Dive Brief:
- The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has fined Texas steel contractor W.S. Steel Erection LLC $175,700 and issued the company two repeat and six serious violation citations involving fall protection.
- In this most recent investigation, the agency said an OSHA investigator saw W.S. Steel Erection workers without fall prevention equipment operating on a platform more than 10 feet above a lower level held up by a forklift, as well as others working from an aerial lift, also without fall protection.
- OSHA said it has investigated W.S. Steel Erection four other times for past fall protection violations in the last five years, including a 2011 case in which a worker fell 17 feet from a roof and died.
Dive Insight:
"W.S. Steel continues to expose its employees to the danger of fatal falls, despite the tragic death of one of its workers in a fall in 2011," Casey Perkins, OSHA's area director in Austin, said in a press release.
As are many other fall protection investigations, the W.S. Steel Erection case was part of OSHA’s Regional Emphasis Program on Falls in Construction and comes after the agency recently hosted the National Fall Prevention Stand-Down, which urged employers to review fall protection safety standards with their employees and host safety-related events.
Fall protection violations are consistently at the top of OSHA's violations. A recent Engineering News-Record report found that OSHA added approximately 520 companies to its Severe Violators Enforcement Program between 2010 and mid-April 2016, and 60% of them were construction industry businesses.
In August of this year, violators could see their fines increase 80% or more when OSHA raises its fine levels to fall into line with the Consumer Price Index — the first increase since 1990.