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New UK podcast on drilling regulation
HSE podcasts are almost always worth listening to. The June 2010 podcast capitalises on the topicality of offshore oil drilling generated by the BP incident in the Gulf of Mexico. The podcast is...
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Politics overrides safety
Why has the Australian government refused to release the investigation report into the Montara oil spill? SafetyAtWorkBlog’s interest in this report is principally over the identification of potential...
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Australian OHS expert in advisory role on Gulf oil spill
Australian Professor Andrew Hopkins is currently in the United States advising the Chemical Safety Board in its investigation of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Several months ago it was rumoured that...
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Montara oil spill report finally released
On 24 November 2010, the Australian Government finally released the investigation report into the 2009 Montara oil spill in the Timor Sea that has similarities to the oil rig explosion of BP in the...
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Analysis of Montara oil spill reports begins
Legal analysis of the Montara oil spill inquiry reports have started to emerge. One of the first is by Allens Arthur Robinson (AAR). It does not discuss safety specifically but in many people’s minds...
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Is capitalism anti-safety? Systemic failures in oil industry
The Wall Street Journal and other media around the world have reported on systemic failures of the global oil industry and government regulators identified by the National Commission on the BP...
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Dust suppression innovation research
Many areas of Australia are flooded, sodden or just very wet in the middle of this Southern Hemisphere Summer. Many workplaces had been expecting to be wetting down worksites and roadways to suppress...
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New books – South African nursing and a Canadian perspective
This week two new OHS books came across my desk unbidden. Both are very good but have very different contexts and both were published by Baywood Publishing Company Inc. “Who Is Nursing Them? It is...
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Rolling the sleeves up – a good OHS technique.
My father has a smallish block up in the bush, north-east Victoria in the Ovens Valley. He can’t live there safely anymore, but since he built the place himself and with all the family history it has,...
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Another government department limits ATV/quad bike use over safety concerns
At the end of May 2011, The Weekly Times newspaper reported that the Victorian Department of Sustainability and Environment “has enforced limited use of ATVs by staff while it conducted a risk...
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Politics slows the safety regulation process in Australian oilfields
On 8 August 2011, the Australian Financial Review (not available online) reported on a letter from the head of the National Offshore Petroleum Safety Agency (NOPSA), John Clegg, that criticised the...
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Similarities between the regulation of environmental and workplace safety
In June 2011, Victoria’s Environment Protection Authority (EPA) released a revised Compliance and Enforcement (C&E) policy. There seemed to be some similarities to WorkSafe’s C&E policy,...
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OHS will eventually need to address the big climate change impacts
The latest edition of the Journal of Occupational Medicine (JOM) (Vol 61. No 5 Aug 2011) includes a short article on the occupational impact of climate change, an issue that must be addressed in the...
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Inquiry links Hazelwood Mine Fire to local deaths
The Hazelwood Mine Fire had no direct impacts on people other than those living in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley. Unlike many disasters, no workers died as a direct result of the fire. However the...
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The forgotten Royal Commission
Australia conducted a Royal Commission in to the Esso Gas Plant explosion at Longford. Two people died and most of Victoria was without gas for around two weeks. The Royal Commission lead to a...
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Overburden exposes the social burden of workplace death and illness
On 26 February 2016, a recent documentary about a portion of the American coal-mining industry, Overburden, was shown with a panel discussion, as part of the Transitions Film Festival in Melbourne. The...
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Prescient research on OHS, values and sustainability
It has become fashionable to place occupational health and safety (OHS) in the organisational context of business sustainability. But this is not a new phenomenon in Australia. In 2001 the Ecos...
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Health, safety and climate change
Sydney, Australia – October 19, 2016: Construction workers set up scaffolding in a construction site. In a small article on the ABC news site, Professor Peng Bi of the University of Adelaide said...
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CEO-speak and safety culture – losing track of what matters most
The BP Deepwater Horizon disaster has faded to become another safety leadership failure to be discussed in the OHS and risk management courses but some new research ($ paywall) in Critical...
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Trump, Puzder and workplace safety
Occupational health and safety (OHS) law in the United States has little impact on that of any countries outside of North America. But the response to those OHS laws by US and multinational companies...
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