no employee or patient has ever been infected at the center.”

While it certainly isn’t news that using a hand-held cell phone while driving is a major distraction that can cause injury or death, a new study is adding weight to the argument that hands-free cell phones still significantly distract drivers.

If your workplace contacts its workers through hands-free cell phones while they are driving, you might want to re-consider this dangerous practice and adopt a do-not-answer policy until they have stopped in a safe area.

Researchers at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, ON, tested 16 healthy young drivers operating a driving simulator equipped with a steering wheel, brake pedal and accelerator inside a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner. This system allowed scientists to map in real time which parts of the brain were activated or deactivated as the simulator took them through increasingly complex driving maneuvers.

Researcher Dr. Tom Schweizer says most serious traffic accidents occur when drivers are making left-hand turns at busy intersections. When those drivers are also talking on hands-free cell phones, “that could be the most dangerous thing they ever do on the road,” he says.

The researchers were able to show for the first time that making a left-hand turn requires a huge amount of brain activation and involves far more areas of the brain than driving on a straight road or other driving maneuvers. When the test subjects were talking on a hands-free cell phone, the MRI scans showed that the part of the brain that controls vision significantly reduced its activity, whereas the part of the brain that controls monitoring a conversation and attention increased its activity.

“Visually, a left-hand turn is quite demanding,” says Schweizer, a neuroscientist and director of the Neuroscience Research Program at the hospital’s Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute. “You have to look at oncoming traffic, pedestrians and lights, and co-ordinate all that. Add talking on a cell phone and your visual area shuts down significantly, which obviously is key to performing the maneuver.”

The driving simulator had the drivers make six left-hand turns with oncoming traffic, which required them to decide when it was safe to turn. The researchers then purposely distracted them by asking a series of true/false audio questions such as, “Does a triangle have four sides?”

The MRIs showed that in drivers who were attempting to multitask negotiating left-hand turns and answering questions, blood moved from the visual cortex, which controls sight, to the prefrontal cortex, which controls decision-making.

“This study provides real-time neuroimaging evidence supporting previous behavioral observations suggesting that multitasking while driving may compromise vision and alertness,” says Schweizer. “Hands-free does not does mean brain-free.’”

Related tools and resources:

Show this distracted driving video to your workers.

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This article from SafetySmart’s sister site, OHSInsider.com, explains how workplaces can create an effective cell phone/texting-while-driving ban with an accompanying tool to setup a model distracted driving policy you can adapt to your workplace.

Researchers at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) injected one group of laboratory mice with a chemical, methylcholanthrene, which is known to initiate cell mutations that can lead to cancer tumors. A second group of mice received saline (salt water) injections.

The mice were then exposed to multi-walled carbon nanotubes. In the group that received methylcholanthrene, 90 percent of the mice developed an average of 3.3 lung tumors, while 50 percent of the mice receiving saline developed an average of 1.4 lung tumors.

“These results indicated that multi-walled carbon nanotubes can increase the risk of cancer in mice exposed to a known carcinogen (methylcholanthrene),” says NIOSH. “It is very important to have new data that describe the potential health hazards that these materials might represent, so that protective measures can be developed to ensure the safe advancement of nanotechnology in the many industries where it is being applied.”

The new NIOSH study is the first to show that multi-walled carbon nanotubes are cancer promoters in a laboratory experiment.

“Risk of occupational cancer depends on the potency of a given substance to cause or promote cancer and the concentration and duration of worker exposure to that substance,” says NIOSH. “This research is an important step in our understanding of the hazards associated with multi-walled carbon nanotubes, but before we can determine whether multi-walled carbon nanotubes pose an occupational cancer risk, we need more information about actual exposure levels and the types and nature of multi-walled carbon nanotubes being used in the workplace, and how that compares to the material used in this study.”

NIOSH says further research is needed to identify what work processes, tasks and physical forms of the multi-walled carbon nanotubes are associated with exposure.

“Workplace studies are under way at NIOSH to learn more about actual worker exposure and to develop guidance on how to contain and control multi-walled carbon nanotubes processes to eliminate exposures, based on advancing knowledge about exposures.”

Similar research is also needed for understanding potential health effects and occupational risk of other types of carbon nanotubes and nanofibers, as well as other nanomaterials.

“While NIOSH and others continue research to help answer these questions, controlling exposure is a vital factor in the prudent manufacture and workplace use of nanomaterials, particularly where other risk factors are as yet unknown or little understood. Containment, local exhaust ventilation, filtration and use of personal protective equipment, including respirators, have proven effective in reducing exposure and are recommended as prudent practices.”

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Share this nanotechnology safety talk with your workers.

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If you’re in Canada, visit OHSInsider.com:

• This article will tell you what the OHS laws in your jurisdiction require you to do regarding fire preparedness and response.
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• Not a subscriber to OHSInsider.com? Sign up for a free trial.