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| US Labor Department's OSHA Proposes More than $121,000 in Fines for Hazards at Brooklyn Store |
The U.S. Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has cited Rite Aid of New York Inc. for 10 alleged repeat and serious violations of safety standards following an inspection of the retail chain's store in Brooklyn. Rite Aid faces a total of $121,100 in proposed fines.
The inspection identified several hazardous conditions similar to those cited by OSHA during inspections of Rite Aid stores in the Bronx and Rome, N.Y., in 2007 and 2008. These conditions include
- an emergency exit blocked by garbage and debris,
- merchandise stacked in an unsafe manner,
- electrical panels blocked by cardboard and totes containing merchandise,
- an ungrounded electric power strip, and
- employees exposed to an electrical hazard while stacking stock.
As a result, OSHA cited the company for five repeat violations with $93,500 in proposed fines.
Additional violations include
- a stairway to the basement storage room that was too steep, too narrow and lacked slip resistant treads,
- an 8-foot fall hazard for employees standing on the top of a ladder to store stock,
- boxes of merchandise used to prop open an emergency exit door,
- the absence of portable fire extinguishers in a basement storage room, and
- the lack of a working interlock to prevent a box crusher from operating while its door was open.
These conditions resulted in citations for five serious violations with $27,600 in fines.
"One might not think of a store as a hazardous workplace, but the fact is that these conditions expose workers to potentially deadly falls, crushing injuries, burns and electrocution, as well as the inability of workers and customers to exit swiftly in the event of a fire or other emergency," said Kay Gee, OSHA's Manhattan area director. "The sizable fines proposed here reflect both the severity of these hazards and the reality that this employer previously has been cited for similar conditions."
"For the safety and health of all its employees, the company should seek to identify such hazards at all of its locations and correct them if they exist," said Robert Kulick, OSHA's regional administrator in New York. "One means of addressing and eliminating new and recurring hazards is through an illness and injury prevention program in which management and workers proactively identify and eliminate hazardous conditions on a continual basis."
Do you regularly identify and eliminate hazardous conditions in your workplace? Help are some tools from Safety Smart to help train your team on this essential skill: Safety Talk: How to Conduct a Job Hazard Analysis, Safety Meeting Tip: Find and Fix the Hazard, and Coping with Hidden Hazards Requires Buy-In from Everyone.
Need access to additional resources on this topic? Try SafetySmart today and get immediate access to safety talks, presentations and more. Sign up for a free 14-day trial now. |
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| You've got to move a refrigerator, but you don't know anyone with a pickup. What do you do? Hopefully, not this! Police photographed this frightening arrangement, where the vehicle owner used seatbelts and rope to "secure" this large appliance. (Richmond, BC, Royal Canadian Mounted Police photo) |
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| ASSE Says Workplace Fatalities Report Should Be a Call to Action |
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics' preliminary 2010 report on work-related fatalities suggests that efforts to protect workers from hazards have stalled, says Terrie Norris, president of the American Society of Safety Engineers (ASSE).
The report states that 4,547 workers died from on–the–job injuries in 2010, compared to 4,551 in 2009.
"ASSE urges everyone concerned with worker safety not to accept as reasonable the preliminary results of this report that show little change in the number of workplace fatalities between 2009 and 2010," says Norris. "The fact that this nation's fatalities are not significantly decreasing should be a call for action, not complacency, especially at an economically challenging time when some of the most dangerous industries are not at full employment.
"Instead of a tug of war over compliance to prescriptive standards that cannot address each workplace, this nation's approach to workplace safety must encourage a specific dialogue about the most important risks in each workplace that engages employers, workers and OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration) in a cooperative effort to address those risks," she says.
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Related story: Never Get Complacent about Others' Complacency
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