The Center for Public Integrity

At 58, retired machinist Bruce Revers is tethered to his oxygen machines — a wall unit when he’s at home, a portable tank when he’s out. The simple act of walking to the curb to pick up his newspaper is a grind.

“This is a hell of a thing to live with,” Revers, of Orange, Calif., said of his worsening lung disease. “There’s nothing I can do without my air.”

His undoing was beryllium, a light and versatile metal to which he was exposed in a Southern California factory that makes high-tech ceramics for the space, defense and automotive industries. His bosses tried to keep the place clean and well-ventilated, Revers says, and he wore a respirator to shield his lungs from the fine metallic dust. Nonetheless, he was diagnosed with chronic beryllium disease in 2009.

He will not recover.

The federal standard in place to protect workers like Revers from beryllium is based on an Atomic Energy Commission calculation crafted by an industrial hygienist and a physician in the back of a taxi in 1949. For the last 12 years, an effort to update that standard has been mired in delay. A plan to address another toxic hazard — silica, a mineral that also damages the lungs — has been tied up even longer: 15 years.

The sluggishness is symptomatic of a bigger problem: the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s inability to act with urgency on well-known workplace hazards.

Beryllium, used in everything from missiles to golf clubs, threatens as many as 134,000 workers in the United States, according to government estimates. Silica, pulverized and inhaled by construction workers, foundry workers and miners, threatens more than 2 million. Obsolete exposure limits, dating to the early 1970s, are on the books for both substances.

A whistleblower who was fired by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration after complaining publicly about the poor quality of injury and illness data kept by employers has won a major court victory.

Robert Whitmore, a supervisory economist with OSHA’s Office of Statistical Analysis, lost his job in 2009, ostensibly for insubordination. On Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit held that Whitmore was fired in retaliation for telling journalists and Congress about OSHA’s failure to crack down on companies submitting suspect data. OSHA is supposed to use the data to identify potentially unsafe workplaces; accuracy, therefore, is crucial.

The Merit Systems Protection Board upheld Whitmore’s firing, finding that he had acted in a threatening manner toward a supervisor. The appeals court, however, found that OSHA failed to provide “clear and convincing” evidence that Whitmore’s whistleblowing had no bearing on his dismissal. The case will go back to the board for rehearing.

The court found that Whitmore’s airing of concerns about employer recordkeeping, beginning in 2005, led to “increasingly strained relationships with OSHA officials” and “paralleled his increasingly poor performance reviews and adverse personnel actions after decades of exceptional service.”

The court went on: “Despite Robert Whitmore’s highly unprofessional and intimidating conduct, which may well ultimately justify some adverse personnel action, he is nevertheless a bona fide whistleblower.”

GALLATIN, Tenn. — Small fires were a part of the job at the Hoeganaes Corp. metal powder plant 30 miles northeast of Nashville. By early 2011, some workers later told investigators, they had become practiced in beating down the flames with gloved hands or a fire extinguisher.

The company’s own product fueled the fires. Scrap metal rolls into the rust-colored plant on the town’s industrial periphery and is melted, atomized and dried into a fine iron powder sold to makers of car parts. Sometimes, powder leaked from equipment and coated ledges and rafters. Under the right conditions, it smoldered.

Wiley Sherburne, a 42-year-old plant electrician, sometimes told his wife how this dust piled up everywhere, she recalled. On quieter weekend shifts, he said he could hear the telltale popping sound of dust sparking when it touched live electricity.

In the early morning of January 31, 2011, Sherburne was called to check out a malfunctioning bucket elevator that totes dust through the plant. Near his feet, electrical wires lay exposed. When the machine restarted, the jolt knocked dust into the air. A spark — likely from the exposed wires, investigators later concluded — turned the dust cloud into a ball of flame that engulfed Sherburne and a co-worker.

“He’s burned over 95 percent of his body,” doctors told Sherburne’s wife, Chris, when she arrived at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s burn unit. “He’s not going to live.” Her husband died two days later.

CLAIRTON, Pa. — Early on the morning of Sept. 3, 2009, Nicholas Adrian Revetta left the Pittsburgh suburb of Pleasant Hills and drove 15 minutes to a job at U.S. Steel’s Clairton Plant, a soot-blackened industrial complex on the Monongahela River. He never returned home.

Stocky and stoic, Revetta was working that Thursday as a laborer for a U.S. Steel contractor at the same plant that employed his brother, for the same company that had employed his late father. Shortly before 11:30 a.m., gas leaking from a line in the plant’s Chemicals and Energy Division found an ignition source and exploded, propelling Revetta backward into a steel column and inflicting a fatal blow to his head. Thirty-two years old, he left behind a wife and two young children.

Nick Revetta’s death did not make national headlines. No hearings were held into the accident that killed him. No one was fired or sent to jail.

Revetta was among 4,551 people killed on the job in America in 2009, carnage that eclipsed the total number of U.S. fatalities in the nine-year Iraq war. Combine the victims of traumatic injuries with the estimated 50,000 people who die annually of work-related diseases and it’s as if a fully loaded Boeing 737-700 crashed every day. Yet the typical fine for a worker death is about $7,900.

“These deaths take place behind closed doors,” says Michael Silverstein, recently retired head of Washington State’s workplace safety agency. “They occur one or two at a time, on private property. There’s an invisibility element.”

Under the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, American workers are entitled to “safe and healthful” conditions. Nick Revetta’s death and the events that followed lay bare the law’s limitations, showing how safety can yield to speed, how even fatal accidents can have few consequences for employers, and how federal investigations can be cut short by what some call a de facto quota system.

As federal regulators review a controversial program exempting government designated “model workplaces” from regular safety checks, newly released U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration records detail significant safety risks, injuries and even deaths at the sites across Massachusetts.

OSHA, the federal overseer of workplace safety, has also allowed some Massachusetts employers to retain their “Voluntary Protection Program” (VPP) status even after serious safety problems have been exposed or workers have been killed, according to more than 1,000 documents obtained by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting under a federal Freedom of Information Act request.

The VPP designation frees employers from regular health and safety inspections, and they are largely left to police themselves, a flaw that has contributed to the death of at least two Massachusetts workers, some critics said.

“If you're a VPP program, that should never happen,” said James Lee, a trustee with the American Postal Workers Union Local 497 and a member of the OSHA investigating team that reviewed a horrific 2006 fatal accident at a U.S. Postal facility in Springfield, Mass.  

“This would never have occurred if (OSHA) came in more frequently,” Lee said.

OSHA rarely strips VPP sites of their special status, even after violations are found or fatal tragedies occur, like the death of postal worker Robert J. Scanlon in Springfield and the 2004 death of a 34-year-old mother of three who was accidentally sucked into an adhesive coating machine at a Spencer, Mass., manufacturing firm, the OSHA documents show.

An ad from the conservative Americans for Prosperity distorts the truth about stimulus money for “green jobs” going overseas. The ad, titled “Wasteful Spending,” introduces some new wrinkles to this well-used line of attack.

According to the ad, the stimulus included:

A pro-Obama TV ad says that “big oil” pledged $200 million to help Mitt Romney, making him the industry’s “$200 million man.” But that’s a pretty slippery claim. The fact is that there is no evidence that truly big oil companies like BP, Exxon Mobil Corp. and Chevron Corp. are behind the money in question. Rather, it’s a funding goal of the Koch brothers, the libertarian billionaires whose diversified corporation has fingers in lumber, commodity trading, ranching, fertilizers, pollution control and coal, besides interests in pipelines and oil refining.

The ad’s claim is based on a news story that said the Koch brothers plan to direct $200 million or more to conservative groups this fall. But the oil interests of Koch Industries are tiny in comparison to those of the better known multinationals that dominate the industry, which also include Royal Dutch Shell, ConocoPhillips and the French-based Total.

This latest ad attempting to link Romney to the oil and gas industry is a joint collaboration between the League of Conservation Voters Victory Fund and Priorities USA Action, the super PAC supporting President Barack Obama. The groups are spending $1 million to air the ad in Colorado and Nevada.

The ad claims that “big oil’s pledged 200 million to help Mitt Romney,” and that, in return, Romney has “pledged to protect their profits and billions in special tax breaks.”

The Department of Labor reported today that 4,690 U.S. workers suffered fatal injuries in 2010, a 3 percent increase from 2009.

The higher number in part reflects a string of high-profile disasters in 2010: An explosion at the Upper Big Branch coal mine in West Virginia that killed 29; BP’s Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, which killed 11; and a blast at the Tesoro Corp.’s oil refinery in Washington State that killed seven.

Even discounting the 47 deaths from those three events, the toll rose in 2010. In 2009, 4,551 workers died, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The fatality rate rose slightly as well, from 3.5 fatal injuries per 100,000 full-time equivalent workers to 3.6.

The number of workers killed in fires or explosions jumped from 113 in 2009 to 191 in 2010. Work-related transportation deaths increased from 1,795 to 1,857, suicides from 263 to 270.

The number of construction-related deaths fell from 834 to 774 — a probable reflection of a weak housing market and a generally rotten economy in 2010.

“It’s disturbing that there hasn’t been any improvement in workplace fatalities in several years,” said Peg Seminario, director of health and safety for the AFL-CIO. “It seems like progress has stalled.”

In the Mississippi River town of Muscatine, Iowa, concerns about a corn processing plant that belches smoke and ash over the South End neighborhood have festered for years.

On Monday, those living in the plant’s shadow took a step that, until recently, would have seemed unlikely at best: They sued the plant’s owner, Grain Processing Corp. — a vital piece of the town’s economy and a political force in Iowa.

For years, the lawsuit alleges, residents have put up with constant pollution that has damaged their property and affected their health. The Center for Public Integrity detailed the persistent haze hanging over the community and the company’s long history of run-ins with regulators as part of its “Poisoned Places” series with NPR last year.

“We’ve reached a tipping point in Muscatine,” said Tony Buzbee, a Houston lawyer with a history of winning high-profile environmental cases who has agreed to represent the residents. “I think that you’re going to see hundreds and hundreds of people who have the courage to stand up and say, ‘We’re in the right, and we’re not going to take it anymore.’ ”

Buzbee joins Jim Larew, who was general counsel to former Gov. Chet Culver, and Des Moines lawyer Andrew Hope in representing the residents, who are seeking to make the case a class action that anyone living within three miles of the plant could join.

The petition filed Monday, Buzbee said, is “just the tip of the iceberg.”  He plans to file hundreds more cases. “It’s going to cost a lot of money,” he said. “It’s going to be a big fight.”