OSHA Compliance

Hazard Communication — 29 CFR 1910.1200 — has been in the OSHA Top 10 most‑cited violations for as long as the Top 10 has been published. There are only a handful of standards that consistently sit on that list, and HazCom is one of the few in general industry that does. That tells me something the inspections data already tells us: most employers think they have a HazCom program because they have a binder of Safety Data Sheets near the door, and most of those programs would

Falls from elevation are the leading cause of death in construction. Every year. Every published OSHA Top 10 list since at least 2010 has put fall protection — 29 CFR 1926.501 — at the top of the cited‑violations list. The standard is one of the oldest, best‑known, and most widely trained in the industry. And yet, in the United States, a worker dies from a fall roughly every other day on a construction site. When I'm retained as an expert witness in fall fatality cases, the f

A cubic yard of soil weighs roughly 3,000 pounds. The average car weighs about 4,000. When a trench wall fails, it does not slowly slough — it releases in seconds, and a worker standing in five feet of unprotected excavation is buried under more than a ton of material before they can take two steps. That is why I tell every contractor I work with that excavation is not a routine activity. It is a controlled high‑energy operation with a regulatory framework that exists because

As a safety professional and expert witness, I get the call about confined‑space incidents more often than any other category of fatality I review. The fact pattern is almost always the same. A worker enters a manhole, vault, tank, lift station, or pit. Something goes wrong inside — usually a low‑oxygen atmosphere or a buildup of hydrogen sulfide. A coworker sees them collapse and climbs in to help. Within minutes, two people are dead instead of one. OSHA has been telling us