City of St. Augustine Safety Hazards Persist -- Workers on Visitor Information Center Roof Without Fall Protection
Several years ago, after eating with visiting friends at the city-owned Lighthouse Restaurant (now-closed), we saw several workers on the roof with no fall protection.
I telephoned and reported it to the City of St. Augustine's Public Works office, which told me that it would remedy the situation and order fall protection for the city employees immediately. I took the City at its word.
Last Monday, August 28, photographer/documentary J.D. Pleasant and I were checking out our City's new parking garage (more later). We observed two contractor roofing workers on the roof of the Visitor Information Center (VIC). Neither had any fall protection. One of the workers may have been underage.
I reported the situation to OSHA The two workers could have died from fatal falls on the roof of our VIC. I also reported the situation to the DOL Wage-Hour Division, which did not return calls.
J.D. Pleasant took color photographs, documenting the date and time (also showing a construction supervisor with a white hardhat was within sight of the unprotected workers. J.D. provided his color photographs to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) of the United States Department of Labor in Jacksonville, Florida.
OSHA has inspected and will issue a report, with possible fines. The contractor has a right to appeal fines to the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission, which will consider whether any violations were willful and life-threatening..
Ironically, if the two workers had been City employees, OSHA could do nothing to protect them -- city, county and state workers are not covered by the OSH Act. A Florida agency that protected city, county and state workers was dismantled by Governor Jeb Bush. As an OSHA official has said, city, county and state workers could "hang from the roof by a string" and there would be nothing that OSHA could do.
If hindsight is 20/20, we should find it all the more unreasonable that our City of St. Augustine is still risking workers' lives and that our federal and Florida governments do nothing little protect city, county and state workers.
When former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neil became CEO of ALCOA aluminum, he instituted a program that virtually eliminated workplace deaths and injuries in aluminum production, one of the hottest processes in American industry. How did he do it? He evaluated every executive on their efforts to make the workplace safer. He worked with unions, instead of against them. He made safety everyone's job at ALCOA. He was fired by the second President Bush for being too outspoken, writing a book about it.
Safety was evidently not "everyone's job" at the Department of Labor on July 19, 1989. Anyone enjoying the view of the Capitol and Mall from DOL's sixth floor cafeteria -- and Washingtonians and visitors passing by -- could see that there was an ATV on the roof and roofing workers working with no fall protection.
At the Department of Labor's own headquarters in 1989, a 23 year old roofer was killed, falling off the roof, due to government and contractor negligence.
Several millennia of construction experience teaches that falls (and lack of fall protections) kill workers, the most experienced of whom need fall protection on roofs. So obvious is the proposition about falls and fall protections that a 1990 DOL Monthly Labor Review article begun by quoting a nursery rhyme:
..... When the bough breaks the cradle will fall,
Down will come baby, cradle and all.
Mother' Goose's Melody (c. 1765).
In nursery rhymes and real life, falls sound an ominous note of human fragility, which if unheeded, can lead to serious injury. Yet, despite the imminent danger, working at heights without adequate fall protection is fairly commonplace today, especially in the construction industry and, in particular, in roofing and sheet metal work. This risky work practice goes far to explain why falls are the leading type of injury and illness in the roofing industry, constituting roughly three-tenths of all its serious cases of injury and illness reported.
According to safety and health experts, most accidents in roof work, as in other industrial settings, are preventable if employers and employees follow safe work procedures.Martin E. Personick, "Profiles in safety and health: roofing and sheet metal work," 113 Monthly Labor Review No. 9 (September 1990), on the Internet at http://www.bls. gov/opub/mlr/1990/09/art4full.pdf.
One year after the death on it's own rooftop, DOL recited a nursery rhyme to begin a fall protection Monthly Labor Review.
It's not funny: falls from lack of fall protection kill American workers and hurt families.
The father of U.S. Attorney General. Alberto Gonzales, died in 1982 from what was called an "industrial accident" -- a fall from atop a rice mill.
(C-SPAN interview of Hon. Alberto Gonzales, March 16, 2001, rebroadcast November 10, 2004).
Worker deaths and injuries cause pain and suffeirng to millions around the world -- 2.3 million workers die in the workplace or from occupational diseases annually.
The presence of the two unprotected workers on the roof of the VIC is symptomatic of the nonenforcement of worker protection laws in America and in St. Augustine. Call it "desuetude" because that's what it is -- worker proteciton laws are not being enforced adequately.
Our City of St. Augustine tempts fate, apparently failing to protect contractor employees.
Efforts to obtain comment from the City's Chief Operating Officer (John Regan) and Public Relations Director (Paul Williamson) were unsuccessful to date. Our City has a $500,000 annual budget for Public Relations -- what do you get for it? We have a $50 million annual budget -- what do we get for that?
What can our City do to protect workers and our environment? It can start by having a City manager or supervisor present at all city government construction jobs, monitoring compliance with safety, health and environmental laws. Is that too much to ask? The lives we save are precious.
It's our VIC roof, it's our City and it's our country. We have a right to governments that work for the people and not against us. What do you think?
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