A Family Voice on Workplace Safety

A Family Voice on Workplace Safety
A scathing critique of the Nevada state Occupational Safety and Health program prompted a recent Congressional hearing that spotlighted how the agency’s shortcomings have tragically affected workers and their families.

At the October 29 hearing of the U.S. House of Representatives’ Education and Labor Committee, members examined many of the findings from a special study by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) after Nevada experienced 25 workplace fatalities in 17 months, from January 1, 2008 through June 1, 2009.

Nevada is one of 27 states and American territories that take federal funding to enforce workplace health and safety standards, in lieu of enforcement by OSHA itself. OSHA has oversight responsibility for the state agencies and conducted this review as the first in a series of studies to be conducted on the performance of the 27 state agencies.

Among other findings, the special oversight review cited repeated failures by the Nevada agency to:

impose stiff penalties after potentially preventable accidents;
issue citations or notices of violations for previously identified hazards;
ensure that its investigators receive proper training; and
allow families of killed or injured workers to participate in investigations.
Many of these findings were also highlighted last year in a Pulitzer prize-winning series by Alexandra Berzon in the Las Vegas Sun investigating deaths in construction accidents that were also covered in the federal report.

The impact of the state agency’s failures on affected families was demonstrated by Debi Koehler-Fergen, the mother of Travis Wayne Koehler, who was killed at the Orleans Hotel in Las Vegas on February 2, 2007. Mr. Koehler had been sent by his supervisors to help a colleague correct a problem for which neither man had proper training and that was normally handled under contract by an outside company. When toxic gasses were released, both men died and a third man was severely and permanently injured.

Mrs. Koehler-Fergen told committee members that she was treated disrespectfully by a top Nevada OSHA official, who was seated next to her at the hearing and who had explained the results of the state report on her son’s death in a public area of the agency while other employees watched her cry, instead of taking her to a private office.

She also said that she was bitterly disappointed by the agency leaders’ decision to downgrade the violations cited to serious from “willful neglect” and “repeat serious” that the key investigator’s findings seemed to warrant against the hotel’s owners. Her complaint to the federal OSHA helped prompt its review of the state agency.

Mrs. Koehler-Fergen is a volunteer with United Support & Memorial for Workplace Fatalities, a Public Welfare Foundation grantee that helps bring the perspective of surviving family members into policy discussions about improving workplace safety and health.

Rep. George Miller, who chairs the House committee and led the hearing, expressed concern that families are often cut out of the investigation process after a loved one has been killed or injured on the job. He said that it’s “an ongoing effort” on the part of the committee to change that, at both the federal and the state level.

To see Mrs. Koehler-Fergen testifying click here.





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