Model Workplaces from The Center for Public Integrity

'Model workplaces' not always so safe

2013-01-11T13:33:20-05:00

First in a series, "Model Workplaces, Imperiled Workers," by the Center for Public Integrity's iWatch News.

In October 2005, a spark triggered an explosion at a Tropicana juice processing plant in Bradenton, Fla. Flames engulfed mechanic Rob Hackley and burned a co-worker who came to his aid. For weeks, Hackley clung to life, undergoing multiple surgeries to treat second- and third-degree burns covering two-thirds of his body. Somehow, he survived.

The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the nation's chief overseer of workplace safety, concluded that the fire could have been prevented if Tropicana had followed basic safety requirements. The company should have evaluated the risks, given workers tools that didn’t produce sparks, monitored for a buildup of flammable vapors and ventilated the area.

Nearby, inspectors uncovered another problem. Employees had to risk a dangerous fall while performing some tasks; the company had refused to pay for a piece of equipment that would have reduced the hazards.

In the official report, inspectors didn’t mince words. They found instances in which “employees were told to ‘throw safety out the window’ and get the work done.” Company managers had shown “deliberate, voluntary and intentional disregard to employee safety.” The inspectors tallied up a dozen violations, including two of the most serious kind that OSHA can allege.

Yet the federal government had for more than a decade considered the Tropicana plant a “model workplace,” and it still does. The plant is one of more than 2,400 across the country that has gained entry into OSHA’s Voluntary Protection Programs, known as VPP — a club whose membership benefits include an exemption from the agency’s regular inspections. Participating sites range from chemical plants and refineries to shipyards and sawmills.

The explosion in Bradenton is hardly the only case of preventable harm to workers at one of OSHA’s exemplars of safety. Since 2000, at least 80 workers have died at these sites, and investigators found serious safety violations in at least 47 of these cases, records examined by the Center for Public Integrity’s iWatch News show.

Workers at plants billed as the nation’s safest have died in preventable explosions, chemical releases and crane accidents. They have been pulled into machinery or asphyxiated. Investigators, called in because of deaths, have uncovered underlying safety problems — failure to follow recognized safety practices, inadequate inspections and training, lack of proper protective gear, unguarded machinery, improper handling of hazardous chemicals.

Yet these companies have rarely faced heavy fines or expulsion from the program. In death cases in which OSHA found at least one violation, VPP companies ultimately paid an average of about $8,000 in fines. And at least 65 percent of sites where a worker has died since 2000 remain in VPP today.

Though Tropicana, a unit of PepsiCo, paid $164,250 in fines stemming from the explosion in Bradenton, the plant stayed in the program. Sixteen months after the fire, OSHA formally reapproved the plant as a “Star” site — the highest level in the club of companies pledging to exceed OSHA standards.

Tropicana said it has corrected problems identified following the explosion and is one of the safest companies in its industry. The Labor Department, which oversees OSHA, said in a written statement that problems were found only in one area of the plant, and that Tropicana took "aggressive action" to fix them.

The program’s supporters note that fatal accidents can occur despite the best efforts of well-intentioned companies; even VPP sites can’t be perfect. But former OSHA officials interviewed by iWatch News said that a death at a VPP workplace should raise serious concerns, especially when accompanied by underlying safety violations.

A fatal accident is “the ultimate failure at a VPP site,” said David Martin, who left OSHA earlier this year after a long career as an inspector, assistant area director and compliance assistance specialist in Pennsylvania. “The whole concept of the program is to prevent fatalities and injuries.”

David DiTommaso, who left OSHA in 2005 after 25 years as an area director in Montana, said, “If you have an OSHA violation and somebody died as a result of that, I can’t imagine how that company can stay in the program.”

The current No. 2 official at OSHA, Jordan Barab, told iWatch News that a death leading to the discovery of serious violations is “certainly a strong indication that you’ve got a serious problem.” But overall VPP is “very useful as a model to all employers of what can be achieved,” he said.

Davis Layne, a former top OSHA official who now is chief of an advocacy group for companies in VPP, said sites that have experienced problems are the exception, not the rule. “Is it a perfect program? Certainly not,” Layne said. “But neither is [OSHA’s standard] enforcement.” He said the group, the Voluntary Protection Programs Participants' Association, doesn’t track fatalities at VPP sites; asked if 80 deaths over a decade was an acceptable number, he said he didn’t know.

VPP exemplified the philosophy of the Ronald Reagan administration, which started the program in 1982, and the George W. Bush administration, which dramatically expanded it. The idea was that cooperation between regulators and industry could achieve better results at less cost than enforcement alone. “OSHA’s primary role is not to police, to punish, or to penalize,” asserted Thorne Auchter, the agency’s chief, in 1982. “We can better assist employers by adopting a more helpful, supportive posture aimed at addressing safety and health needs.”

Other agencies also have adopted voluntary alternatives to enforcement. The Energy Department has a VPP, and the mining industry wants one. Barely a year after the deadly accident at Massey’s Upper Big Branch coal mine, a coal executive asserted that “to improve safety performance, we need to move beyond a model based strictly on enforcement.” His suggestion: a program patterned after OSHA’s VPP. The Environmental Protection Agency rewarded companies taking steps benefiting the environment by lessening the chances of an inspection — until the EPA’s inspector general criticized the program and a newspaper series investigation called it a “charade.” The EPA canceled the program in 2009.

But OSHA’s program has spanned administrations and enjoys continued support today. Despite warnings from government auditors about the risks of expanding too quickly, its growth has been exponential, adding to concerns that employers are only going through the motions, not genuinely protecting workers. Between 2000 and 2008, the number of sites tripled.

“When it started, we thought it was a good idea,” said Mike Wright, director of health, safety and environment for the United Steelworkers union. But “the program got out of control. They started measuring the program by the number of sites rather than the quality. A lot of companies that got in didn’t deserve it.” (Nor is there much in the way of evidence that the program has made workplaces safer: See Does it Work?)

When the Obama administration sought to curb spending on the program last year, the participants’ association and supporters in Congress resisted; the administration gave in. Members of both parties in Congress are pressing to make VPP permanent and to ensure its government funding.No law now requires OSHA to keep the program.

Supporters argue that the program extends the reach of workplace safety regulation at a time when inspectors hardly can be expected to keep tabs on conditions facing every American worker. OSHA has only so many inspectors. By one AFL-CIO estimate, it would take 129 years for inspectors to visit each U.S. workplace.

To be sure, there are success stories — injury rates lowered, workers’ compensation costs reduced, safety lessons learned and disseminated. Some participants in the program mentor their peers and help OSHA by sharing information and providing experts to help evaluate other sites.

Five of Butterball’s six poultry processing facilities in three states, for example, are in VPP. Since joining the program, the plants have seen significant reductions in injury and illness rates and workers’ compensation costs, said Brian Rodgers, the company’s corporate director of safety and risk management. “By committing to it,” he said, “we believe that it elevates us to be the best of the best.”

Another key benefit of participation is that employees become more involved and aware of safety issues, whether it’s holding safety meetings or identifying potential hazards, Layne said. In many workplaces, he said, “it changes the culture.”

But, for some sites, a different picture emerged during an eight-month iWatch News investigation that included visits to VPP workplaces, interviews with company officials, union representatives, safety experts, accident victims’ families and former OSHA officials, and a review of thousands of pages of OSHA records and agency databases obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

This picture is of a program that has grown faster than OSHA’s ability to monitor it. It is a picture of a program that continues to reward some companies, even after they have failed to protect workers and violated safety standards. It is a picture of overstretched regulators who must decide whether a company is really committed to safety or is just good at making it look that way — and who are uncertain whether every company in the club deserves to be there. Asked if the agency felt confident that only qualified sites were in VPP, OSHA official Barab said, “We’re looking at that.”

Preventable deaths

A complete picture of the conditions at VPP workplaces is hard to come by. Unless a worker dies on the job or at least three workers are sent to the hospital, OSHA often doesn’t conduct an investigation, making non-fatal accidents at VPP sites difficult to track. Member companies and OSHA often cite injury and illness rates as a measure of how well an employer is protecting its workers, but government auditors and experts have questioned the wisdom of relying solely on these self-reported numbers, which can be inaccurate or misleading.

iWatch News tried to determine the extent to which VPP sites outperform other companies in the same industry – the comparison OSHA makes when evaluating VPP sites’ injury and illness rates. An analysis of agency data obtained under an open records request indicated that, between 2000 and 2008, an average of about 13 percent of VPP sites each year were worse than their industry peers on one or both of the injury and illness measures used by OSHA. In each year, at least a few sites had rates of injury and illness more than double the average at other workplaces in their industries. OSHA said it couldn’t confirm these numbers, and the agency did not respond to requests by iWatch News for its own numbers. A Government Accountability Office audit looking at rates from 2007 found similar numbers.

Documents obtained by iWatch News provide a glimpse of safety lapses involving companies in VPP. Case files detailing OSHA investigations of fatal accidents at VPP sites, though often heavily redacted, show that some deaths were, in the view of agency inspectors, preventable.

“Proper training along with working two employees together and a review of the duties to be performed would have prevented this accident,” OSHA concluded after an investigation of a fatal accident in 2003 at the Tobyhanna Army Depot in Tobyhanna, Pa., in which a pressurized tank lid blew off and hit the employee.

Following an investigation of a fire that claimed a worker at Eastman Chemical Company’s Longview, Texas, plant in 2003, OSHA determined that the worker could have survived the blaze if the company had provided the proper protective suit.

And after an investigation of a catastrophic boiler explosion in 2008 at International Paper’s mill in Vicksburg, Miss., OSHA found that the company did not act on recommendations from its own expert that, if followed, would have either prevented the explosion or minimized the risk to workers. As it was, the blast killed one worker and injured another 22, at least three of whom remained in medically induced comas for months as doctors treated grave burns.

In each case, OSHA alleged violations of safety standards VPP members are expected to exceed, but the company remained in VPP. In the Eastman and International Paper cases, some of the violations were reduced after the company contested them.

Representatives of Eastman and International Paper declined to discuss the accidents. Russ Dunkelberger, Tobyhanna’s safety manager, said that the depot regularly exceeds OSHA safety requirements; the 2003 death, he said, was not indicative of larger problems.

At least seven sites have experienced multiple fatal accidents while in VPP; four remain in the program today. Two companies, International Paper and Georgia-Pacific — among the largest corporate participants in the program — have four sites each where workers have died since 2000.

Some accidents have occurred just months after OSHA officials determined the site belonged in VPP.

In May 2009, the agency announced that American Packaging Corp.’s Columbus, Wis., plant had earned “Star” status. OSHA Area Director Kimberly Stille, presenting the company with a flag and a plaque, noted American Packaging’s “excellent record in workplace safety and health,” “outstanding efforts” by management, and “exceptional employee involvement in safety and health programs.”

Five months later, an explosion rocked the plant, killing 47-year-old worker Jeffrey Doxtater. OSHA investigators found a host of deficiencies, including inadequate training, protective gear and written safety procedures, as well as problems with the company’s handling of hazardous substances. The agency found 29 serious violations of safety regulations, and proposed a $127,350 fine.

This time, Stille was not so laudatory of the company’s safety achievements. “These types of violations show the company’s disregard for the safety and welfare of its employees,” Stille said in a press release announcing the violations. “Those who ignore safe practices and OSHA regulations are inviting tragedy into the lives of their workers.”

American Packaging didn’t respond to requests for comment. In an earlier statement, the company said it was “shocked and dismayed” by OSHA’s proposed penalties and noted its status as a member of the club. “Approval into VPP is OSHA’s official recognition of a company’s outstanding efforts and excellence in occupational safety and health,” the company stated. American Packaging is contesting the citations.

The Labor Department, in a written statement, said that approval of VPP status was based on the standard evaluation by a VPP team, which is "not a comprehensive safety and health investigation." The government also said it is weighing whether the operation in Columbus still meets the program's requirements.

In the meantime, American Packaging remains in VPP.

Staying in the club

To join VPP, companies must submit to an on-site evaluation. Unlike the usual OSHA visit where inspectors can issue citations, however, evaluators — often including employees of companies in the program — issue “90-day items,” a list of hazards to correct within 90 days. “Star” sites typically won’t face another evaluation for at least three years. Almost every member of the club — more than 95 percent — has “Star” status.

Once a site is approved into VPP, it is largely left to police itself. Only serious accidents, formal complaints, or referrals — when OSHA is informed of a potential hazard — will trigger a visit from an enforcement official.

Though OSHA often uses special enforcement programs to target particularly dangerous industries, VPP sites are exempt from these inspections, too. Companies must file reports on themselves with OSHA each year, but OSHA generally does little to verify them until the next evaluation in three to five years, Barab confirmed.

When a worker dies at a VPP site, OSHA officials responsible for overseeing the program have to follow up, but what happens after that is a judgment call. The agency could perform a full re-evaluation of the site’s VPP status, or it might just call the company on the phone to check in.

“A lot of VPP is kind of subjective,” said OSHA’s Barab. For a workplace to stay in the club, “we have to feel like they’re acting in good faith.”

During the past decade, these judgment calls usually tipped in favor of letting companies stay; at least 65 percent of sites where a worker has died remain in the program today.

Some sites have been re-approved after fatal accidents, only to experience further problems. At Weyerhaeuser’s Valliant, Okla., plant, for example, a contract worker was crushed to death in a paper machine in May 1999, but, in May 2001, OSHA re-approved the facility as a "Star" site. Less than two months later, another worker was crushed to death in a paper machine, and OSHA found the same violations for which it had cited the company after the first death. Only after this second death did OSHA remove the site from VPP in 2003.

Weyerhaeuser refused to discuss the accidents, but said in a statement: “Weyerhaeuser takes safety very seriously and supports the goals of VPP. Whenever we have a fatality we review the event and work with the appropriate safety agencies to learn how to prevent future occurrences.”

And, more recently, the agency has repeatedly reapproved Bayer MaterialScience’s Baytown, Texas, plant after serious accidents — once after a chemical spill in 2000 that led to willful and serious violations issued for what OSHA deemed a botched cleanup, then again after a 2005 explosion followed the next year by a chemical release that killed a worker. After another explosion, the company withdrew from VPP at OSHA’s request in 2007 but was readmitted the next year.

Bayer refused to discuss the accidents or its brief withdrawal from VPP, instead providing a written statement. “Achievement of ‘Star’ status came through the commitment of Bayer Baytown employees to a philosophy of continuous safety improvement,” the company wrote.

William A. Burke, OSHA’s acting regional administrator in Dallas, provided a statement to iWatch News about the Bayer plant, saying, “Each inspection and VPP review following each inspection taken independently didn't indicate a significant deficiency in their safety and health program, but added together showed an overall weakness in the strength of the program.” But the company has fixed the problems and demonstrated “their sincerity to protect their employees,” he said.

The decisions that OSHA officials make in such cases are based on reviews of the site, but the Government Accountability Office raised serious concerns in a 2009 report about the assessments underlying these decisions. Auditors found that, in some cases, there was little documentation of what, if anything, OSHA regional offices did to ensure these VPP sites still belonged in the program. The GAO concluded that “some sites that no longer met the definition of an exemplary worksite remained in the VPP.”

Barab, acting chief of OSHA at the time of the report, responded by requiring documentation of follow-ups to serious accidents, among other steps. The effect of these changes is still unclear.

Last June, OSHA reapproved International Paper’s Vicksburg mill as a “Star” site. The decision came less than a year after the company agreed to stop fighting the citations, including one initially deemed “willful,” stemming from the fatal 2008 boiler explosion. A "willful" citation signals OSHA's conclusion that a company either intentionally violated the law or acted with "plain indifference" to it. In International Paper's case, the willful citation was reduced to a "serious" one.

Current agency head David Michaels signed a letter to the mill manager, calling the site “a model of excellence” and “an inspiration to us all.”

‘Cosmetic compliance’

Some critics have argued that VPP has been watered down in the rush to expand, and is too easily gamed by employers more interested in “cosmetic compliance” — looking good on paper — than keeping workers safe.

In the push to expand the program, OSHA may have undermined its effectiveness. Workplace safety regulators have changed policies to make it easier to join the club, allowing streamlined approvals for companies seeking VPP status for more than one workplace and allowing a company more latitude in how it compares its injury rate to industry peers; instead of using industry rates for the previous year, an employer can choose from one of the three previous years, whichever presents its record most favorably.

Former OSHA officials described a quota system that diverted resources from enforcement and cast doubt on the quality of some sites in the program. During VPP’s rapid growth between 2001 and 2008, the number of OSHA staffers helping companies comply with safety regulations, including oversight of the VPP program, decreased, according to agency data. But with the rapid expansion, OSHA needed more people than ever to conduct on-site evaluations.

Adam Finkel, OSHA regional administrator for many of the Rocky Mountain states from 2000 to 2003 and now on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, said that, during his time at the agency, the emphasis on expanding VPP membership sometimes came at the expense of enforcement. Finkel, who won a settlement from OSHA after blowing the whistle on exposure of inspectors to a toxic metal, recalled the pressure to increase the number of VPP worksites: “It was always, ‘How many people are you putting on this? How many new sites have you got?’ ”

Former OSHA official Martin, who was a compliance assistance specialist in one of the agency’s Pennsylvania offices until earlier this year, also recalled pressure to move quickly. “During that era, there were some that were clearly rushed through,” he said.

Haste may have had consequences. A former OSHA official asserted in a formal complaint with the Labor Department’s inspector general in 2009 that evaluators missed “glaring violations” that led to a serious accident, then took steps “to cover up the botched VPP evaluation.”

The complaint stemmed from a June 2008 evaluation of a Petrolia, Pa., plant owned by Indspec Chemical Corp., a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum Corp. Impressed, evaluators recommended “Star” status. In September, the regional administrator signed off, noting “the overall safety and health program management system at this site is excellent.”

One month later, a wall of white smoke billowed from the plant’s “Acid House” and into nearby buildings. Workers coughed and struggled to breathe as they fled the fumes, according to their statements included in a set of documents obtained by iWatch News.

The cloud was oleum, also known as fuming sulfuric acid. OSHA eventually determined that the company’s botched response led to a large and uncontrolled release, threatening a nearby community, which had to be evacuated.

This time, OSHA didn’t praise the company. Its program for handling hazardous chemicals such as oleum, which the VPP evaluation team had saluted only a few months earlier, was incomplete and had created “a greater likelihood for the chance of a catastrophic release of toxic materials,” the agency’s inspection report concluded.

In all, the agency found 27 serious violations and issued a $121,500 fine. OSHA, which hadn’t finalized the site’s "Star" status and announced it publicly, quietly withdrew the approval, and Indspec’s aborted bid to join the VPP club has not been previously disclosed. To settle the enforcement case, the company agreed to pay $90,000 for 20 violations and to remedy the unsafe conditions, according to the settlement agreement between OSHA and the company.

OSHA’s actions “wasted government time and money and resulted [in] endangering not only plant employees, but also the residents of [the] town of Petrolia,” wrote the official, whose name was redacted on documents iWatch News obtained under a public records request. Had OSHA officials been qualified and done their jobs, the official wrote, “they could have intervened prior to the incident and possibly prevented it.” The Labor Department said in a written statement that VPP evaluation team's review had been thorough and that the underlying cause involved an infrequent process at the plant.

Indspec declined iWatch News’ requests for comment, but in a statement the company said it may reapply for VPP status. “We understand and regret any inconvenience caused by the October 11, 2008, incident at the Indspec Petrolia plant,” the company said. “To ensure that this type of incident doesn't happen again Indspec has made several changes in equipment and procedures.” The company added, “Indspec believes in the fundamentals of OSHA's Voluntary Protection Program.”

A ‘wake-up call’

Mechanic Rob Hackley spent much of Oct. 10, 2005, scrubbing and shoveling sludge from equipment at Tropicana’s Bradenton, Fla., plant. The company had given him an extremely flammable cleaning solvent known as “Brake Wash” to use.

Though company managers knew well the heightened safety requirements for working with such hazardous substances, they did virtually nothing to address the dangers, investigators later found. Any one of an assortment of tools and equipment later found at the scene — but that shouldn’t have been there — could have triggered an explosion, investigators said. As it happened, it was Hackley’s electrical impact wrench.

“One little tiny spark is all it took,” recalled Cliff Vanluven, who was in the room with Hackley as it erupted in flames, singeing the hair off every uncovered part of Vanluven’s body and engulfing Hackley. Vanluven used his hands to beat out the flames that were consuming Hackley, suffering serious burns himself. “It seemed like forever,” Vanluven recalled.

The OSHA inspection yielded a scathing report. Two of the dozen safety violations were deemed “willful” — a designation so serious that companies with such violations can’t apply to VPP for three years. But Tropicana was already in the program, and regulators weren’t required to kick the company out. Tropicana paid the full $164,250 penalty and corrected the problems investigators had found, OSHA documents show.

In a press release, OSHA deemed the fire a “wake-up call” for Tropicana. The agency’s regional administrator, after meeting with company executives, said she was “convinced of their commitment to the high standards of the Voluntary Protection Programs,” according to an OSHA statement.

Tropicana refused interview requests from iWatch News but in a written statement said it has remedied problems identified following the explosion. “[W]e take seriously our responsibility to continually evaluate and enhance our procedures and systems,” the company wrote. “Our safety record exceeds our industry and our plants are among the top safety performers.” Of the fire in Bradenton, it said: “[W]e quickly developed and implemented new safety measures. These have been included in our workplace safety and training programs.”

October 2005 was not the first time OSHA had been called to the plant since it was admitted to VPP. In November 2000 — nine months after the site first earned "Star" status — a worker was crushed to death between a trailer and a loading dock. OSHA investigated but didn’t issue citations. Instead, the agency gave Tropicana a list of five recommendations to address voluntarily. In a letter to OSHA, the company said it had taken steps to address the recommendations.

Since the accident in 2005, OSHA has received three formal complaints about the Bradenton plant. One resulted in the issuance of a serious violation. In 2009, OSHA officials returned to the plant for a scheduled VPP re-evaluation and found deficiencies in how the company was identifying and controlling hazards. The agency re-approved the plant as a "Star" site under “conditional” status, essentially placing it on probation for a year. A follow-up evaluation is supposed to take place within 15 months; OSHA did not respond to requests for information about it.

Both Hackley and his wife, Kim, have regular reminders of the 2005 fire. Rob’s skin has healed well, Kim said, but he has scars on his chest and arms from the skin grafts. Sections of his skin are from cadavers and pigs.

Other wounds are less obvious. Rob has periodic anxiety attacks and shaking fits, Kim said. Sometimes he inexplicably gets so cold that they have to wrap him in blankets. After the accident, Rob received treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, Kim said. Rob himself is still too upset to discuss the accident, she said.

The Hackleys eventually reached a settlement with Tropicana, Kim said, but she couldn’t discuss the details. “I don’t know if it was fair or not,” she said. “When you’re dealing with a company as big as Tropicana, once the accident is over and you sign the papers, they’re done with you. But people have to live with the effects.”

Rob considered going back to work, she said, but “he just could not bring himself to get close to the plant.” He now has a slow-paced job at a small shop. He likes his work, and he sees a psychologist much less often.

“The one thing that really still bothers Rob is that they got to keep their ‘Star’ status,” Kim said. “If safety really had been a priority, this wouldn’t have happened.”

'Model' workplaces avoid special government scrutiny targeting hazardous industries

VALERO ENERGY CORPORATION — 2011-12-01T08:50:35-05:00

This is part of a series,"Model Workplaces, Imperiled Workers," by the Center for Public Integrity's iWatch News. The first article is here.

On a December night in 2009, something went wrong with boiler B28 at Valero’s oil refinery in Texas City, Texas. Technician Tommy Manis and his co-workers weren’t sure just what it was. They had tried more than a dozen times to get the boiler started. They weren’t aware of the dangerous levels of gas building up inside, ready to ignite.

Manis had never worked on B28 before. His job took him to different parts of the plant, so he may not have known the boiler’s history: During the previous 15 months, there had been two explosions inside its hulking furnace. After the second, Valero determined gas had built up and ignited. Now, with Manis and his co-workers nearby, gas again flowed unchecked into the boiler.

Oil refineries are inherently dangerous, and the industry’s record of failing to curb hazards prompted the federal government in 2007 to start subjecting them to more intense scrutiny in a special enforcement program. But Tommy Manis and his wife, Laura, trusted that this refinery was safer. The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the nation’s chief overseer of worker safety, had formally certified the Valero refinery as a “model workplace” with an exemplary record and an impeccable safety program exceeding that required by regulators.

It was a “Star” site in the agency’s Voluntary Protection Programs — a distinction that, for Valero, conveyed more than just bragging rights. OSHA exempts members of this club, known as VPP, from some inspections, including the special enforcement program targeting refineries and similar initiatives designed to address hazards in some of the nation’s most dangerous industries.

Many of the nation’s largest employers covet the VPP stamp of approval — a mark now held by more than 2,400 workplaces across the country, from sawmills and shipyards to power plants and textile mills. Participation in the program helps reduce injuries and illnesses and lowers workers’ compensation costs, they say. For the Valero refinery in Texas City, it also meant a break on local taxes.

The VPP flag can attract and reassure workers. A red, white and blue symbol of the government’s approval, it flies at nine of Valero’s refineries. Manis had received T-shirts, pens and Christmas ornaments stamped with the program’s logo — gifts from his employer. The refinery’s reputation, his wife recalled, had drawn Manis to apply for the job in the first place: “He thought Valero was the cream-of-the-crop plant. It didn’t blow up. It was safe.”

That December night, while in her car, Laura received a text message: Had she heard what happened at the refinery? She knew Tommy was in the middle of a shift. She dialed the sender and asked what was going on. “There was dead silence on the phone, and I knew,” she recalled.

Investigators would later determine that Tommy’s death could have been prevented. Valero hadn’t adequately investigated the first boiler explosion or taken proper steps to prevent it from recurring, OSHA found. The agency determined that the company hadn’t adequately trained workers, evaluated dangers or ensured the problematic boiler conformed to widely accepted safety standards.

Though Valero blames the companies that manufactured and installed the boiler in an ongoing lawsuit, OSHA found fault with Valero, issuing a serious violation and highlighting a half-dozen safety problems. In a June 2010 settlement with the agency, Valero agreed to fix problems at the refinery but didn’t admit to violating safety regulations. The company paid a $4,500 fine.

When the boiler exploded, Tommy Manis became the fourth worker at a VPP “Star” refinery to die since the special inspection progam began in mid-2007. Since his death, three more workers have died at one of these government-recognized refineries. Yet all five plants where the seven workers died retain OSHA’s stamp of approval today, an investigation by the Center for Public Integrity’s iWatch News has found. Thus they remain beyond the reach of the agency’s inspection program designed to protect those who work in one of the nation’s most dangerous industries.

Fires, explosions — and exemptions

A similar story line has played out elsewhere: Recognition of “model workplace” status, missed opportunities to detect and fix hazards, a serious mishap or fatal accident, detection of safety violations and, ultimately, continuation of the government’s stamp of approval.

To be sure, there are success stories in the ranks of VPP members — injury rates lowered and workers’ compensation costs reduced, safety lessons learned and disseminated. Even many of the program’s critics believe it could work with adequate oversight. Like other companies in the program, Valero points to a safer workplace and improved employee engagement as the primary benefits of participation.

But agency documents and data and interviews with former OSHA officials, union representatives and experts reveal another side to the program — preventable accidents, unaddressed safety problems and overstretched regulators.

Membership in VPP exempts employers from inspections unless there has been a serious accident, a formal complaint, or an instance in which OSHA learns of a specific potential hazard.

That exemption is perhaps nowhere more beneficial than for sites in industries that find themselves in OSHA’s crosshairs. OSHA’s recent focus on oil refineries offers a clear example of the agency’s approach: Identifying industries where problems seem to be widespread, charging inspectors with policing them, but placing some sites off-limits for special inspections. Roughly 30 “model workplace” refineries are off-limits to inspectors under the program.

Not only have workers died at VPP refineries, those plants appear to have some of the same problems plaguing the larger refining industry.

Fires are a primary concern. Refineries are fuel factories that use highly flammable chemicals. Even small fires can be indicators of how well refiners are managing hazards that can lead to catastrophic explosions or toxic chemical releases. Regulations require companies to evaluate potential dangers, test equipment, and investigate mishaps as part of what is known as “process safety management” — the focus of the OSHA enforcement initiative targeting refineries.

During 2009 and 2010, at least 21 of 55 fires at refineries falling under federal jurisdiction occurred at VPP sites, an iWatch News analysis of regulatory and news media reports found. VPP sites make up about 30 percent of these refineries, so these government-recognized sites have experienced more than their proportionate share of fires.

Some refineries are in one of the 25 states that run their own workplace safety agencies, which the federal government requires to be at least as effective as OSHA. All the state agencies have a version of VPP. Many of these states have adopted the special enforcement program, though data on those inspections are harder to track.

The United Steelworkers union, which represents about 30,000 refinery workers, recently reached a similar conclusion after looking at incident data it had collected and talking with local union officers: Refineries in VPP seemed to be just as dangerous as refineries outside of it. “We didn’t think there was any difference,” said Mike Wright, the union’s health, safety and environment director.

Same company, different scrutiny

The patchwork regulatory system in which OSHA officials can conduct routine inspections and find violations at some workplaces while others are off-limits exists even within companies; oil giants such as ExxonMobil, ConocoPhilips and Valero own both VPP and non-VPP refineries, so some of their plants are shielded from special inspections while others aren’t.

At refineries that inspectors can visit as part of the special enforcement initiative, they frequently have found serious safety violations.

One company — Marathon Petroleum Company — offers an example. It owns four refineries under federal jurisdiction — two in VPP and two not in VPP. During inspections conducted under the emphasis program in 2007 and 2008, inspectors proposed $479,000 in fines for 61 violations combined at two of the company’s refineries, in Texas City and Canton, Ohio.

The agency deemed two of the violations in Canton “willful” — alleging that Marathon either intentionally violated the law or acted with “plain indifference” to it. In Texas City, four “repeat” violations involved citations issued to the company in previous inspections. OSHA later agreed to reduce the severity of the violations deemed willful in the Canton case, and Marathon paid the $321,500 fine. OSHA records indicate the Texas City case has not been resolved.

But as VPP members, Marathon’s two other refineries under federal jurisdiction —in Robinson, Ill., and Garyville, La. — are exempt from similar inspections. Even as the new enforcement program got underway, OSHA was concluding an investigation of a fatal accident at the Robinson refinery. In January 2007, a worker had died after being overcome by toxic fumes.

In that case, investigators found five serious violations. Among other things, OSHA said, Marathon had failed to address some hazards in the unit where the accident occurred, and the company had failed to investigate previous similar incidents. OSHA officials identified the case as a priority under its Enhanced Enforcement Policy, meaning the agency had determined “there is reason to believe that the employer may be indifferent to its occupational safety and health obligations.”

Almost every problem investigators alleged was a violation of the process safety management standard — the same standard that was the focus of the emphasis program and would be the basis of most of the citations at Marathon’s two non-VPP refineries.

According to the OSHA report, one Marathon official “asked about the status of VPP and how OSHA views them since they had a fatality.” The company had little to fear, it turned out. The next year, OSHA reapproved the Robinson refinery as a VPP Star site, allowing it to remain exempt from the ongoing enforcement initiative. In a statement, the Labor Department said Marathon took steps to prevent future similar problems.

The Garyville refinery has also experienced fatal accidents. Since 2002, three workers have died there, though none of the accidents resulted in citations for Marathon. The refinery remains a “Star” site today.

Marathon refused to discuss specific accidents or the OSHA emphasis program but provided a statement that “Marathon is a strong supporter of the VPP program and is proud to have many of its facilities VPP certified.”

More recently, an accident in August 2009 at ExxonMobil’s Joliet, Ill., refinery — a VPP site — injured two workers and released a highly toxic chemical called hydrofluoric acid, prompting an air pollution lawsuit from the state attorney general and citations from OSHA. All of the violations initially alleged — from failing to identify hazards to failing to test equipment and correct deficiencies — related to process safety, the subject of the ongoing emphasis program. OSHA later agreed to delete one of the violations, and the company paid a $9,000 fine.

‘A matter under discussion’

The government’s special scrutiny of refineries stemmed from tragedy. In March 2005, an explosion killed 15 people and injured 180 more at BP’s Texas City refinery, just a short drive from where Manis would die four years later. The U.S. Chemical Safety Board, the independent federal agency that investigated the BP disaster, in 2007 urged OSHA to start a “national emphasis program” that would give special scrutiny to refiners in an attempt to curb hazards before disaster strikes.

OSHA shared concerns about the industry. “As a result of the Texas City accident, OSHA began evaluating its data on fatalities and catastrophes and determined that refineries experienced more of these problems than the next three industry sectors combined,” Richard Fairfax, who headed the agency’s enforcement programs, told a congressional subcommittee n 2007.

OSHA took the board’s advice and started the emphasis program later that year, focusing on process safety management — the control of dangers associated with the use of highly hazardous substances that could lead to fires, explosions or chemical releases. The agency planned to inspect every oil refinery under federal jurisdiction.

Every refinery, that is, except those in VPP.

The industry has been among VPP’s strongest supporters. The current chairperson of the association representing VPP participants works for Valero spinoff NuStar Energy. Two of the program’s staunchest supporters in Congress — Sens. Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., and Mary Landrieu, D-La. — received more than a half-million dollars combined in contributions from the oil and gas industry since 2005, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics. Overall, the industry spent almost $146 million to lobby the federal government in 2010.

Representatives for two oil industry trade groups, the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association and the American Petroleum Institute, did not respond to repeated interview requests for this story. But the president of the refiners’ association, Charles Drevna, did send OSHA chief David Michaels a letter last year, urging continued support for VPP. “There is no need for OSHA to revisit and inspect VPP worksites as part of the Refinery Process Safety National Emphasis Program,” Drevna wrote.

But, to OSHA, that isn’t so clear. “We have had some fatalities in VPP refineries, so that’s something [i.e., the National Emphasis Program] we are still trying to figure out,” said Jordan Barab, the agency’s No. 2 official. Asked if the refineries beyond the reach of the current emphasis program are safer than those that aren’t, Barab said, “One would hope so.”

To make sure they are, he added, the agency is considering inspecting a few VPP refineries. The agency has the authority to do so, but there are other potential challenges, among them a scarcity of resources. The possibility of conducting intensive inspections at VPP refineries, then, is “a matter under discussion,” Barab said.

The refiners’ association, in its letter to Michaels last year, defended the exemption from special inspections. “VPP sites are exempt from programmed inspections because the program has and continues to meet its goal to foster a collaborative environment between management, labor, and OSHA,” wrote Drevna, the association’s president. “NPRA members believe that the exclusion of VPP sites from NEP inspections has not diminished the rigor whereby VPP sites are evaluated.”

The refinery emphasis program, which requires a significant dedication of time and manpower from OSHA, is not the only such ongoing program from which VPP sites are exempt. Since 2002, another OSHA emphasis program has targeted workplaces where hazardous machinery could cause serious injury or death.

The initiative focuses on enforcing a few specific safety standards at workplaces in a range of industries, including paper mills, sawmills, food manufacturers and metal fabricators — all among the largest industries in VPP.

iWatch News identified four fatalities at VPP sites during the past decade in these specific industries that resulted in OSHA finding violations of these specific standards. At least eight other fatal accidents at VPP sites involved the types of hazards outlined in the enforcement program.

Other emphasis programs from which VPP sites are exempt focus on correcting hazards at federal agency sites or ferreting out inaccurate or fraudulent injury and illness recordkeeping.

A relatively new program raises similar issues to those presented by the refinery initiative. OSHA is in the early stages of an emphasis program targeting similar dangers — those presented by the use of highly hazardous substances — at chemical plants. With more than 250 sites under federal jurisdiction, chemical manufacturing is the largest industry in VPP, and all of these sites are exempt from inspections under the ongoing program.

‘Nobody was looking over their shoulder’

By the time Tommy Manis was assigned to work on the troublesome boiler at Valero’s Texas City refinery in December 2009, two of the company’s other refineries had already been inspected under the OSHA emphasis program. Inspectors had found a combined total of more than 30 violations and issued more than $200,000 in fines to Valero’s refineries in Port Arthur, Texas, and Delaware City, Del. (OSHA agreed to reduce the severity of the violations and cut fines in the Delaware City case, and Valero has since sold the refinery. Valero is still contesting the penalties in the Port Arthur case.)

Some believe that OSHA’s findings could have raised red flags. When the last of these violations were announced in June 2009 — less than six months before Manis’ death —George Washington University School of Public Health lecturer and former OSHA official Celeste Monforton raised concerns on a public health blog: “It makes me wonder whether similar violations … would be found at the ‘inspection-exempt’ Valero sites? After all, it is the same employer, the same board of directors, the same executive team and presumably the same safety policies and procedures at its sites.”

Valero spokesman Bill Day said there is a company-wide safety policy that is implemented at every site. “Safety is equally important at all of our refineries,” he said. Eventually, he said, the company aims to have all of its refineries in VPP. “This is a business that has to operate safely in order to attract the best employees.”

Valero, in its lawsuit against companies that made and installed the boiler, states that, because of the “defective package boiler system,” “Valero suffered damages.” Because Texas workers’ compensation laws may shield Valero, Laura Manis’ lawsuit also targets the manufacturers. But she and her lawyer, Gary Riebschlager, blame Valero for the deadly blast.

After the earlier explosions, Riebschlager argues, Valero tried to fix the boiler on the cheap and get it back into service quickly. “All they had to do was fix it right the first time,” he said. “But they didn’t because they knew that nobody was looking over their shoulder.” Once companies qualify for VPP, he added, “they know that OSHA’s not coming in.”

In May 2009 — two months after the second explosion and seven months before the one that killed Manis — OSHA officials had been at the refinery, conducting an on-site evaluation to determine whether to reapprove the site’s VPP status, which had been in effect for almost eight years. They’d chosen to use a “compressed reapproval process,” an abbreviated review reserved for sites that the agency felt had demonstrated excellence.

The evaluation report made no mention of the boiler.

In a statement, the Labor Department said the abbreviated review was “unrelated” to the fatal explosion and had focused on requirements for participation in VPP. “The required programs and processes were in place at the time of the VPP on-site evaluation,” the department said.

It’s far from clear, of course, that aggressive policing by OSHA would have prevented the explosion. Even an intensive inspection like those conducted under the emphasis program is no guarantee that a site is problem-free.

But Kim Nibarger, a safety official with the United Steelworkers, said he sees the Valero accident as an example of larger problems. The explosion, he said, offers more evidence that refineries in VPP aren’t better at managing serious hazards than their non-VPP counterparts, and that the exemption from emphasis program inspections is “cause for concern.”

Since Manis’ death, at least three more workers have died at VPP refineries, though the employer at the site of the most recent death said it appeared to have been from natural causes. OSHA told iWatch News it doesn't consider another of the deaths attributable to the refining company because the accident occurred at an area of the refinery that was under construction and primarily overseen by a contractor.

One of the deaths since Manis' occurred at another Valero refinery. On March 6, Valero personnel found contract worker Rodrigo Rodriguez dead on a platform at the company’s plant in Norco, La. Just over a week later, Rodriguez’s family sued Valero and Koch Specialty Plant Services, his employer and also a VPP participant.

The family’s lawyer, Byron Buchanan, said interviews with employees who were at the accident scene, along with other evidence, indicated that Rodriguez was overcome by hydrogen sulfide as he and other workers fled a leak of the toxic gas. This gas, a well-known hazard at oil refineries, also killed a worker at Valero’s Texas City refinery in 1998 — three years before the site was approved into VPP.

Valero spokesman Day acknowledged that there was a hydrogen sulfide leak but said the cause of Rodriguez’s death wasn’t yet clear. In court filings, the company denied allegations of gross negligence.

Rodriguez’s employer, Koch Specialty Plant Services, didn’t respond to requests for comment. In court filings, Koch said its liability is limited "because responsible third parties may have caused or contributed to" Rodriguez' death.

OSHA is investigating the Norco death, and the agency recently closed the Texas City case.

In a statement, the Labor Department said OSHA recently conducted an on-site evaluation of the Texas City refinery.“A decision on the site’s VPP status is pending,” the department said.

Meanwhile, both refineries remain in VPP.

Laura Manis said she hopes her lawsuit will keep Tommy’s memory alive in a meaningful way — by spotlighting safety issues at the countless refineries and chemical plants dotting the Galveston Bay area, including many that are VPP workplaces.

To her, the VPP “Star” logo that adorns the refinery’s grounds is a meaningless trophy: “It says we’re going to give you this little stamp, and you can do whatever you want behind those gates.”

IMPACT: OSHA's 'model workplace' program needs reform, report finds

2012-08-21T17:15:40-04:00

So-called “model workplaces” that won exemptions from regular inspections will now face greater scrutiny, amid concern over deaths and safety breakdowns at some plants held up as industry leaders.

A report suggesting reforms, from a task force of the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, comes more than a year after a Center for Public Integrity series revealed that deadly accidents and serious safety violations at these sites had gone largely unpunished by OSHA.

The report about the agency’s Voluntary Protections Programs, known as VPP, recommends that OSHA overhaul its policies for responding to serious accidents at these sites. Regional officials should thoroughly re-evaluate sites that have such problems, the report said, and they should have broader authority to kick out problem workplaces. The agency also should suspend sites while investigations are ongoing, the report recommended.

"This report will serve as a valuable road map for the agency as we continue to address issues present in VPP," Jordan Barab, OSHA's No. 2 official, said in a statement. "In general, we agree with most of the findings of the report, and have already or will be implementing a number of substantive changes to the program based on the recommendations included."

The association representing companies in the “model workplace” program is holding its annual conference in Anaheim, Calif., and no one from the organization could be reached for comment Monday.

The task force, composed almost entirely of regional and local OSHA officials, identified muddled guidance, inaccurate data and regional inconsistencies that have led to problems within the program.

As the Government Accountability Office has noted, OSHA lacks evidence detailing the program’s effectiveness. The task force acknowledged as much, suggesting ways the agency could better gather information on sites in the program.

The report also suggests OSHA should consider abandoning the initiative known as “VPP Corporate,” which allows certified companies to receive streamlined evaluations at all their sites.

One Center story highlighted the initiative and its second participant, the U.S. Postal Service. At the same time one OSHA branch was approving large numbers of postal service sites into VPP, the agency’s enforcement branch was alleging widespread safety problems at all mail processing centers nationwide – an approach one former OSHA official called “schizophrenic.”

The task force’s report is not the final look at VPP: The Department of Labor’s Office of Inspector General announced earlier this year that it would also look into the program.

OSHA reforms Voluntary Protection Programs

2012-06-29T06:00:01-04:00

Citing a 2011 Center for Public Integrity investigation, a Labor Department official said Thursday that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has reformed a program that rewards workplaces reporting lower-than-average injury and illness rates.

OSHA’s Voluntary Protection Programs (VPP), which exempt “model workplaces” from routine inspections, were established in 1982. VPP tripled in size between 2000 and 2011, as OSHA’s inspection staff diminished and membership requirements were relaxed. The Center’s investigation found that at least 80 workers had died at VPP sites during that period.

At a hearing before a subcommittee of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, Jordan Barab, the Labor Department’s deputy assistant secretary for occupational safety and health, said the department “is committed to VPP. But like every other federal agency, we need to make some very hard decisions about how to allocate our limited resources where we will get the most worker protection bang for our buck.”

After the Center’s investigation, an internal OSHA workgroup reviewed VPP and submitted recommendations for improved management, Barab said. Reforms include increased funding for a program that offers free advice to small businesses on worker safety practices, he said. A whistleblower program has been expanded, with four new laws designed to protect workers from retaliation for reporting potential safety hazards.

Barab also reported a shift away from incentive programs based on keeping injury and illness rates low. Such programs often discourage workers from reporting injuries, he said; OSHA now promotes programs that encourage and reward employee involvement instead.

“We’ve seen companies, for example, offer a pizza party or enter workers into a raffle if they met a goal of not incurring reportable injuries over a specified period of time,” Barab said. “Programs like these, while possibly well intentioned, ultimately discourage workers from reporting injuries. Unreported injuries that are not investigated cannot be used to help prevent future injuries. This is not what we want and ultimately, I do not think it is what VPP participants want, either.”

Because of VPP’s rapid growth, OSHA has accumulated a backlog of reapproval evaluations for participating companies. Instead of easing standards, OSHA will focus on “maintaining the integrity of the program,” aiming to eliminate the backlog by the end of 2012, Barab said.

R. Davis Layne, executive director of the VPP Participants’ Association (VPPPA), disagreed with OSHA’s new approach.

“OSHA did not think out all of the implications of this new policy,” Layne said. He said some member companies had been told that “any incentive program, regardless of its nature,” could jeopardize their VPP status.

Massachusetts workers killed, injured at facilities touted as 'Model Workplaces'

Massachusetts,United States — 2012-05-18T06:00:01-04:00

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.

Currently 41 Massachusetts employers participate in the highly touted VPP program, including power, chemical and nuclear plants, military and postal facilities and biotechnology firms. Those worksites given the highest VPP rating are subject to OSHA re-evaluations every three to five years; those with lower ratings every 18 months to 2 years, according to the program guidelines.

GE Transportation Aircraft Engines in Lynn has maintained its VPP status, despite a $14,000 fine last year for failing to assess and document the condition of a covered piping system that exposed workers to explosion hazards, OSHA records show.

Workers at defense contractor Raytheon’s Andover plant, a VPP designee since 2009, were exposed to several electrical hazards that could have led to electrical shocks, burns or even death, OSHA inspectors found last year. The hazards were discovered within a year of Raytheon's disclosure in a 2010 company safety report that its Andover facility was one of three Raytheon plants among the company’s U.S. sites with the highest injury rate.

The release of the heavily redacted OSHA records comes in the wake of two recently announced federal reviews of the program, which started in 1982 to reward employers who “achieved exemplary occupational safety and health,” according to OSHA's program description.

More than 80 workers have died at VPP sites since 2000, according to an investigation published last year by the Washington D.C.-based Center for Public Integrity. Following the report, the U.S. Department of Labor's Office of Inspector General announced an upcoming audit of the program. OSHA is also conducting its own “top-to-bottom” internal review.

In addition, the federal Government Accounting Office released a report last month faulting OSHA for failing to give clearer guidance to field inspectors about how safety incentive programs for employers like VPP should operate.

Despite numerous requests, OSHA officials did not respond to written questions or return phone calls seeking interviews with NECIR.

Fines slashed following safety violations, including a fatality

Despite at least six “serious” alleged violations — offenses that OSHA believes could cause death or serious injury — against VPP workplaces in Massachusetts since 2001, OSHA has slashed fines in almost all of those cases, including some by as much as 75 percent. Even after finding these problems, though, the agency either approved the site into the program or renewed its status, records show. The OSHA records provide no details about why the fines were reduced.

Laura Pacquette, a 34-year-old mother of three, had worked at FLEXcon, a plastic film and sheet manufacturer in Spencer, Mass., for nine years when she was accidentally pulled into an adhesive coating machine on Dec. 11, 2004. She died of crushing injuries two days later.

OSHA's investigation of the accident found FLEXcon failed to provide adequate guards on the equipment “to protect the operator and other employees from hazards created by a crushing action." The company later corrected the hazard and was fined $6,300, an amount reduced by OSHA to $5,800 just four months later.

FLEXcon was never dropped from the VPP program. Today, with no recorded OSHA violations since that incident, FLEXcon remains part of VPP, a shining example of what Michael Engel, the company's Chief Operating Officer, said in a press release announcing the firm's 15th year as a VPP participant was “proof of the outstanding dedication and commitment of FLEXcon employees in helping to create and maintain a safe and healthful working environment.”

Three other VPP companies in the Bay State — beverage maker Coca Cola in Northampton, defense contractor Raytheon in Andover and chemical manufacturer Solutia Inc. near Springfield — have each been cited for “serious” violations by OSHA since 2003.

All three were ordered to pay fines ranging from $2,275 to $22,000. OSHA later reduced those fines for Coca Cola and Raytheon, in one case by more than 75 percent. The three companies remain on OSHA's VPP list.

Danger and a death at Massachusetts postal facilities

Robert J. Scanlon was 58 when he was crushed to death on Nov. 8, 2006, after being pinned between a truck and a trailer at the Postal Service's Logistics and Distribution Center in Springfield. The now-closed facility was among the 130 postal sites across the country designated as VPP, the largest group of any employer in the U.S.

But before and after Scanlon’s death, there were concerns about safety at the Springfield worksite. Two months before Scanlon's deadly accident, OSHA cited that postal distribution center for two serious health and safety violations. A postal “clean up team” at that facility lacked adequate protective gear and were not properly trained in the use of a chlorine bleach solution when they were called in to mop up a chemical spill. Some of the employees suffered burns and dermatitis as a result of using inadequate protective gloves, OSHA records show. The postal service was fined $975 for those violations.

Two months after Scanlon's death, OSHA again cited the U.S. Postal Service, this time for failing to follow recognized safety practices in connection with the fatality. A $7,000 fine was also imposed. The fine was $3,786.33 below the $10,786.33 average amount assessed to employers in 2006 for safety violations resulting in death, according to a 2007 study conducted by The Massachusetts AFL-CIO, the Massachusetts Coalition for Occupational Safety and Health and the Western Massachusetts Coalition for Occupational Safety and Health.

The study, titled “Dying for Work in Massachusetts: The Loss of Life and Limb in Massachusetts Workplaces,” also found that OSHA was so understaffed and underfunded, it would have taken about 117 years for OSHA inspectors to check each workplace under its jurisdiction in Massachusetts alone.

In the aftermath of Scanlon's death, OSHA found several health and safety violations, many of which likely existed beforehand. Among those violations was shoddy record keeping, inadequate employee training, poor lighting conditions, an improperly working intercom system and inadequate safety equipment, said Lee, the union official. Investigators also found that Scanlon was not using safety gear because the required orange vest and flashlight apparently had not been returned to its proper storage area, Lee said.

Scanlon's family did not return several calls requesting comment.

Lee is not alone in his criticism of the program. Other union representatives said the VPP program allows OSHA to exempt businesses from certain evaluations for up to five years, leaving a regulatory gap that can lead to lax safety.

“When VPP first started, the result was extremely positive,” said Timothy Dwyer, president of the National Postal Mail Handlers Union Local 301, rattling off a list of safety improvements that included the purchase of hydraulic equipment designed to lift heavy pallets or large mail-filled bins, easing the physical strain on mail handlers. Dwyer said the union embraced the VPP concept, convinced that it would bring more safety programs into the workplace.

Then several years ago, union officials had second thoughts. With fewer workplace checks by OSHA required under the VPP program, it started to look like safety was being compromised, they said. Regularly scheduled maintenance was being postponed due to budget cutbacks, worrying union officers concerned about accidents. Without the regular OSHA checks, they wondered if safety was being compromised. Soon, unions at the Springfield VPP facility began talking about getting rid of the elite safety program in favor of more conventional OSHA inspections.

“We thought it was a joke,” David Sarnacki, Local 497's maintenance craft director said of the VPP program. "We felt that after a fatality, why were we still part of this?”

It was the economy, rather than the union, however, that finally ended the Springfield facility's VPP program when budget cuts forced a merger with another postal center about two years ago.

Union officials claim they could see the impact cost-cutting measures were having on safety long before that merger as the postal service began grappling with billions of dollars in losses.

Machinery once quickly repaired was not undergoing regular maintenance while staff cuts along with increased demand for quicker mail processing was keeping malfunctioning machines in operation, Dwyer said.

“It's a matter of ignoring procedures because procedures cost money,” he noted. ”An adherence to safety issues is not a high priority for the Postal Service right now.”

Postal officials dispute that contention, however, saying employee health and safety remains a top priority. They declined further comment.

Yet postal workers said they continue to grapple with unsafe conditions, particularly around electrical issues.

Sally Davidow, spokeswoman for the American Postal Workers Union, said beginning in July 2010, OSHA fined the U.S. Postal service more than $6 million after finding that it willfully violated safety standards by exposing workers to serious and potentially fatal shock hazards and burns at 350 processing and distribution centers nationwide. It remains unclear how many of the 29 processing and distribution centers designated as VPP sites were among those plagued by electrical hazards, Davidow said.

Management and union views on VPP effectiveness

Yet despite those violations, many union and company representatives in Massachusetts said participation in the VPP program has made a safer workplace for everyone, provided that management and employees can work cooperatively with OSHA to solve safety issues.

Cindy Raspiller, director of environmental health and safety for Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems, including Raytheon's Andover facility, called participation in the VPP program “a transforming process” that has not only produced safer work conditions but also helped contribute to cost savings.

“We had a good, solid compliance program to begin with,” she said. ”What VPP did was take us beyond that.”

Yet just two years before entering the VPP program in 2009, Raytheon's Andover plant faced violations labeled “serious” by OSHA.

In February 2007, an employee at Raytheon's Andover facility lost his fingers while servicing a machine. Just four months later in June 2007, another employee at the same plant suffered burns to his face while uncapping a hot radiator on a lawnmower. Then, in 2009 after gaining VPP status, the Andover facility was cited again for exposing employees to electrical hazards.

Despite those violations, the question for some is not whether the VPP program works, but whether there is a commitment to make it work at all.

“You have to have a full commitment by management and labor to achieve safety,” said.

Marcy Goldstein-Gelb, executive director of the Massachusetts Coalition of Occupational Safety and Health. ”Unless you have a strong union health and safety program, you end up with companies who portray themselves as safer than they naturally are or who are unable to identify the full range of health and safety issues.”

The New England Center for Investigative Reporting is a non-profit newsroom based at Boston University. This story was done in collaboration with the Center for Public Integrity and the Investigative News Network.

Inspector general to examine ‘model workplaces’ program

2012-02-09T17:00:31-05:00

The Department of Labor’s Office of Inspector General will examine a federal program that recognizes “model workplaces” and exempts them from regular inspections, the office’s audit plan for the coming fiscal year shows.

The assessment comes as an Occupational Safety and Health Administration task force is conducting its own review of the agency’s Voluntary Protection Programs — the subject of a recent Center for Public Integrity investigation.

The Center found that, since 2000, more than 80 workers have died at sites OSHA deemed the nation’s safest. But even when investigators found serious safety violations related to the fatal accidents, OSHA rarely used its authority to remove sites from the program.

The agency also places “model workplaces” in some of the most dangerous industries beyond the reach of special inspection programs despite evidence that similar hazards may exist at some of these sites. It does little to oversee the 21 states that operate their own versions of VPP. And the list of fatal accidents that officials use to monitor the program was incomplete; the agency later added deaths flagged by the Center.

In recent months, the agency has removed some sites highlighted in Center stories from the program and begun a “top-to-bottom review” of the experiment in cooperative regulation that began in 1982.

The Government Accountability Office has also raised concerns. In 2004, the GAO urged OSHA to evaluate VPP and other “voluntary compliance strategies” before continuing to expand them. By 2009, the program had grown significantly, and GAO raised concerns about its quality.

In announcing its plans to look at the program, the inspector general’s office noted, “Incorrect VPP approvals, during preliminary evaluation or a re-evaluation could leave workers vulnerable.” The review will focus on whether OSHA has clearly laid out criteria for getting into the program, and whether it has evaluated sites consistently, the office’s audit plan shows.

The inspector general’s office previously passed on a chance to look into the program. In 2009, a former OSHA employee filed a complaint, alleging that a “botched VPP evaluation” failed to catch hazards that resulted in a release of toxic acid that forced a Pennsylvania town to be evacuated. OSHA officials gave preliminary approval to the site as a program “Star” — and then, after the accident, quietly withdrew the honor before it became final.

After receiving the complaint, one official in the inspector general’s office wrote that “there appears to be sufficient cause for possible action,” emails show. But an assistant inspector general declined to conduct an audit, saying the GAO “previously reported inadequacies” with the program.

A spokesperson for the office declined to discuss why VPP has now come to the inspector general’s attention.

IMPACT: Agency task force conducting ‘top-to-bottom review’ of ‘model workplaces’ program

2011-12-21T11:50:46-05:00

A federal task force is conducting a “top-to-bottom review” of a controversial program that exempts “model workplaces” from regular safety inspections, a Department of Labor official confirmed this week.

The review is focusing in part on “legitimate concerns” raised earlier this year in a Center for Public Integrity investigation, said Jordan Barab, the No. 2 official at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which runs the program.

The Center’s investigation found that, since 2000, more than 80 workers have died at workplaces in OSHA’s Voluntary Protection Programs, known as VPP – a club of more than 2,400 sites that are supposed to be the nation’s safest. In more than half of these cases, the mandatory inspection triggered by the fatal accident found serious safety violations. Yet these deaths rarely led to serious consequences for the company, and OSHA has seldom used its authority to boot a site from the program.

Among the questions the agency will have to address: What should happen when a worker is killed at one of these OSHA-recognized sites?

OSHA’s policy on responding to fatal accidents at VPP sites is one of “the first things we are looking at,” Barab said. The task force, which has six members pulled from OSHA’s local, regional and national offices, has submitted its report, which is being reviewed and will have to go through the agency’s lawyers, he said.

The document includes recommendations on how to improve the program, but Barab would not provide details. “I’m not saying we’re going to change everything, but we are looking at [the recommendations],” he said.

The ongoing review of VPP comes years after federal auditors raised concerns about the program’s rapid growth during the George W. Bush administration and repeatedly urged OSHA to evaluate it.

In a 2004 report, the Government Accountability Office warned that the planned expansion of VPP and other “voluntary compliance strategies” could tax OSHA’s limited resources and urged the agency to evaluate the program, which began in 1982 as part of the Reagan administration’s emphasis on partnering with the business community. OSHA commissioned a study that the GAO later determined to be “unreliable” and “flawed.”

In 2009, the GAO went further, raising concerns about the quality of the program and again urging OSHA to conduct an evaluation. In an interview with the Center in March, Barab said the agency had decided not to review VPP. “There are plenty of things that need to be assessed and evaluated,” he said, “and all of them cost money to evaluate.”

This week, however, Barab said, “There are some legitimate questions out there about the legitimacy of the program, and we want to make sure that all the participants in the program should be in the program.”

OSHA already has taken some action. Less than a week after the Center highlighted a fatal explosion at an American Packaging Corp. plant in Columbus, Wis., OSHA told the company it was considering kicking the site out of VPP, and the company agreed to withdraw. Weeks after receiving detailed questions from the Center about a U.S. Postal Service site in Philadelphia, OSHA booted the mail processing center from VPP. And the agency recently acknowledged that its internal database of deaths at VPP sites was incomplete and that it had updated the list to include additional accidents identified by the Center.

New scrutiny of worker safety excludes some chemical plants

2011-12-01T08:44:07-05:00

Worries about fires, explosions and chemical releases prompted the federal agency in charge of workplace safety on Wednesday to expand a special inspection program focusing on the nation’s chemical plants. Regulators believe the industry is particularly vulnerable to such hazards, meriting the closer attention.

Yet some plants will continue to be shielded from the special inspections, despite past worker deaths, because of their status as “model workplaces.”

“Far too many workers are injured and killed in preventable incidents at chemical facilities around the country,” said David Michaels, the head of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, in announcing the broadening of the pilot program, which began in 2009.

Michaels said inspectors would “cover chemical facilities nationwide to ensure that all required measures are taken to protect workers.”

But the agency opted to exempt sites that participate in its Voluntary Protection Programs, known as VPP. As iWatch News has reported, more than 80 workers have died since 2000 at these sites OSHA has deemed “model workplaces” – from power plants to paper mills and shipyards.

Companies, however, have rarely faced serious consequences, even when inspectors identified safety violations related to the fatal accident.

The exemption from regular inspections, including those conducted under special emphasis programs, has particular resonance for companies in the chemical manufacturing industry, which is both the target of the new initiative and the largest industry sector in VPP.

At least 18 of the deaths at VPP sites since 2000 occurred at chemical plants.

Three of these deaths occurred at two plants owned by Eastman Chemical Company – cases highlighted in a recent story by iWatch News. Regulators deemed two of them preventable and issued violations to the company, but both sites remain in VPP and beyond the reach of the newly expanded program.

Michaels said in Wednesday’s announcement that inspections conducted under the pilot program uncovered similar dangers to what the agency found in its program targeting oil refineries.

Under that initiative, too, OSHA exempted VPP sites, but, as iWatch News has reported, seven workers have died at these off-limits refineries since the program began in 2007.

An OSHA spokesperson said the exemptions were “an incentive and a matter of OSHA policy.”

Read more about 'model workplaces' here.

Deaths at ‘model workplaces’ missing from list of federal overseers

EASTMAN CHEMICAL COMPANY — 2011-11-04T05:30:01-04:00

When Wanda Manning arrived at a hospital in Kingsport, Tenn., on March 29, 2004, she found her son, Scott, in a coma. Leaking equipment at the chemical plant where he worked had released hot, toxic vapors in his face.

The accident was the result of a series of errors and oversights, from installing equipment upside down to failing to run a key safety check. Scott hadn’t known about any of this; he was just unlucky.

That night, Wanda overheard the name of one of the chemicals Scott had inhaled: methyl iodide. Quickly, she researched the substance. Even before the doctors told her the next day, she knew her son was going to die.

What she didn’t know until weeks later was that the plant where Scott worked — the flagship facility of Eastman Chemical Company — was a member of an elite club of sites deemed exemplary by workplace safety regulators and exempted from regular inspections.

The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration allows Tennessee, along with 20 other states, to run Voluntary Protection Programs, or VPP, as a way of encouraging adherence to safety rules. As difficult as it has been for regulators and auditors to determine whether the program is working in the 29 states overseen by the federal government, the picture in the states is even murkier.

As the Center for Public Integrity’s iWatch News has reported, more than 80 workers have died since 2000 at federally overseen VPP sites. OSHA keeps a database of these deaths, though the agency recently acknowledged it was incomplete after iWatch News identified additional deaths.

But no comparable list tracks fatal accidents at VPP sites in the remaining 21 states. The dividing line between state and federal oversight, along with OSHA’s policy of viewing each VPP site in isolation, makes it more difficult for the agency to detect problems that may exist at more than one workplace because of broader issues in a company or an industry.

Because of a combination of incomplete records and a lack of interest in monitoring state sites, for example, Eastman’s two “model workplaces” — the Tennessee plant and another in Texas, falling under federal oversight —appeared just once in federal OSHA’s database of VPP site deaths provided to iWatch News after an open records request. In fact, six workers died at the plants between 1998 and 2005.

Concerned about the quality of some state-run workplace safety agencies, OSHA now conducts enhanced annual evaluations of each state agency. But these focus on the state’s enforcement efforts. When it comes to VPP, “We really don’t monitor that much,” said Jordan Barab, OSHA’s No. 2 official.

As the experiment in cooperative regulation approaches its 30th anniversary, one of the most basic measures of how the program is working — the number of deaths — isn’t known. With some deaths inexplicably missing from the agency's database and others not tracked by OSHA, it’s unclear how many workers killed on the job at “model workplaces” are, like Scott Manning, not even a number.

‘An accident waiting to happen’

Circumstances led Scott Duane Manning, like many others born and bred in hilly East Tennessee, to a job at Eastman Chemical Company. After years in the food service industry, he’d settled on a job at the company’s flagship plant in Kingsport, a town of roughly 48,000 near the Virginia border.

A 900-acre mass of twisting metal and looming smokestacks that straddles the Holston River, the facility hums day and night, churning out products that end up in everything from paint to the coating of aspirin. The company was spun off from Eastman Kodak in 1994. The Kingsport plant opened in 1920, and the community’s economic fortunes now are largely tied to that of the plant and the roughly 6,600 jobs it provides.

Chemical manufacturing has inherent dangers, but Scott and his co-workers enjoyed good pay and benefits — generally considered the best in town. He’d been happy to land the job.

“I had reservations,” his mother recalled. “I wanted more for Scott.”

By 2004, after a decade at the plant, he’d become a computer operator. The promotion meant he was no longer regularly out in the more dangerous areas, working amid the hum and hiss of equipment harboring hot, toxic substances.

That pleased Wanda. She and her son had become closer since her husband unexpectedly died from complications after surgery 18 months earlier. Scott had become more protective of his mother and two sisters. He called Wanda frequently and wouldn’t hang up without saying he loved her.

Called in to work overtime on March 29, Scott wasn’t assigned to his normal job. The state’s inspection report describes what happened. He was back out in the plant, tasked with bringing a piece of equipment known as a heat exchanger back online. The exchanger, which had been idle for 10 months, heated chemicals used in the production process. This one, known as 22E-26, had undergone repairs throughout the previous summer.

No one noticed that a key part — one needed to prevent a leak — had been reinstalled upside down after repairs. A company inspector hadn’t caught the error during a “visual inspection.” And the company had failed to run a leak test — a standard safety practice in the industry and one required by the company’s policies. As a result, a state inspector later determined, the exchanger was “an accident waiting to happen.”

Manning knew none of this. When the exchanger was taken out of service, he’d been in Las Vegas, where he’d taken Wanda for her birthday.

When Scott opened the valve that day, a mixture of acid and toxic gas heated to more than 240 degrees sprayed in his face.

“Bad leak at E-26,” he radioed to the control room as he fled the building and made it to an eyewash fountain.

Despite the initial concern with his eyes, the less obvious — and far graver — injuries were internal. The chemicals were attacking his lungs. For almost two weeks, his condition deteriorated. By then, his lungs had turned a purplish-red color, and all of his organs had started to fail.

On April 9 — Good Friday that year — Scott’s mother, two sisters, ex-wife, one uncle and one stepson gathered in a room at the hospital in Kingsport.

“One of the hardest things I ever had to do was … to tell the doctor that it was OK to turn off the respirator,” Wanda recalled.

Scott lived just minutes.

‘Do what is right’

Scott Manning was not the first to die at a “model workplace” owned by Eastman. Fewer than 11 months earlier, another Eastman employee, Mark Mitchell, had been working in the hazardous waste incineration unit at the company’s Longview, Texas, plant — a participant in the federal VPP program.

His job that day: transferring a mixture of waste containing a substance so volatile it bursts into flames on contact with air. The material leaked, and flames engulfed Mitchell.

A federal OSHA investigator found that, had Eastman provided the proper protective suit — like one recommended by the company that supplied the dangerous chemical — Mitchell could have escaped the blaze and survived. As it was, emergency responders had to put out the fire before retrieving his badly burned body.

The agency issued the company a serious violation for not providing proper protective equipment and proposed a $4,500 penalty. The agency also sent the company a letter, noting eight other problems, from failing to evaluate all of the hazards of dangerous chemicals and failing to address the findings of the company’s own hazard analysis to failing to document testing of key equipment. But the agency chose not to cite Eastman for these problems. Instead, it wrote the company, “I recommend that you take steps voluntarily to eliminate or reduce your employees’ exposure to fire and/or explosion.”

Eastman contested the violation and the $4,500 fine.

Robert Varner, a Dallas-based lawyer representing Mitchell’s family, wrote to lawyers in the Labor Department, which oversees OSHA. He’d heard that the agency was considering a settlement with Eastman that would reduce the severity of the violation inspectors had found.

“Mark Mitchell’s family expects the federal agency charged with protecting him and others like him to do what is right: Stop the miscarriage of justice which will result if Eastman is allowed to settle this citation for something less than the serious violation that it was,” Varner wrote.

He also noted the irony of the plant’s status as a "model workplace." “Eastman has long promoted itself as an OSHA ‘Star’ worksite, yet OSHA found several very serious safety deficiencies which caused Mr. Mitchell’s death,” Varner wrote.

He made two requests on the family’s behalf: Uphold the original penalties, and remove the plant from VPP.

The agency did neither. In June 2004, it signed a settlement agreement, reducing the severity of the violation and cutting the fine in half to $2,250. Eastman agreed to take additional actions, including improving its hazard analyses and providing more training to some employees.

In 2005, a team of OSHA officials returned to the Longview plant and reapproved it as a VPP “Star” site. The evaluation report devoted just five sentences to the 2004 fire, noting that Eastman had taken corrective actions and paid a penalty and that the accident was not “believed to be caused by a significant deficiency in the site’s safety and health management system.”

Officials at the Longview plant declined to discuss the accident or the settlement with OSHA. But the site belongs in VPP, they said. “When you look at the intent of what VPP is,” said Fred Jennings, manager of plant protection, “I’d say we’re there and we’re constantly getting better.”

No additional scrutiny

Even before the deaths of Manning and Mitchell, workers had died at the same two Eastman plants in Tennessee and Texas since they’d been deemed “model workplaces.”

From August 1999 to January 2000 at the Texas plant, two contract workers were killed. Both accidents involved the same contractor and similar circumstances: being struck by railcars. Neither resulted in OSHA citations for Eastman. Only one of the deaths appears in OSHA’s database of VPP site fatalities.

Tennessee, which operates the Tennessee Occupational Safety and Health Administration, an OSHA-approved agency supported in part by federal funds, began its version of VPP in 1997. Eastman was one of the first companies to join.

Within months of the company’s joining this elite club, however, a worker died after being electrocuted. Regulators issued a serious violation, but the state allowed the site to remain in VPP. (A worker also died at the plant in 2005 after falling down a set of stairs, but an investigation indicated Eastman was not at fault.)

In a statement to iWatch News about the deaths at its two VPP sites, an Eastman spokesperson wrote: “We suffer as a company when any of our employees don’t make it home safely. That’s why we continually strive to improve workplace safety and have made substantial progress in the past 20 years in reducing workplace injuries and incidents, due in part to the continual improvement emphasis of OSHA’s Voluntary Protection Program.”

The deaths at Eastman’s “model workplaces” didn’t prompt additional scrutiny for the company or removal of either site from VPP. Tennessee officials were concerned only with the plant in their state, and federal officials had their hands full monitoring VPP sites under their jurisdiction as the program grew rapidly.

Some of the money that states operating their own programs use to fund their versions of VPP comes from federal OSHA, and, though the state programs differ in some details, they are modeled on the federal program. Federal officials track the number of sites added in the states, but they do little else to keep tabs on how states are running their programs.

By law, state-run workplace safety and health agencies must be at least as effective as federal OSHA. That may not always be the reality. OSHA began reviewing the effectiveness of each state agency in 2009 and concluded that some were deficient when it came to identifying hazards, issuing appropriate violations and following up on dangers after they were identified. A report released in March by the Labor Department’s Office of Inspector General found that OSHA didn’t know whether the states were truly as effective as federal OSHA.

Sometimes OSHA’s lack of interest in the performance of state-monitored VPP sites overlaps with its general policy of viewing each "model workplace" in isolation, even when it is one of many owned by the same company. The agency does consider a company’s overall record in some contexts: It may inspect other plants owned by the same company if it suspects there could be similar dangers, or it might increase the severity of a penalty if the company has violated the same safety standard at another location.

OSHA’s Barab said that, when it comes to assessing the effect of corporate-wide policies on individual sites, “It’s hard to generalize.” Corporate culture and policies might have a significant impact at all sites in some companies, while it might be far less important at other companies.

One company where OSHA has repeatedly said corporate culture is important is BP. “We found a lot of the same problems from plant to plant,” Barab said. “That’s why I’ve been quoted as saying BP corporate has a systemic safety problem.”

Yet BP has seven sites deemed “model workplaces.” The majority, Barab noted, are on the Alaskan oil fields — areas not watched by federal regulators because Alaska runs its own program.

In a statement to iWatch News, BP said it was making changes to improve its safety practices and VPP was “complementary to these much bigger internal changes that we have embarked on.”

‘A good company’

Dave McMurray arrived at Eastman’s Kingsport plant on May 25, 2004. McMurray was the state’s most experienced inspector when it came to facilities using hazardous chemicals, and the state had called on him to investigate Scott Manning’s death.

It was clear that it wouldn’t be an easy case. McMurray knew he was entering a company town — one where many residents have loans from Eastman Credit Union and shop at the stores on Eastman Road. He conducted more than 30 interviews with people at the plant, and Eastman’s lawyer wanted to be present during every one, he recalled. Eastman safety official Pete Lodal recently said the company routinely informs workers that they can have a lawyer or representative present but never forces one on them.

From the start, Eastman told McMurray that blame lay with Fluor, the contractor whose workers Eastman said had improperly reassembled the heat exchanger that leaked toxic chemicals. Fluor, in turn, said it had not reassembled the heat exchanger, the state report notes.

But to McMurray, the question of who botched the reassembly was secondary. The key point was that the error should have been caught by running a leak test, which was Eastman’s responsibility.

“This should never, never have happened,” said McMurray, who is now retired. Eastman, he said, “really blew it.”

McMurray’s four-month investigation identified a long list of safety violations, 27 in all. He found, for example, that Eastman hadn’t developed or implemented safe operating procedures, hadn’t performed appropriate equipment inspections, hadn’t documented steps taken to correct deficiencies identified in a self-audit, hadn’t put together an adequate emergency response plan and hadn’t provided proper training to some of its employees. The total proposed penalty was $76,000.

In his official report, McMurray wrote that Eastman had taken “a shortcut at the expense of safety, for the purpose of production expedience.”

As it had in Texas months earlier, Eastman challenged the case. The company enlisted a team of lawyers and experts, McMurray recalled. The agency was “in a quandary,” he said. It was outmanned and overmatched. “For us to fight for the [initial violations] would have been a lot of time and a lot of resources,” McMurray said.

So they settled. Lawyers for Eastman and the state signed an agreement, and about 80 percent of the violations McMurray had found were deleted from the company’s record. Eastman agreed to take corrective actions, and the company, which made a $557 million profit the previous year, paid a $50,000 fine.

Eastman officials declined to discuss the accident or the decision to challenge the state’s findings. “We did review it, we did respond to it, but we’re not going to talk about specific incidents,” Lodal said. Speaking generally, he said, there is “inherent risk in what chemical companies do. The analogy I would draw is there is a certain amount of risk in driving your car every day. … We try to drive that as low as we possibly can.”

Lodal said the plant still deserved its “Star” status, and the accompanying exemption from regular inspections. “We apply a lot of resources to [safety],” he said.

Tennessee officials defended their decision to keep Eastman in VPP. “Sure there were concerns,” said Jim Flanagan, the state’s VPP manager, “but the program elements that were cited were corrected. They’re a good company.”

Wanda Manning also tried to find out more about her son’s death. She began collecting documents, phone numbers and addresses and talking with workers at the plant. She said that some told her they feared they’d lose their jobs if they talked to her.

By 2006, she had essentially given up hope of getting answers to all of the questions she had about the leaking heat exchanger, about conditions in the plant and about the accident that had killed her son.

That September, regulators formally closed the book on the investigation into Scott Manning’s death. One month later, the state issued a press release with the headline “Eastman Chemical earns third Star safety award.”

OSHA acknowledges database of fatal accidents incomplete

2011-11-04T08:56:05-04:00

At an Ohio chemical plant, an explosion launched pieces of metal that struck and killed a worker. At a Pennsylvania steel mill, equipment crushed a worker to death. At an Oklahoma oil refinery, a flash fire fatally burned a worker.

Each death occurred at a plant deemed a “model workplace” by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, but none of them appeared in the database the agency uses to monitor its Voluntary Protection Programs, known as VPP.

They aren’t the only ones. The Center for Public Integrity’s iWatch News identified at least 15 deaths since 2000 that weren’t included in OSHA’s database, which the agency provided after an open records request. OSHA confirmed that the deaths should have been included but couldn’t explain why they weren’t.

“The inclusion of fatalities in the database didn’t always occur as it should have,” OSHA said in a statement. “We are continuing to strengthen the procedures for the reporting and tracking of fatalities at VPP sites.”

In recent years, the agency has issued memos to regional officials stressing the importance of documenting and following up on fatal accidents at VPP sites. Soon after being appointed in 2009, the agency’s No. 2 official, Jordan Barab, noted that there were some deaths missing and talked with others at OSHA about it, he said in an interview with iWatch News. “I said, ‘Listen, if we’re going to do this, we need to do it; we need to have our database up to date on things like this,’ ” he said.

iWatch News identified the deaths by cross-referencing two databases OSHA maintains – one containing information on inspections and another with information about VPP sites.

The list of 15 deaths includes two sites that have multiple fatal accidents missing from the database: Eastman Chemical Company in Longview, Texas, and Appleton Papers Inc. in Roaring Spring, Pa. From the time Appleton Papers joined VPP in 2001 until it voluntarily withdrew in 2007, the site had three fatal accidents – two of which didn’t make it into OSHA’s VPP database – and its injury rates were worse than those of its industry peers in almost every year. The company didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Three of the deaths that didn’t appear in OSHA’s database occurred at oil refineries. Worried about what the agency has determined to be widespread hazards throughout the industry, OSHA has begun targeting refineries for inspections in a special enforcement program. Those in VPP, however, are exempt from these inspections. As iWatch News has reported, at least seven workers have died at these off-limits refineries since the initiative began in 2007, but all of these sites remain “model workplaces” today.

OSHA began a similar enforcement program in 2009 focusing on the chemical manufacturing industry, which is the largest sector in VPP. At least four of the deaths not included in OSHA’s database occurred at chemical plants. These sites are all still in VPP, placing them beyond the reach of the initiative.