Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 6, 1994 TAG: 9403010236
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BY JOHN J. FRIED KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
And every year scores of workers die in these confined spaces, victimized by gases, fumes and other substances lurking there undetected.
Death by asphyxiation in a cramped, dirty and hard-to-escape space "is one of the primary ways people get killed on the job," says Vince Gallagher, a New Jersey safety consultant.
Indeed, 6,000 U.S. workers are injured in confined workspaces each year, and at least 60 workers die.
That is not the way it is supposed to be anymore.
Early last year, after almost two decades of debate, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration issued a regulation detailing steps employers must take to protect workers toiling in confined spaces.
Among other things, the regulation requires companies to determine which work areas are confined spaces because they are hard to enter and leave.
It also requires employers to ventilate the spaces, monitor the air quality, provide equipment that would allow employees to work there safely and post someone to stand watch over others working in the spaces.
Employers also must make provisions for rescuing workers who get caught.
Implementation of the new rule, however, has been hampered by controversy, reticence by some industries and OSHA failure to issue additional guidelines, according to industrial safety experts.
Many safety experts say the new standard is a dramatic improvement over the days when only piecemeal regulations affected confined spaces and worker protection was left to companies.
"Although the creation of the [regulation] does not automatically translate into fewer deaths and injuries, it sets a standard of better care than was available before," says Stephen Hemperly, a representative of the American Industrial Hygiene Association.
OSHA believes that the regulation will cut the number of deaths by as much as 85 percent. But compliance will be expensive.
Henkels & McCoy, a Blue Bell, Pa., construction and engineering company that also provides maintenance workers to utilities and industry, says it will have to spend between $3,000 and $4,000 to outfit each crew with space ventilators, atmospheric monitors, respirators and other required safety equipment.
By some estimates, the new regulation will cost industry more than $200 million.
Despite the expense, industry supports the regulation because it sets broad goals for worker safety, yet allows individual companies to come up with plans for meeting those goals.
That is not to say, however, that compliance has been instantaneous and widespread, many experts say.
Many companies still "have a long way to go to meet the intent and spirit of the standard," said Victor Hillman, director of industrial-hygiene field services at the Liberty Mutual Research Center in Hopkinton, Mass.
Moreover, there is outright opposition to the new regulation in some quarters.
The American Gas Association is fighting the rule, arguing that gas companies already are subject to confined-space regulations issued by the U.S. Department of Transportation.
And the electric industry says the standard would impose an excessive financial burden on power companies. Moreover, the industry says, electric workers deal with unusual situations that should be covered by a rule designed to meet their needs.
After negotiating with two industry groups for months, OSHA recently decided that the talks were going nowhere and withdrew, said Wendell Glasier, an OSHA safety specialist.
Some industrial-hygiene experts worry that the regulation fails to include construction, maritime and agricultural workers.
"All three of these sectors are where many of the fatalities and near-misses are," says Hemperly.
OSHA, for its part, says it is drawing up standards that meet the specific needs of those sectors.
The United Steelworkers of America, meanwhile, worries that the regulation too narrowly defines confined spaces, thus excluding many dangerous areas.
OSHA said it was trying to resolve the steelworkers' objections.
Some safety experts also are concerned because the rule allows companies to contract with outside emergency services to rescue a worker overcome by gases or lack of oxygen in a confined space.
OSHA has said that option was designed to make the new regulation less burdensome to companies that could not afford to train and maintain in-house rescue units.
But all too often, it is the rescuer, rather than a trapped worker, who winds up hurt or killed. Often firefighters or emergency medical technicians end up trapped or overcome by fumes in an unfamiliar space, experts say.
"People assume that you can dial 911 and that takes care of it, but that is not the case," Liberty Mutual's Hillman says.
"Fire departments have been cited by OSHA after responding to a confined-space situation because they did not have a program in place" to deal with such situations, Hillman adds.
Any company that has decided to depend on an outside emergency service would have to make sure that the service's personnel have been on company grounds, have studied its confined spaces and have made plans to respond to a call within minutes, he says.
"If they take more than three or four minutes to get to the site and get into the space," the rescuers will be dealing with a "body-extraction situation," not a rescue of an ailing worker, Hillman says.
The debates over what is a confined space, how much ventilation it needs and other issues could be resolved if OSHA came up with a so-called compliance directive, experts say. The directive was due last summer.
Such directives serve as detailed sets of instructions to OSHA field personnel on how to enforce any new regulation.
Since these directives are public documents, businesses also depend on them to guide their compliance.
But with a legal challenge to the new regulation pending from the gas and electric industries, the directive may be delayed for years because the outcome of any court case would influence what goes into the directive, OSHA's Glasier said.
"We're not happy with the situation, but that's the way it is."
by CNB