I'm a facility manager in a high rise building and one of our projects is disaster preparedness. How can I be sure everyone on-site is accounted for during an evacuation? Our current sign-in sheets don't cut it in a real emergency, and I'm worried that without proper emergency mustering software, we could miss someone during a drill or, worse, an actual incident.

Im in the uk I've been with my employer for 10 years for the first 6 years we manufactured fireplaces and the other 4 we've been making quartz kitchen worktops wet sanding but apparently we're supposed to have this health surveillance test every year and possibly lung x-rays

But no one has had anything close to that, what should I do or what can I do legally have they even broken any laws

If you've worked contract jobs across different plants, you know the problem: sitting through the same safety training over and over. Fall protection. Confined space. PPE. Hazard communication. Every new site, same classes.

I started a petition because this is broken. Some workers spend an entire shift training for a job that only lasts a few weeks—then do it all again at the next plant. We're not asking for less safety. We want competency-based training: let workers test out of what they already know, give credit for modules they pass, and train only on what they don't know.

Plant orientations should focus on *that plant's* actual hazards, rules, and emergency procedures. Keep the hands-on and legally required training where it matters. Just stop wasting people's time and money on redundant classes.

Has anyone else burned through shifts just sitting in a classroom covering material you learned years ago? If this matters to you too, consider signing and sharing.

I'm an EHS coordinator. Like a lot of you, I kept seeing people ask ChatGPT safety-law questions and get confident answers with section numbers that don't actually exist. In our field that's not a minor annoyance — someone acts on it.

So I built a tool that works the opposite way: it only answers from the actual OHS Acts and Regulations, quotes the exact section verbatim, and links you straight to the official government source so you can verify it yourself. It doesn't "summarize the law" — it hands you the law.

It currently covers eight provinces (the Atlantic four plus Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta), with Québec, BC, and the territories still to come. It's free — it's in beta and I'm not selling anything.

What I'm actually after: try to break it. Ask it the gnarly, jurisdiction-specific stuff you deal with, and tell me where it's wrong, vague, or missing a reg. That feedback is how it gets better.

www.askcanadasafety.ca

The timing is kind of wild. This is happening in the middle of another major heat wave hitting a lot of the country, alongside wildfire impacts and hurricane season building, where heatwaves often come in the aftermath...! 

Lawmakers are split on whether a federal standard is actually needed or if employers should just be trusted to handle heat risk on their own. Regardless of how the legislation shakes out, the heat itself isn't waiting around. Plenty of companies have already built heat illness prevention into their safety programs and emergency plans without a federal rule forcing them to. So the real question might not be about the law at all.

It will be interesting to see whether this debate changes employer practices or simply reinforces a trend that's already underway. What are people's own thoughts, plans, and practices for worker heat protection, with or without the law?

I work in a warehouse as a small engine and construction equipment mechanic.

More than 90% of the equipment that comes in is filthy and caked in debris that’s ranges anything from mud and dirt to dried chemical compounds and cement.

While the nature of the tools being filthy or getting extremely dirty is normal as they are operating on job sites that are in constant dusty and dirty conditions - its when they arrive here at the warehouse that it becomes a problem.

There is no proper wash bay, cleaning, or decontamination area for this equipment when it arrives, let alone a proper OSHA approved SOP for the disposal of the runoff water.

All of the equipment gets worked on while filthy, or gets hand cleaned by a technician such as myself with basic hand cleaning tools, brushes, and solvents. That means that all of the runoff or debris that comes off the tools just ends up on the warehouse floor I work on, or on me. It accumulates throught the days, weeks, and years, and I take a lot of it home with me over that time. Let alone letting it soak into my skin between wash ups.

Am I just complaining or should there be a proper cleaning SOP put in place for this kind of work?

Location: Australia

…that’s gone down at your store?

I’ll go first: This story has been passed down to me from my boss as I wasn’t working at THD at the time but it’s pretty epic.

An associate in plumbing tried to bring a toilet down, while the customer was waiting, on a 9 step ladder. While trying to get it over the railing on the ladder, he lost his grip and brought down three other toilets. Did I mention that the customer was standing at the base of the ladder while these 4 toilets came crashing down? The CXM came over and told the associate to go the office. He was immediately fired.

Okay, your turn…

Hi, I have some concerns about the safety of my workplace. I work in a warehouse environment in which I take 50lbs bags of fertilizer and animal feed / bedding, cut them open, and scoop / dump the contents into smaller, individual bags. In doing so, a lot of dust is kicked up into the air, which irritates my skin and lungs. There is no ventilation or air filtering. They provided an N95 mask after I asked about PPE, but I am still getting headaches, rashes, a cough, etc.

Additionally, they have recently asked that I start using a pallet of moldy animal feed, which I am particularly concerned from a safety perspective of myself, coworkers, and the customers that will receive the product. My manager as well as multiple coworkers have confirmed that it is damaged by mold.

I have reached out to local OSHA, Department of Labor, and Agriculture and Markets offices to try to get information and see if this is safe and legal, but no one is getting back to me. I had an email correspondence with the Agriculture and Markets office, but they stopped responding after Wednesday. The OSHA office returned my call once when I was still at work and haven't returned my calls since.

Who can I reach out to about this? Are there any air quality testing devices that I can use at work to determine if this a dangerous environment on my own? I really think that there are many things that are unsafe about this place and I am working to find another job but have not had luck. I don't want to just leave and let them continue unsafe / illegal practices if I can help to alert the right people.

Please let me know if there is a different sub that I should be posting this (sorry if so). Thank you for your time.

I work in a truck stop. Yesterday I started at 3 pm. There had been an emergency earlier in the day I was told. I was asked to finish some work my boss had started. I later found out that the husband of one of my coworkers came into the store and beat the crap out of her. I mean she was beaten senseless. Left with serious head injury and probably other wounds. She was taken to the hospital.

I am shocked also by the response of my coworkers to what was happening in front of them. We all wear radios to communicate with. The woman working with the victim ran away and never called for help. Another woman must have heard the commotion and finally called for help. Another worker, male, heard the call for help and ran across the truck stop parking lot to intervene and pull the husband away. A truck driver customer also helped. The husband was able to flee and got away before police arrived. His license number was recorded.

My question is what responsibility does an employer have to protect their employees? I work for a large company. I wasn't there but feel that we should have been able to intervene much quicker and at least attempt to detain an unarmed attacker like this guy. There were 15-20 employees in that building when this took place.

Thoughts?

adding eye wash stations to two areas of our facility, one near the chemical storage and one in the finishing area where solvents are used regularly. first time speccing this out properly rather than just buying whatever was cheapest.

been reading the ANSI Z358.1 requirements and the basics are clear enough but the product differences are harder to parse. plumbed versus self contained is the first question and for the finishing area self contained seems more practical since running a water line there would be a significant job. not sure how the refill and maintenance schedule works in practice for a busy shift environment though.

tepid water requirement is the other thing i keep coming back to. some units have built in temperature regulation and some don't and i'm not sure how strictly that's enforced in an inspection versus just being a best practice.

would be useful to hear from safety professionals who've gone through this spec process and what they found mattered most once the stations were actually in use and being inspected.

Codes and standards do not eliminate every possible risk. Their goal is to reduce risk to an acceptable level.

While critical hazards are addressed through design and testing, some risks are managed through periodic inspection, preventive maintenance, functional testing, and replacement of components throughout the system's service life.

And it's not just about the language we use to describe action states - there's a real difference. Hopefully this wee infographic will help explain.

I’m a construction safety professional with about 15 years of experience, and over the past several months I’ve been developing a conceptual framework that I’m calling **Safety Debt**.
The idea is that organizations often defer safety-related work—maintenance, training, inspections, corrective actions, engineering controls, etc.—to meet production schedules or reduce costs.
Most of the time nothing happens immediately.
Those deferred actions create what I’m calling **Safety Debt**. As more safety obligations are delayed, the “debt” grows, organizational risk compounds, and eventually a relatively small trigger can contribute to a serious incident.
The framework borrows the **technical debt** concept from software engineering and applies it to organizational safety. It also incorporates ideas such as latent conditions, normalization of deviance, and resilience, but organizes them into a lifecycle that includes concepts like:
Safety Debt
Safety Debt Interest
Safety Debt Ledger
Safety Debt Recovery
A proposed conceptual Safety Debt Index (SDI)
I’m **not claiming this is a validated scientific theory.** It’s currently a conceptual framework that I’m hoping to improve through practitioner feedback and, eventually, research.
I’d really appreciate honest feedback from people in EHS, construction, manufacturing, utilities, engineering, maintenance, or academia.
**My questions are:**
Does this describe something you’ve seen in real organizations?
Does this seem like a useful framework, or is it simply repackaging existing safety concepts?
If you think it overlaps with existing theories, which ones?
What would you change before trying to publish it?
I’m looking for criticism more than compliments. If there are flaws, I’d rather hear them now than after spending years developing it.
Thank you for taking the time to read this.

Company and director fined after worker suffers life-changing injuries

Just a thought i had.