Las Vegas Sun

July 25, 2008

Construction Worker Deaths on the Strip:

Union demands safety upgrade

Ironworkers leader wants state OSHA to direct contractors to install decking that could prevent falls

By Alexandra Berzon

Wed, Apr 9, 2008 (2 a.m.)

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The Las Vegas Ironworkers Union is asking Nevada safety regulators to require contractors to provide netting or temporary flooring of the kind that could have saved two workers who fell to their deaths last year on the Strip.

Chuck Lenhart, Las Vegas-based business agent for Local 433, sent a letter to the Nevada Occupational Safety and Health Administration on Friday demanding the agency require the temporary flooring or netting. The request asks the state to ignore a 2002 federal OSHA interpretation — known as a “compliance directive” — that allows contractors to avoid the safety measures.

“Our union has strongly opposed this compliance directive on numerous occasions and demanded that OSHA rescind it,” Lenhart said in the letter to Tom Czehowski, chief administrative officer of the state OSHA.

“OSHA was warned on several occasions that this specific compliance directive would result in serious injuries and death to ironworkers throughout the country,” the letter said, citing stories in the Las Vegas Sun that detailed the causes of the two men’s deaths and those of seven other construction workers on the Strip.

The directive at issue was written by federal OSHA as instruction to that agency’s investigators. States that operate their own workplace safety departments do not have to follow the federal interpretation.

The federal directive tells OSHA officers to cease enforcement of a long-standing regulation that requires employers to place decking or netting at least two floors — and no more than 30 feet — below employees, provided the workers are required to use safety harnesses.

Czehowski told construction company safety engineers and union leaders at a meeting last month that the state agency has adopted the federal directive, according to people who were present.

Federal OSHA representatives contend that the directive simply cleans up what had become an outdated provision after the agency adopted strict new fall protection standards in 2001.

“We don’t consider this less effective,” said Dale Kavanaugh, an administrator for federal OSHA who has worked extensively on the standards.

Nevada OSHA did not respond Tuesday to inquiries from the Sun.

Anger over the directive has been brewing for years at the Ironworkers Western District Council, which oversees Nevada and several other states. Temporary decking or netting is the last chance to save a worker’s life if a safety harness fails, the union says.

The union’s fears were realized Oct. 5 when Las Vegas ironworker Harold Billingsley fell 59 feet to his death at CityCenter. Billingsley was wearing a safety harness but it was not attached to anything.

Two months later, ironworker David Rabun fell four floors down an elevator shaft at Cosmopolitan after his employer, Schuff Steel, had failed to plank floors beneath him. Rabun’s safety harness was attached to a steel beam that also fell, and therefore could not save him.

Rabun and Billingsley were among nine construction workers to die in the past 16 months at Strip construction sites. The rash of deaths has shaken the local construction industry and brought new attention to Nevada OSHA’s often weak enforcement of workplace safety regulations.

Lenhart’s letter to Nevada OSHA represents something of a new position for the union leader. He had said previously that Billingsley died from his own tragic mistake: not having his safety harness attached. Lenhart also told a former leader of the union, Fred Toomey, that the absence of decking was not an issue in the fatality, Toomey told the Sun.

Toomey sent a letter to the union after Billingsley died demanding action. Toomey said that when he was an ironworker, he once survived a 30-foot fall because decking was in place beneath him.

Lenhart’s letter to the state continues a fight that Steve Rank, a safety expert who works with the Ironworkers Western District Council, has been waging for years. Rank was on a committee of business and labor leaders that rewrote federal OSHA standards for steel erection; they took effect in 2001.

The standards that emerged from that contentious process were stronger than previous standards and required all workers doing steel erection work use safety harnesses or another personal fall protection system whenever they are more than 30 feet off the ground.

At the time of the revisions, the requirement for temporary decking was left untouched, although at one committee meeting, a contractor reportedly asked to have that requirement eliminated. Rank said other committee members reacted strongly to the request.

“We were really ticked off someone would consider repealing that provision and it was dropped like a hot potato,” Rank said.

When the compliance directive was issued the next year — without industry or union consent — Rank grew angry.

“This is exactly what we told OSHA would happen,” Rank said. “When you put out interpretive letters and don’t maintain a tightly decked floor, you can fall distances where there’s no chance of surviving.”

Discussion: 5 comments so far…

  1. By mikeg
    4/9/08 at 10:20 p.m.
    Suggest removal

    Wow this newspaper's readership must be 95% ironworkers, judging by its prominent coverage of local construction news.

  2. By seslew
    4/10/08 at 2:33 a.m.
    Suggest removal

    Thank you Alexandra and The Sun for bringing these issues to the public so that perhaps some changes can be implemented before more injuries or deaths occur.

    As the indusrial revolution caused a huge building boom over a hundred years ago structural steel erection was an incredibly dangerous business. One book said that the average lifespan for an Ironworker was only seven years. The emergence of the Ironworkers Union was in no small part brought on by workers wanting self determination on safety issues.

    Statistics are hard to come by from the first half of the last century but the trade did become a lot safer as Ironworkers made and enforced safety practices concerning their work. After WWII, Dept. of Labor statistics for work related deaths showed a steady decrease in Ironworker fatalities for next 50 years. older Ironworkers with a lifetimeof experience taught the younger members about hazards and safe procedures. Then in the mid 1990's fatalities again began to rise nationwide per hour worked.
    As Insurance companies started demanding onsite
    company(not Union)safety personell the safety decisions were taken out of the hands of the people who had done so much good and given to people that had little or no working knowledge of the trade. With smugness born of ignorance these company safety "experts" have made decision after decision that have caused many deaths and injuries. The finding of the company safety person after an accident is invariably that the worker was not following safety procedure when he was injured. But the truth is as long as safety procedures are in the hands of these incompetant and unqualified people accidents will continue to rise. There is still time for Ironworkers and OSHA to squash the petty tyrants that masquerade as being for safer jobs while feeding their egos and wallets at the expense of the blood and misery of working men and women.

  3. By Felicity
    4/10/08 at 1:10 p.m.
    Suggest removal

    Once again, if you have companies paying people to over see the safety on job sites do you actually think that it will be effective. It's like putting the Bank robber in charge of the Bank.............My Uncle Rusty should be ALIVE today. End of story..... Robbie and Chuck if you two have done nothing wrong then why did you spend so much time redirecting the attention to the people who "leaked" to the Sun. No one leaked they/we spoke out to let everyone know how corrupt the OSHA/Contractor/Union relationship really is. If you have the balls to say the things you've said then you better have even bigger ones to back it up. I think you all are a bunch of spineless cowards. If City Center is so safe then tell us all why and how a man got ran over by a forklift at that job just this week??????? OSHA should spend more time directing it's attention to what is going on at these sites and quit being bought to overlook violation after violation. After my Uncle was killed a man from the CITY CENTER job site called a public agency and told them that OSHA over looks all the violations on the job site for Perini. So tell me what you think is really going on. It's not just the ironworkers job to overlook safety for all who are invovled it starts with the Union, then OSHA then the Contractors, then Ironworkers. The job site has to be safe for the Ironworkers to start and continue safety......OSHA needs to leave their teeth in if they want to have their rules and regulations a bite to them and not gum the contractors!!!!!

  4. By Vince_Hetfield
    4/14/08 at 11:03 a.m.
    Suggest removal

    Why is it that iron workers will not tie off a suitable anchor point? With the availability of rolling beam clamps and retractable lifelines, tying off have never been so easy. However, from the outside, it would appear to be a cultural issue within the IW trade that tying off is uncool.

    Also, absolutely correct, the iron workers helped to develop the OSHA standards (Subpart R) that they work on. They allowed the 30 foot for connection and 15 foot for decking exemption. Every other construction worker is tying off at a 6 foot exposures, perhaps it's time for the IW to join the rest of the world and tie-off at 6 feet?

  5. By angryfamily
    4/16/08 at 12:45 a.m.
    Suggest removal

    Grow a spine Chuck Lenhart and stand up for your fallen men. Stand up and make someone accountable. They entrusted you as their leader and helped to pay your salary. If you cannot represent them how about refunding the money they had deducted out of their pay to pay your salary so you could sit on your thumbs and blow smoke. GROW A SPINE OR GET OUT. Why does Robbie Hunter do all your talking for you. I thought he ran LA. Bailing you out of your mess?

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