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ACCSH Transcripts: December 6, 2001
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OCCUPATIONAL SAFETY AND HEALTH ADMINISTRATION
ADVISORY COMMITTEE ON CONSTRUCTION SAFETY AND HEALTH
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF LABOR
Marriott Hotel
1331 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC
Thursday, December 6, 2001 |
Editor's Note: the references to Amec should be AMEC (Construction
Management Services)
The meeting was convened, pursuant to notice, at 8:20 a.m., Mr. Robert
Krul, Chairman, presiding.
APPEARANCES:
EMPLOYEE REPRESENTATIVE
MR. ROBERT KRUL
MR. STEPHEN D. COOPER
MR. LARRY A. EDGINTON
MR. MANUEL MEDEROS
EMPLOYER REPRESENTATIVE
MR. JAMES AHERN
MR. STEWART BURKHAMMER
MR. FELIPE DEVORA
MR. DAN MURPHY
STATE REPRESENTATIVE
MR. KEVIN BEAUREGARD
MR. JOHN P. O'CONNOR
PUBLIC REPRESENTATIVE
MR. THOMAS A. BRODERICK
MS. JANE F. WILLIAMS
FEDERAL REPRESENTATIVE
MARIE HARING SWEENEY, Ph.D.
DESIGNATED FEDERAL OFFICIAL
MR. BRUCE SWANSON
COMMITTEE CONTACTS
MR. JIM BOOM
ALSO PRESENT:
MR. CARL SALL
MS. NANCY FORD
MR. NOAH CONNELL
MS. PATRICIA CLARK
MR. ROBERT BIERSNER
MR. JOHN L. HENSHAW
MR. MATTHEW GILLEN
MR. ZIGMAS SADAUSKAS
MR. CHRIS TRAHAN
MR. SCOTT SCHNEIDER
MS. CAROLYN GUGLIELMO
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PAGE
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WELCOME, INTRODUCTIONS
By Mr. Robert Krul
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5 |
ACCSH WORKGROUP REPORTS
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|
CRANES - SUBPART N
By Mr. Larry Edginton
By James Ahern
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10
15 |
OSHA FORM 170
By Jane Williams
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19 |
MULTILINGUAL ISSUES IN CONSTRUCTION
By Felipe Devora
By Marie Haring Sweeney
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27, 34, 30 |
SPECIAL PRESENTATION
WORLD TRADE CENTER - UPDATE
By Mr. Stewart Burkhammer and
Ms. Patricia Clark
|
42 |
REMARKS
By John L. Henshaw, Assistant Secretary
Occupational Safety and Health
Administration
|
92 |
WORLD TRADE CENTER - UPDATE (Continued)
By Mr. Stewart Burkhammer and Ms.
Patricia Clark
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134 |
SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS
DISTANCE LEARNING - OSHA TRAINING
INSTITUTE
By Mr. Zigmas Sadauskas
|
174 |
NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR OCCUPATIONAL SAFETY AND HEALTH (NIOSH) - NIOSH
RESEARCH PROGRAMS IN CONSTRUCTION
By Mr. Matthew Gillen
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211 |
TOWER ERECTION - UPDATE ON NC INITIATIVES
By Mr. Kevin Beauregard
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239 |
DIRECTORATE OF CONSTRUCTION UPDATE
By Mr. Russell B. Swanson and
Mr. Noah Connell
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255 |
RECORDKEEPING - EFFECTS ON CONSTRUCTION
By Mr. Carl Sall
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262 |
MANUAL FOR UNIFORM TRAFFIC CONTROL DEVICES
By Ms. Nancy Ford
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296 |
PUBLIC COMMENT PERIOD
Comments by Ms. Chris Trahan
Center to Protect Workers' Rights
Comments by Ms. Carolyn Guglielmo
Director of Safety and Health Associated
General Contractors
Comments by Scott Schneider
Laborers' Health and Safety Fund 290
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279
283
290 |
ACCSH BUSINESS
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200, 254, 298 |
ADJOURN |
302 |
P R O C E E D I N G S
WELCOME and INTRODUCTIONS |
CHAIRMAN KRUL: Good morning. Welcome to the
Advisory Committee on Construction Safety and Health
meeting. My name is Bob Krul. I am the Chairman.
Just for going over, bathrooms are across the
hallway, through the back doors behind the elevator bank,
next to phone banks.
There's a sign-in sheet out on the table outside
the doors. Those of you who have not signed --we don't
have to worry about committee members, we have that. But
those of you from the public who have not signed, if you
would, please sign that sign-in sheet.
It's a little warm in here. We're going to have
the air conditioning turned up. For some reason,
Washington has been blessed with 75-degree weather over
the last few days and it's a little steamy in here. A lot
of these hotels have shut down their AC systems. I hope
this one didn't.
For those of you in the public who want to make
some comments later at the end of this session, if you
would, please, write your name down and who you
representative on a piece of paper and give it to myself
or someone here from the staff so that we can accommodate
you at the end of the meeting.
These are normally day and a half meetings. Our
agenda is a one-day meeting today, which is the reason for
the 8:15 start. I know a lot of you, especially on the
committee, have some flights, with the security concerns.
I am told that everything on the agenda that is
lined out within time is not exact. It was just put down
to be an 8:15 to 5:00 session. So, hopefully we'll have
you out of here in time to get to the airport, clear
security, and catch your flights.
I'd like to begin with introductions, and I'm
going to start at the end of the table with the gentleman
who was appointed to the committee, but unfortunately
could not make our last meeting. We're glad that he's
here.
He's a colleague of ours from the building and
construction trades. He is the current Secretary of Labor
in Parris Glendening's office in the State of Maryland.
I'd like you to welcome John O'Connor. John, welcome.
MR. O'CONNOR: Thank you, Bob.
CHAIRMAN KRUL: Jim, you want to introduce
yourself?
MR. AHERN: Jim Ahern, road contractor,
Charleston, West Virginia.
MR. MURPHY: Dan Murphy, St. Paul Company, St.
Paul, Minnesota.
CHAIRMAN KRUL: Please use the microphones,
guys. It's easier for the transcriber.
MR. BRODERICK: Tom Broderick, Construction
Safety Council, Chicago.
MR. EDGINTON: Larry Edginton, International
Union of Operating Engineers.
MR. BOOM: Jim Boom, Director of Construction,
OSHA.
MR. BIERSNER: I'm Bob Biersner. I'm the
advising attorney to the committee. I'm with the
Solicitor's Office with the Department of Labor.
CHAIRMAN KRUL: Bob Krul, Roofers International
Union.
MR. BURKHAMMER: Stu Burkhammer, Bechtel.
MS. WILLIAMS: Jane Williams, A to Z Safety.
MS. SWEENEY: Marie Haring Sweeney, National
Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.
MR. DEVORA: Felipe Devora, Fretz Construction
Company, Houston, Texas.
MR. BEAUREGARD: Kevin Beauregard, Assistant
Deputy Commission, North Carolina Department of Labor.
MR. MEDEROS: Manny Mederos, representing the
International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.
CHAIRMAN KRUL: Thank you.
What we're going to do, is go through some
workshop reports. Stu Burkhammer and Patricia Clark, from
Region II up in the New York City area, have a very, very
interesting, and I think you'll find, as everyone has told
me who has gone down to ground zero, it is an extremely
moving experience to witness the destruction that took
place, and the deaths of our fellow citizens after the
terrorist attack on September 11th.
It's a whole new set of problems down there.
I'm not going to steal any of Stu's thunder in his
presentation, but it's a very, very dangerous place, with
all the demolition and attempts at clean-up down there,
and the different groups. There are over 1,000 people.
MR. BURKHAMMER: Initially, when we first got
there, we had probably 5,00 to 6,000 people, volunteers,
Army, police, fire, construction workers, Salvation Army,
Red Cross, CIA, FBI, Secret Service. Anybody with a
badge. That's about it.
CHAIRMAN KRUL: And the pictures on TV, from
what I'm told--I have not personally been down there--just
don't do justice to the massiveness of the destruction
down there.
When you think about that many thousands of
people all trying to be helpful, yet in an extremely,
extremely dangerous situation with the attempts to pull
debris out and find survivors in the beginning, we're just
very fortunate, I think, that we haven't had any further
loss of life down there. Of course, that was one of the
reasons for OSHA wanting to go down there.
But we'll see Stu's presentation. I know I'm
looking forward to it. So, let us begin with some
workshop workgroup reports.
Larry, if you would begin with cranes.
ACCSH WORKGROUP REPORTS
CRANES - SUBPART N
By Mr. Lary Edginton |
MR. EDGINTON: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
What I thought I would do this morning is sort
of summarize where we've been and where we think we're
going.
For roughly, I suppose, the last 18 months or
so, at the direction of this committee, the Subpart N
workgroup has been giving consideration to the adequacies
of the existing subpart, or in some instances
inadequacies.
The process that we've utilized -- first, let me
talk about who we've had working on this. We've had a
pretty good cross-section of individuals and organizations
that are impacted by the regulation.
We have got crane manufacturers, we've got the
users of cranes, we've got worker representatives of crane
operators, we've got union contractors, we've got open
shop contractors. We've got everybody in the room, or
pretty much everybody in the room, we think.
Our attendance probably averages around 20 to 22
people a meeting. We've had as high, I think, as 35 or so
at some of our sessions. As I have said to my colleagues
as I try to facilitate this, is some days I feel like it's
a little bit like herding cats. But, nonetheless, I think
we're making some progress.
Certainly it has begun to attract the attention
of the industry, as I said. We've had manufacturer
representatives in from Germany, from Japan. We're trying
to bring focus to this.
In terms of just background in our process, our
first meeting, or several meetings, we thought that if
you're going to talk about revising a subpart, that it's
important that everybody understands what's in the current
subpart.
So, we spent a fair amount of time sort of
trying to get everybody on the same page in terms of the
understanding of the current regulation, let alone where
we might want to go with it.
In addition to that, because the current subpart
references several ANSI standards and other standards, we
also spent time understanding those standards, both as
they exist currently in the subpart, as well as those
standards that have been updated by these consensus
groups. That was fairly time consuming.
But, having said that, we have begun to look at
the subpart itself. Our primary focus has been on cranes
and derricks. As many people know, the Subpart N actually
includes a lot of equipment other than just cranes and
derricks. You've got side booms, conveyors, hoists,
helicopters, and on, and on.
Our focus has not been in those areas. We have
not made a specific decision to exclude those, but we
really haven't had any interest coming forward saying we
have problems in those areas. So, cranes has really been
our focus because of that.
One of the things that has come out early on in
the work of the group is a fairly strong belief on the
part of members that we give consideration to beginning to
establish minimum qualifications for crane operators as a
part of the regulatory process as a direct way to improve
job site safety.
We have begun to do that over our last couple of
sessions. The concepts, I do not think, are fundamentally
different from some of the other, what I will loosely
characterize as qualification processes that exist within
other OSHA standards.
But it has been an interesting experience trying
to get everybody on the same page. I think we have begun
to do that.
Another strong opinion from this group. Let me
say that what people said in terms of our initial charge
was that we wanted to be able to develop a recommended
standard that was understandable to every party of
interest. Whether it is an employer, whether it's an
owner, whether it's an OSHA compliance officer, our goal
was to have a standard that is clear for all of those
parties of interest. That is the direction in which we
have been working.
Having said that, we know we still have a long
way to go. Craning is becoming increasing sophisticated
and complicated and we want to make sure that any
recommendation that we bring forward to this committee is
reflective of the current state of affairs in craning and
within the industry.
One of the things we are now struggling with, is
this group feels that--again, in terms of sort of our
plain language attempt, if you will--that there is strong
need to identify a specific scope of equipment that is
covered by the standard as well as equipment that is
explicitly not covered by the standard, because there is
certain equipment that is used in construction for lifting
purposes on occasion that often get confused as to whether
or not it's a crane. So, we're trying to work through
those differences. That's probably our next charge.
We met for the better part of two days this
week. We have set out a meeting schedule for another
three meetings, the first of which will be in late
January. I don't remember the dates off the top of my
head, but we will have those up on the ACCSH portion of
the Web site soon.
We have begun a process where all workgroup
members routinely get e-mailed our product from the
previous meetings. We're finding that that works very
well.
We've received really excellent cooperation from
the directorate in terms of staff support. We're now
leading every meeting with a work product in hand. I
think it's been very beneficial in that respect.
Jim and Jane have been involved. I don't know
if they have any thoughts or comments about it, but I
certainly think we ought to hear from them.
CHAIRMAN KRUL: Jim?
CRANES - SUBPART N
By James Ahern |
MR. AHERN: The one comment that I would make to
add to Larry's remarks, in the seminole event that I've
perceived since I became a member of the group earlier
this year, is the efforts we've made to come up with a
qualification criteria for operators that is two-part,
written, and practical. A third part, which almost goes
without saying, is a physical and drug-free.
One of our real challenges is, as the industry
goes from the cable friction rigs that dominated the
hoisting 50 years ago to the more complicated hydraulic
computer-controlled rigs that are the state-of-the-art
machines that are being purchased at this point, is to
ensure that we have operators who are actually skilled
with dexterity to pull the levers and understand,
physically, what's happening with ground pressure, wire
rope hydraulic systems from a very experienced point of
view.
But then we also have operators that have the
intelligence level to pass a fairly rigorous written test
that demonstrates that they go beyond a seat-of-the-pants
and move into the real ability to understand the physics
of lifting the loads.
That's going to be a real challenge to ensure
that the person that can pass the written test really has
the physical ability and the necessary experience, and the
person that's currently out there now that has never
really been tested but has 25 years' experience, but maybe
has less capacity to sit down and pass a couple-hour
written test, that we don't miss something in that
process.
In West Virginia, where I'm from, we have gone
through a licensing process. All crane operators, as of
September of this year, have to be licensed. It's been a
challenge to ensure that we accomplish our end goal and
don't leave anybody out. That will be a challenge to our
workgroup, and the industry as a whole, as we go forward.
Jane?
MS. WILLIAMS: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I think one of the things that we need to
stress, is this overwhelming commitment from the attendees
who come to this meeting, and the support from their
employers to finance them to come to these meetings, and
they're lasting two days.
As Larry just said, they sit in the room. We're
in there all day long. We have had some very interesting
discussions, but we certainly have come out of each
meeting with consensus and enthusiasm to continue our work
product.
I think it's very important to acknowledge all
the stakeholders that have such an interest in seeing this
very old standard move forward in the manner in which this
is all being talked about. It's very impressive to have
that many people participate continually.
MR. EDGINTON: Sort of following up on Jane's
point, we spent some amount of time yesterday talking
about the announcement that was made in this week's semi-annual regulatory agenda with respect to a Notice of
Intent to consider the use of negotiated rulemaking for
cranes.
I think it was the sense of the workgroup--and I
don't know that today is the day to do it, but you may
well hear from us in the very near future once the Notice
of Intent is formally published by the Agency--that the
interests that we have had represented in the workgroup
should be interests that are represented on the negotiated
rulemaking committee at the starting place. Not the end
place, necessarily, but a start place.
As you may recall, this question came up before
in the context of ACCSH recommending to the Agency that it
use negotiated rulemaking for cranes. The charge that was
given to us, in lieu of a decision being made on that, is
to continue to move forward with our work product until
such time as a negotiated rulemaking committee is
established, if it is established, at which time we would
hope that the work of this workgroup would become a
starting point for a negotiated rulemaking committee, one.
Two, that because we've had such a strong cross-section of interest, again, that it would be appropriate
to have those interests represented on the committee.
CHAIRMAN KRUL: Okay. We introduced ourselves.
I neglected to have the audience and public introduce
themselves so everybody knows who everybody is.
Could you state your name and your affiliation,
please?
(Whereupon, the audience introduced themselves.)
CHAIRMAN KRUL: Thank you.
Jane is a subcommittee of one, now that Mr.
Cooper isn't participating in this. Could you give us a
report on Form 170?
ACCSH WORKGROUP REPORTS
OSHA FORM 170
By Ms. Jane Williams |
MS. WILLIAMS: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The Form 170 workgroup has met consistently over
the last four years. The 170 workgroup was charged by the
agency to identify the cause of fatalities by review of
the Fatality Form, which is what we refer to as Form 170.
We have met on multiple occasions, as I've said,
and have enjoyed significant support from numerous
stakeholders, OSHA representatives, as well as
representatives from the Department of Energy, Bureau of
Labor Statistics, Center for the Protection of Worker
Rights, the University of Tennessee, ACCSH Data Collection
workgroup, and many, many more that I'm leaving out here
for the sake of time.
Over the years, the workgroup successfully
drafted reference logic for the new form and was able to
really accommodate data input fields to make the
information much more meaningful to the directorate when
they were trying to target what is the cause of
fatalities.
Where do we really have to look, be it standard
language or enforcement programs, or whatever the case may
be, to help them have a better handle in making sure that
fatality rates come down, not go up, as they have been?
The in-depth analysis has, in fact, been
completed. The workgroup is satisfied, for what our
charge was with this product, to identify those fields to
assist the data people who actually are going to be
managing the computerized document to put such equations
into the system that would let Compliance put in
information that will allow it to be extracted in a manner
that you would know that the fall came from a ladder that
killed, or the fall was a result of a building collapsing
rather than just knowing you had 10 falls. That was the
whole intent.
With the steel erection standard coming out in
January, one of the commitments in that standard was to go
back and visit the fatality information. We believe that
revision of this form will be critical to play that role
for the agency to be able to determine if, in fact, the
new standard is saving the projected 30, 40 lives or is
there other options that have to be reviewed by the Agency
in regards to that standard.
We have provided the Directorate all of our data
that we have gone through over the year, the format, the
re-tasking, the flow charts. There are numerous things.
I am very confident that the Directorate is working with
the Office of Management Data Systems on processing that
information. Again, it will have to play a large role in
researching the fatality issues that they really want.
So I believe, Mr. Chairman, that the task of the
170 group, in this regard, is completed. We have totally
massaged the report. We have provided strong rationale
for the issues that we felt needed to be. We have passed
those issues off to the Directorate in a very timely
manner.
I'd like to, at this point, thank all the
hundreds of people that participated. We had some, also,
interesting sessions that allowed us to do that.
The other task that was assigned to me that came
under the umbrella of 170, which is not really the right
name but it was assigned anyway under this area, was for
me to work with and respond to questions from the
construction representative, Ms. Cathy Martinez, of the
Office of Regulatory Analyses in support of their
responsibilities for paperwork reduction.
There are various issues that have to come
before the Regulatory Office to review to see if, in fact,
the paper itself that's stated in the standard can be
eliminated or justified in a research of the actual hours.
They've asked ACCSH to participate with them so
they could have actual field input as to what is really
involved rather than someone guessing, oh, I think this
can be done in two minutes.
The first packages of crane issues have been
completed and have been submitted to OMB. They are now in
the process of preparing the next round of documents,
which will, in fact, be sent to me.
I will be responding to those documents either
with my own individual field analyses of timing for them
for verification. Or, should something require another
expertise than I would be able to do in the field, my
intent would be to call one of my ACCSH brothers here to
say, I need your help to help me verify this time
restraint, or element, or whatever it is that they're
asking us to do, and we will do it that way and then
resubmit back to them. They're on a schedule, so we had
to be very consistent with our schedule.
In the past, I would inform my chairman and the
Directorate of any requests that I get for participating
so they always know what it is that we're doing, and they
would be sure of the response to then pass on to the
Office of Regulatory Compliance.
So I believe, in summary, the summary actions to
offer to ACCSH, is I wish to thank you all for listening
for four years to the input of 170. I do believe this is
a critically important document for the Agency.
I cannot wait to see its priority listing and
how it will end up some day and be utilized. I think we
gave them a very good field common-sense approach to
fatality issues, and hopefully the prevention of many,
many lives.
The last summary action would be to conclude
that portion of the 170 workgroup until such time as the
Directorate would ask us to be involved with their ongoing
workgroup, who meets monthly, picking up where we are and
massaging it with OMB.
Then, as a side note, I will continue to work
with Regulatory Analysis at their request of me.
Thanks, Mr. Chairman.
CHAIRMAN KRUL: Thank you, Jane. The goal of
trying to get better data collection when it comes to
fatalities, and serious injuries, for that matter, in
construction, it seems to me to be a logical step, with
the nomadic nature of construction, the inability of OSHA
compliance officers to track every single contractor every
single place that they go.
But yet, if there was a way to get all that data
for the terrible accidents and fatalities that
unfortunately happen in construction, and they happen for
a reason. It's not just acts of God and willy-nilly.
There has to be a pattern to most of them. We all
understand that freak accidents do happen. It's a very
dangerous workplace. But I think the data collection is
an important factor in that.
I was privileged, when you and Steve were
working on that form, to look at our trade and trying to
break it down into sub-work activities. It was
interesting. I saw the value in doing that.
Without trying to raise a Hatfield and McCoy
issue, though, this is the Chairman's second time at
chairing this meeting. I gathered from the last time that
the 170 report came out that the Data Collection Committee
and Targeting Committee, we were not at odds, but -- I'm
trying to avoid, now that this has gone -- I don't want us
to look like banning Santa Clauses in Kensington,
Maryland.
MS. WILLIAMS: Absolutely, Bob. If I might just
suggest, I think the input from Data Collection was very,
very important to the Form 170. It was critical at
various places.
Their quest is to come up with a whole system to
help assist data collection. At first it was a little
confusing, their charge, in relation to our charge, which
was to work with specific form data issues, to look
directly at construction fatality, but not to be related
in a number issue. We were looking more towards root
cause analysis.
So I think, once we truly got on track and
everyone knew what we were doing, Data Collection is
continuing with the significant task they have before them
of all these interesting code names that I have no idea
what half of them are. Marie is the scholar on that. But
they have tremendous tasks that are ongoing.
But for us to have a meaningful form, that
hopefully in time will be coded so others will use it--
and we did do that in conjunction with the BLS reporting
method, which was very important that came from Data
Collection for us to be on track to do it that way.
I think we've ended up with a very, very strong
product for the Directorate to be able to work, and
hopefully they get the computers running to identify and
put it in.
We should be able to start seeing functional
data as to where our causes are coming from in some of
these fatalities and what we have to do to correct for
that recurrence.
CHAIRMAN KRUL: Okay. Thank you, Jane.
MS. WILLIAMS: You're welcome, sir.
CHAIRMAN KRUL: Okay. Marie and Felipe,
Multilingual Issues.
ACCSH WORKGROUP REPORTS
MULTILINGUAL ISSUES IN CONSTRUCTION
By Felipe Devora
|
MR. DEVORA: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I want to go over the history a little bit of
this workgroup, and then talk a little bit about our
goals. I'll let Marie talk about some of the meeting
discussions that we had. That's where we are right now,
is discussions, and not knowing quite sure where we were
going to go with this workgroup.
The history of this workgroup, is I guess over a
year ago, seeing many comments on the diversity of
construction, the changing face of our industry of the
workers out there and the diversity of our workers, we
felt that the Advisory Committee should convene a
workgroup to address some of these issues, not necessarily
focusing on any specific cultural group.
But, given the statistics that came out last
year, I think our workgroup has focused our attention on
some very interesting statistics from the Bureau of Labor
Statistics with regards to fatalities and injuries amongst
Hispanic workers.
So I think that's the way we're going with our
diversity workgroup right now, is focusing on our efforts
to see if we can change the numbers.
As you may have read in some comments by the
Secretary of Labor, fatalities among Hispanic workers in
2000 increased sharply. They increased from 730
fatalities in 1999 to 815 in 2000. I think occupational
experts will tell you that, in construction, those numbers
are higher.
I think there's a statistic that there is a 20
percent chance more likelihood of an Hispanic worker
having serious injury or fatality on a construction job
site than whites or blacks, given the statistics that we
have from BLS for 2000.
Having said that, the Advisory Committee
Workgroup on Diversity in Construction is beginning a
partnership with the Agency. The Agency has assigned John
Miles, Region VI Director, to head up this effort for the
Agency. He is in our region, and in my region in Texas.
So, we have begun discussions and we have begun
identifying some of our objectives and some of our goals.
Quite frankly, our goal is very simple. That is to review
the training process and to see what works, and identify
some folks out there that can help us with this effort,
and then report back to the Agency on what works in
helping reduce these numbers.
Numbers, like everything, sort of validate what
we suspected to be the case many years ago. With the
changing face of the workforce in construction, there was
a likelihood that the injuries and fatalities were going
to be higher for Hispanic workers. As the statistics bear
out, that has been the case.
Marie is going to talk a little bit about some
objective and some of our goals right now, short-term and
long-term.
ACCSH WORKGROUP REPORTS
MULTILINGUAL ISSUES IN CONSTRUCTION (Continued)
By Dr. Marie Haring Sweeney |
DR. SWEENEY: Good morning, Mr. Chairman,
members of the committee.
I, first, have to apologize to Tom Broderick,
because I noticed on the minutes from the last meeting
that he is actually on this workgroup. We apologize for
not including you in our discussions yesterday, but we'll
make sure that you are in the future.
I did want to expand a little bit on the goals
of the workgroup. One, is basically to reduce injuries,
both fatal and non-fatal injuries, among Hispanic workers.
I think what we need to do, is probably define it more
Spanish-speaking worker. Right?
MR. DEVORA: We'll talk about it.
DR. SWEENEY: Some of the objectives that we
have are pretty lofty, and perhaps we'll have to hone them
down a little bit. But our first objective would be to
identify the occupational safety and health needs of the
Spanish-speaking worker, the Hispanic worker, and their
employers. We have to keep both groups in mind.
Secondly, we wanted to identify possible
collaborators who could work with the Agency. That
includes federal collaborators such as NIOSH and EPA, who
both have ongoing programs not only for construction, but
other efforts related to Hispanic workers.
Also, to look at collaborators from the non-Federal area, such as trade associations, academic
organizations, labor organizations, and other interested
parties who, again, may have programs that deal with the
health and safety of Spanish-speaking workers. Then,
also, not to leave them out, actually, the leaders in the
construction industry.
We would also like to help identify possible
resources, including financial resources, personnel,
training materials, existing programs including training
programs, as well as existing information in Spanish that
may be directed to the Spanish-speaking worker as well as
the employer.
I think there is a lot of stuff that has been
done in the work that we've done at NIOSH. We know that
there are programs out there. We're better off not
reinventing the wheel, so we'd like to work with the
Agency in identifying those programs and seeing how we can
integrate them into the overall health and safety program
that OSHA will be working on.
Our final objective is to help disseminate and
communicate that information, whether it be in training
programs or technical advisors, in public materials, or
videos, what have you.
So we'd like to help the Agency pull together a
holistic program that looks at identification of
collaborators' existing materials.
Then finally, perhaps, given when we've
identified all the gaps and all the existing stuff, to see
where the Agency can appropriately step in.
Now, we've put together what we consider a
short-term action plan and a long-term action plan. These
things are fluid, so we may or may not get them all done.
The first thing we are going to be doing, is to
work with John Miles on the Agency program, and hopefully
have a workgroup meeting that, in fact, coincides with
their Agency group. We haven't talked to them yet, but
we're hoping we can do that.
Then, also, to hold a workgroup meeting sometime
between now and the next ACCSH meeting, or maybe two, so
that we could start getting some of these objectives
going.
Then, finally, in terms of long-term plans, we
thought maybe we could help the Department of Labor put a
workshop on, or a conference, that deals specifically with
Hispanic workers and their employers, their needs, and
what kind of information is needed.
Then, finally, probably within a year, we want
to put a report out to the committee that makes
recommendations on a variety of different things that we
have just talked about.
Now, I know that Felipe said that there is a lot
of work being done in Houston. I think we wanted to talk
about that, because it deals directly with training
Hispanic workers.
Before he does that, I just want to say that
NIOSH, last week, just instituted their Spanish Web site.
It's up and coming. It doesn't have a lot of stuff on
construction, but we are putting links to things like
ALCSH, to various databases in Spanish. PAHO, the Pan
American Health Organization, is being linked, as well as
other links.
So, please visit our Web site. It's
www.CDC.gov/NIOSH, and then go to NIOSH en Espanol. Thank
you.
Felipe is going to talk about the Houston
program.
ACCSH WORKGROUP REPORTS
MULTILINGUAL ISSUES IN CONSTRUCTION (Continued)
By Mr. Felipe Devora |
MR. DEVORA: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Very quickly, last year in Houston we began this
effort, in collaboration with the local OSHA offices,
their outreach -- they had one outreach designee for both
offices.
What we did, we identified some voluntary
trainers. We targeted our audience to the field workers
out in the field. Not necessarily the safety directors or
foremen, but more just the workers. We offered this free
of charge, in collaboration with OSHA. Houston AGC
donated the facility and the trainers were voluntary.
This was kind of put together with the OSHA
office. Now the two OSHA offices in Houston each have an
outreach person assigned to them. We will be in
collaboration with those two folks.
This year, we have expanded our classes to
having one every month. We ran about four last year. I'm
sorry. We ran about six classes last year, and we ran
about 400 field-level workers through the program. This
year we hope to double or triple that number.
We hope to report on the results of that, in
collaboration with OSHA, our local offices, and, for lack
of a better term, we are known as the Hispanic
Construction Safety Committee of Houston. We will be
reporting and working with the Agency very, very closely
in Houston to track numbers and track injuries in our own
local area with that specific group in mind.
So, having said that, this workgroup is going to
be interested in other local efforts and will certainly
make any resources available through this committee, or
through any other group, to any other part of the country
that has some interest in this area.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
CHAIRMAN KRUL: Thank you. Certainly, as you
mentioned in your opening remarks, the demography for the
entire workforce over the next 10 or 20 years indicates a
huge increase in the Hispanic workforce. In many, many
areas of the country--I speak personally--I know, in our
line of work, in areas like Chicago and places that you
would not think -- everybody always thought the Hispanic
workforce was more prevalent in the southwest and
California, and that is certainly not the case.
This issue of the 730 fatalities versus 815 was
of great concern to the president of the AFL-CIO, John
Sweeney. He's sent a letter of concern to Secretary Chao,
asking that she look into it. So, I think the work you
guys are doing on that committee is certainly going to
help.
I can tell you, at least in the organized
sector, there is a great deal of effort for ESL, English
as a Second Language, classes to be organized, either at
the Building Trades Council level or utilize schools who
have grants to teach ESL classes. They look for places to
spend that money.
The problem with ESL classes, is getting people
to attend them. Many are no different than people in this
country who drop out of school. The last thing they want
to do is go back to school. We find that in our
apprenticeship program. But where it works, it works. We
have bilingual instructors in our apprenticeship and
safety and health training programs. That seems to help.
It's sort of a boring class for people to
attend. It's like listening to a speech--I think I
listened this at the last ACCSH meeting--and then having
it translated. There can't be anything worse than sitting
in a classroom and having a course taught that way.
But, nonetheless, these are issues that must be
faced. I think, with the language barrier, it's just a
breeding ground for fatalities and serious accidents when
people go out on construction sites, which are inherently
dangerous anyway, and don't know either what they're
doing, or can't follow directions, or can't take
precautions.
So, I think what you guys are doing will be
extremely important in directing the Secretary and the
Assistant Secretary.
DR. SWEENEY: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I think
one of the things that those of us at NIOSH realize, and I
hope at Department of Labor and OSHA, is that we have to
go to more grass-roots levels. We can't just stay at the
federal or state level any more.
Even in Cincinnati, there are church groups that
are teaching people English as a second language. Also,
there are other organizations that are teaching safety and
health. So, we're going to have to see if we can utilize
those resources as best we possibly can to perhaps get
those out.
CHAIRMAN KRUL: I wrote one down for you. It's
LACLA. Have you dealt with them?
DR. SWEENEY: We haven't dealt with them yet.
I'm trying to find a contact. If somebody has one, please
call me.
CHAIRMAN KRUL: I'll be happy to steer you the
right way.
Jane?
MS. WILLIAMS: Mr. Chairman, Marie might have
just answered my question. In a recent round table that I
participated in, the workers that were participating in
the round table were very concerned with the emphasis to
teach them in Spanish.
Many of them were asking for English language to
be taught to them so that they could not only be more
responsible on the job site, but so they could also be
more responsive in society.
I was wondering, has your workgroup looked at
that as a side issue because of the multiple dialect
problem?
MR. DEVORA: Let me address that. In Houston,
in our particular trial classes that we had last year, we
looked at it this way. We tried to use more job site-specific scenarios where they're working together, these
different dialectic groups are working together, as well
as with English-speaking foremen or supervisors.
So we have invited those folks that they work
with 8 or 10 hours a day, five or six days a week, into
these classes. These are folks that are already
interacting with these people.
So we have not identified it as so much as a
barrier, as more of an interaction. That is another thing
that we're going to have to sort out, is the successful
type of curriculum that I was talking about with Marie,
whether it's because the educational level that we're
targeting is probably a lot lower than folks that are
trying to get an OSHA 10-hour or OSHA 40-hour course.
We're targeting even a little lower than that.
From this group, we hope that they'll bootstrap themselves
up and we'll be able to identify leaders that will pull
themselves to the next level that are bilingual that can
take the OSHA 10-, 30-, and 40-hour courses.
DR. SWEENEY: Right. Thank you
CHAIRMAN KRUL: Go ahead, Larry.
MR. EDGINTON: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
So far this morning I have only heard you
talking about Hispanics. The thought occurs to me that,
in some industry sectors or regions of the country, we
have individuals from Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia,
North Africa.
I'm wondering, on the BLS data, is there
anything separate for them? I don't think that there is,
but I was wondering if it was there. Alternately, in
terms of sort of the scope or charge of your project, are
you going to look beyond Hispanics?
MR. DEVORA: We talked about that in our
discussions. I think if the Agency had identified folks
that weighed 150 pounds with red hair that were the ones
that were getting injured at a 20 percent higher rate than
anyone else, that we would think that the Agency would
focus on that particular group.
The reason we focused on this group, is because
really, in the changing face of construction, I think the
propensity has been toward Hispanic workers. But we do
recognize the very diverse other groups.
What we're hoping will come out of this will be
perhaps a model for successful curriculum training, where
other diverse groups or other ethnic groups that have a
contingency of workers can start as a ground base for
those sorts of efforts.
CHAIRMAN KRUL: I'll repeat for some of you in
the public who came in later. If there is anybody in the
public sector who would like to make a comment later on in
the afternoon at the end of the agenda, if you would give
me your name and affiliation on a piece of paper so we
could recognize you later this afternoon. Okay.
I'm going to turn this over to Stu Burkhammer
and Pat Clark right now. When I knew this was going to be
on the agenda, I was excited about hearing about it and
seeing it myself. It's a report on the operations at
ground zero at the World Trade Center.
Stu was there on September 12th and worked there
for two months. Pat is with Region II of OSHA. I think
we are going to hear and see from both of them a rather
interesting report on the World Trade Center.
Stu, Pat?
SPECIAL PRESENTATION
WORLD TRADE CENTER- UPDATE
By Mr. Stewart Burkhammer and Ms. Patricia Clark |
(Showing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: Good morning.
On September 11th, we all--probably most of us,
anyway--sat in front of a TV somewhere watching the events
that took place in New York. I did in my office in
Frederick. Pat probably did firsthand, just down the
street from where it occurred.
MS. CLARK: Actually, I was in Paris.
MR. BURKHAMMER: She missed it.
MS. CLARK: It made it more difficult because I
could not find out until Friday if our people in WTC 6
were okay. So, there were a number of very stressful
days, just wondering if the people got out okay.
MR. BURKHAMMER: And probably with the airports
closing, too.
MS. CLARK: No.
MR. BURKHAMMER: I got a call the morning of the
12th from Riley Bacto, who asked me to put together a
small team and go to New York on an humanitarian mission
to see if we could help in any way.
We did that. Luna went out to Wal-Mart and some
other stores and we got some stuff and threw it in a van,
and seven of us drove to New York City. For those of you
that have driven in New York City in real life, it's a
disaster.
That day, driving to New York City, was like
driving through a ghost town. We got to the entrance to
the Holland Tunnel, and of course there's police
everywhere and the bridges were closed, and the tunnels
were closed.
Fortunately, one of my brighter moves was to
take a New York City fellow with me who has a family of
14, and was born and raised in New York and happens to
have friends or family in every agency in New York City,
probably.
It just so happened that one of his brothers was
a personal friend of one of the cops that was standing in
front of the Holland Tunnel and knew Greg, and we were the
only vehicle allowed in the Holland Tunnel and we got
through.
We ended up in New York City at the Marriott
Hotel, and went out to the site the night of the 12th.
the pictures you're going to see in the presentation we've
put together--and Pat made a presentation to NACOSH last
week--you'll kind of get a feel, hopefully, for some of
the things that we all experienced and went through, some
of the stories that didn't make TV or the news that
actually happened there, and some of the personal feelings
that I think we all shared among each other.
A lot of people became very close friends during
our time there. It's certainly a moving experience that I
never expected, in my career, to ever happen to me, and I
don't think America ever expected it to happen to it.
So with that, Pat, do you want to --
MS. CLARK: No. Why don't we go through the
pictures. And, as we go through, we've been trying to
figure out how we do this. I'll talk a little bit later
on about OSHA's role, what we did initially and what we
actually are still doing, and will be doing for quite a
while.
MR. BURKHAMMER: Bechtel's role was kind of
strange, in a way. When we got there, we had an
individual in New York City. One of our ES&H area
managers was in New York City working on a project and
went out to the site immediately on the 11th and got
involved.
When we got there the night of the 12th, he had
made some contacts that allowed us to get onto the site
and to start functioning in an ES&H role of helping to
come up with some plans and procedures to protect the
approximately 10,000-plus people that were initially
there.
When you say 10,000, you'd think on a 16 and a
half acre site, 10,000 is a lot of people. It is. But
appreciate that everybody around the world in a lot of
instances, and certainly around the United States, rushed
to New York to help in any way they could. We had a
tremendous amount of volunteers, as well as a lot of
craftworkers and companies that came in to give material
and people and any help they could give. It was just
amazing, the outpouring of things people did and the
things that happened in New York City.
Bottles of water. For example, every bottle of
water manufacturer you can name had bottles of water
trucked in, literally trucked in, to New York City. I
would be, in an easy estimate, we probably had upwards of
3 to 4 million bottles of water that were consumed daily.
McDonald's brought in a mobile food truck, which
was a hit. Salvation Army had their food service. There
was lots of people. The American Red Cross set up
emergency food services, plus emergency medical for the
workers. We'll get into a little bit about how that
worked later.
But Bechtel's role ended up evolving into, on
Saturday the 15th, I was named the consulting ES&H
director for the World Trade Center emergency site,
working basically with four city entities: the Department
of Design and Construction, which had overall oversight
for the clean-up of the site; City Health, which was
responsible for the safety and health of the City of New
York and the site; the Department of Environmental
Conservation, which was responsible for the environmental
aspects of the site; and certainly Pat Clark and her team
and OSHA. OSHA and Bechtel formed a very unique teaming
arrangement and partnership on this site. I think we
could not have accomplished what we did without that
particular team. It worked out exceptionally well.
It also was a training ground, in a sense,
because a lot of the OSHA people were brought in from
around different parts of the country, as I brought in a
lot of Bechtel people from various parts of the country.
So, Bechtel got to know OSHA in a lot closer way
than we normally would on a regular site, and I think OSHA
got to know Bechtel a little better also. We both
appreciate greatly the aspects that both teams brought to
the party.
So, with that, we'll start.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: Here's an overview of the World
Trade Center as it was. You can kind of see, going around
the various buildings -- and we picked this one because
these are somewhat the key buildings that were affected
more so than the peripheral buildings.
As you'll see when we go through the site,
you'll probably see a little bit of every one of these
buildings, or some of all these buildings of what's left
over.
We'll kind of bring you up to date. I came back
yesterday from New York. I was out on the site on Tuesday
to kind of get a feel for where they are currently, and
I'll share that with you as we go through.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: This is Tower I North and Tower
II South that were hit. This basically is a shot to show
you the underground levels, which is kind of untouched
right now.
We've spent a lot of time getting rid of all the
debris, which you'll see in the slides in the upper
structures, and demolishing the buildings that were
somewhat left standing.
We've been cleaning up the peripheral buildings
that were damaged greatly, shoring up the Winter Garden,
picking out pieces of steel out of the peripheral
buildings.
Then you'll see shots of that that you wouldn't
normally see on TV, or couldn't see on TV. Basically, the
television cameras are mounted
-- one camera was mounted on the south shooting north, and
one was mounted in the north shooting south. So, you kind
of got a line view, so to speak. If you'll notice, after
a while, you were seeing the same old pictures over and
over again on TV.
That's because we would not allow the site and
the City of New York -- the FBI, because it's an ongoing
crime scene, Secret Service, CIA, and anybody else that
you can imagine is associated with a federal agency, is
controlling the site very tightly because of a lot of
reasons. That's why you kind of only saw pretty much two
views on TV.
All the above-ground work is scheduled to be
completed December 31st. In my view, it will be. The
mayor, when he leaves office the first part of January,
issued an edict that eh wanted all the upper buildings,
upper debris, and upper demolition completed before he
left office. I think that will be a challenge, I think,
to meet that goal.
The majority of the balance of the work will
probably take four to five months. It should all be
completed by the end of May, and that's the target date.
Originally, the target date was
September/October. Some people were even saying it would
be the end of 2003. But the team out there has done a
phenomenal job of cleaning up and developing a system for
getting the debris off the site. They take it off to Pier
7 and Pier 25, where they have hoppers.
They load it on barges and the steel is shipped
to New Jersey, where it's going to be melted down and
eventually made into new steel columns and beams which
will be used in the rebuilding of the World Trade Center,
which is interesting.
So what you're seeing here in the below-ground
shots, are the mall -- for those of you who have been
here, there's a shopping mall down here. There's two
parking level garages. Then there's the path tube, and
there's the N&R line.
And then there's the bottom part, which contains
the battery rooms, the chillers, the motor control
centers, all the electrical parts that ran this whole
seven-building complex and area, so to speak.
So there are a lot of things down below that are
not known, currently. Certainly there's hazards down
below that we have not quite identified, even though
there's been a lot of samples taken, and you'll hear about
that.
Also, there's a lot of air pockets down below
where debris did not fill when it came down. That causes,
somewhat, a lot of shifting and moving of material,
especially when you're taking material out with huge, big
pieces of equipment. As you tend to snake something out,
something moves, something falls, and something shifts.
So, it's a very unstable bottom, currently.
Also, when we first started, there were two
huge, big fires burning underground, 2,800 degree fires.
Slowly, over the past two months, those fires have
decreased.
We have pumped millions, and millions, and
millions of gallons of water, some of which reached part
of the fire, some of which didn't because of the massive
debris down there. The water would coagulate all this
material together and then it would run off out into other
places and never even get to the fire.
The fire department tried a chemical called
pyrofoam, where you had to drill down and pump some foam
down into this. But the problem was, there is so much
mangled steel, you could never get a clean drill and a
clean tube down to where the fire was to get some of the
pyrofoam down in there. So, we scrapped that idea. The
fire department scrubbed that idea and just continued to
pump water, and water, and water.
Right now, there's one fire left burning. It's
a small fire on the Building 7 side. It's about 400
degrees, which has been greatly reduced. That fire, they
anticipate having out Friday.
So, once that comes, a lot of the heat and
problems will dissipate and it should be somewhat easier
to get down into the lower levels. We started down at the
lower levels and stopped because of the shifting material
and the heat. But once the fire gets out and we have a
day or two to cool, we should be able to go back down and
work that.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: This is the flight path of the
attack, which you've seen on TV several times. But we've
put this in to kind of show you, in correlation to the
rest of the building, and how the two planes came in from
opposite directions and hit in an almost perfectly precise
place in each of these buildings.
Where they hit was the after-flow of the
heating, ventilating and air conditioning systems. So
when they hit in the two buildings, all the floors above
those plane crashes were basically cut off from anybody.
The only way those people could have ever gotten
out, was if you could have gotten a helicopter in there to
evacuate them, which of course did not happen. So, every
employee above those airplane crashes died or is missing.
Below them, there are some remarkable stories
about people getting out. One particular story appeared
in the New York Times, which was an exceptional article.
I think it also was in the Washington Post,
about the safety director for Sherson, Lehman, who had
2,300 employees and evacuated 2,100 of him. He, himself,
died while going back to try to get the other 200 out.
He was an ex-war hero. It is a phenomenal story
of courage and individual fortitude by a person. And he
weighed about 370 pounds. He was one of the better
security guys in the world.
He had predicted something like this would occur
and he had planned for it in advance. He had his people
trained and ready to get out of that building. His sole
efforts, I think, and that of some of the firemen who
helped him, saved the lives of 2,100 of those people in
that building. It's a remarkable story.
But there are tons of remarkable stories. Pat,
I'm sure, has several also. But that particular one
touched me greatly, because I keep thinking about Bechtel
and the evacuation procedures in our own buildings all
over the world.
It kind of hits home that maybe we're not as
prepared as we thought we were, and I've been doing
something about that since I've been back. But it's a
slow process.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: The fire balls you saw on TV.
These pictures were taken by an individual who happened to
be down there and just happened to have a camera, and
happened to get out so you could see his pictures.
But these are when the planes actually hit. This
is the jet fuel explosions that you saw on TV and the huge
fire balls that came out of both of the buildings.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: This is 1 as it's tumbling down
and collapsing, and this is 2 as it's tumbling down and
collapsing. Again, the individual that took these
pictures and shared them got out safely and is fine.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: But you'll notice, the closer
he was here, he's now running, and the further away he was
when he took these shots.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: We have a handout for you.
Hopefully, you can pick one of these up because you can
use this to follow along as we go through the
presentation. A lot of the shots -- if you don't have
one, take a few minutes and go out and get one.
Does the committee have this? Luna, could you
get some and pass it out to the committee, please?
It will make it easier for you to follow along
when you see the pictures. You can kind of identify where
we are in relationship to the map.
You can read here, collapsed or destroyed,
partially collapsed, or major damage.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: Then we have a shot that shows
you the periphery damage. One hundred and sixty-eight
buildings total either need cleaned, had broken windows,
trash on the roof, or other types of debris before they
could be reoccupied. That's the gray you see around this
area here.
So you can see the collapse of these two towers,
in essence, causing the collapse and severe damage of the
other buildings, and the damage that occurred in the
yellow area.
The gray area is the area that a lot of clean-up
was done, washing down the buildings, replacing windows,
communication problems, debris on the roofs, trash on the
roofs, cleaning the streets. The Sanitation Department
did a phenomenal job at that.
This kind of gives you kind of a pictorial view
of the whole area that had to be cleaned up in the City of
New York.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: This is kind of interesting.
This is a before and after. The left image is just an
aerial shot taken in June of 2000. Of course, this is the
after view and the plume, as it became known as, which is
a combination of heat, fire, dust, and debris that's
floating up in the atmosphere. The plume lasted for about
six weeks. A lot of the plume contributed to the fires
burning down below.
So even though it was not this extensive, and
you'll see in some of the pictures initially the 12th,
13th, 14th, 15th, those kind of days, most of this area in
here was very heavily, for lack of another word, fogged in
and it was very difficult to see.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: In your handout we've given you
these fact sheets. It just kind of tells you a little
story about the World Trade Center and different things
about it.
The fire department in New York suffered
probably one of the greatest losses in history of
anything. Three hundred and eighty-three firemen lost
their lives in the rescue operations of the World Trade
Center. You can see the number of vehicles they lost.
NYPD lost 85 people and 133 vehicles.
The Port Authority of the New York Police lost a
couple of dozen people, of which we found two Sunday, by
the way, in the bottom of one of the areas. They were
doing demolition of one of the buildings and they saw some
things and stopped.
They brought in the fire department. The site
is still under the jurisdiction of the incident command.
The incident command is a guy by the name of Chief Hayden,
who is a battalion chief of the New York City fire
department.
Incident command means, until the fire is out
and until "recovery" of bodies is complete, it's under the
jurisdiction of the incident command.
The unique part of this, is it's also a crime
scene. It will be an ongoing crime scene until all the
debris is cleaned up, including the basement. So you have
a lot of federal agencies out there watching, looking, and
making sure that any parts that could help them in their
investigation of various things throughout this are taken
care of properly and removed. So, they have all the
access to it.
So it is very difficult for contractors, in a
sense, to do their job because they're doing it under the
scrutiny of several federal agencies. When they do get to
the point where a body is potentially available to
recover, or a part of a body is there to recover, they
stop work, they call in the dogs. A dog goes in and does
his thing and they tell, yes or no.
Then if it's yes and it's identified as NYPD,
fire department of NY, or Port Authority Police, or a
federal agent individual, there's a ceremony that takes
place and the body bag is filled, and there is a flag
draped over it and there's a procession that comes out
honoring this individual. He's taken off in lighted
police escort to the morgue. It's quite a moving scene
when you see this the first time, but it continues to be
moving the more you see it. It gets to you after a while.
Pretty soon, you get to the point where you
accept it, but still you feel for the family and you feel
for the people because you can't help but do that.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: Three thousand, one hundred and
seventy-five confirmed dead or missing as of Tuesday. As
you'll notice, this number keeps coming down, which is
great. That means that they found, identified, or found
people they thought were missing that have not been.
I'm sure, hopefully, you all saw on TV--maybe
you did--the fraud case that took place last week, where
an individual's family said they were missing, filed an
insurance claim, and they were not missing--they were
hidden somewhere--to collect the insurance money. They
were caught, of course. Now they're both in jail,
awaiting trial.
Fifty-seven million tons of debris were removed
out of a total of 100 million, plus or minus. When you
think about the devastation, that's a lot of debris. The
Staten Island landfill has been set up as the debris
removal site. The Staten Island landfill is a huge area.
We had an opportunity to go over there and take a look at
it on a couple of occasions.
It's kind of unique, in a way, because they have
three 100-yard football fields, it looks like, roughly.
FBI has one, NYPD has one, and I think the other Secret
Service, CIA, and other agencies kind of have one
together.
Their job is, they have 100 people in each of
these three areas, 100 FBI, 100 NYPD, and 100 combination,
I think. They all have rakes. Their job is to rake
through every single piece of debris that is sent over
there from the site to do three things.
One, to see if they can find any crime scene
things that would help them in the crime scene. Two, is
to make sure that the debris that is sent over there is
proper and belongs in that particular site and doesn't
belong in another place. Three, to see if there are any
body parts, teeth, hair, bone fragments, et cetera, that
they can identify or take out and try to match with DNA.
They've asked all of the family members of those
that are still in this 3,175 to please come in and
contribute some DNA material, because that's the only way
now that they're ever going to identify, basically, the
balance of these people.
MS. CLARK: They are also looking for any other
kind of identification. Just two days ago, we had a call
from the FBI because they had found the credentials for
one of our investigators. They were calling to find out
if he was safe or if he was still missing. Luckily, he is
safe.
But they've also been able to do a number of
identifications that way, licenses and other kinds of
material like that.
MR. BURKHAMMER: Speaking of that, there's an
interesting story that occurred one day into the second
week. Time became a blur for a lot of us back there, and
I can't remember one day from the next.
First of all, the badging scheme out there was a
joke, in a sense. We went through seven badging systems
because, every time we'd get a badging system going,
people were coming in and out of the site in droves. We
had 36 entrances and exits, which we in no way could
control. It was just a disaster.
So we'd keep going through these badging systems
because, as soon as we got one color going, we'd find out
they were selling badges on Ebay to the highest bidder so
anyone could buy one and come to the site, and that was a
disaster. So we have finally, hopefully, gotten that
stopped. I think we did. I think they quit selling
badges on Ebay.
But if you're a director or one of the people
that were allowed to go to various different places, you
had a badge with your picture and stuff on it. They had
different symbols that told where you could go.
One of the symbols that nobody wanted, that I
unfortunately got, was the morgue symbol. It's a humorous
story, but in a sense it isn't. I was out at the site one
day and I got a call that the doctors would like me to
come to the morgue that was located in the American
Express building. And I'm not a big morgue fan.
So I went over there, very uneasy and not
knowing what to expect and what they wanted me for. They
wanted me to come in because the body bags were getting to
the point that they were being stacked up and they were
falling, and they didn't know how to fix this. It was
just a big room. It was really an eerie feeling in there.
So I made a couple of suggestions. We got some
people over there and we built some stands that we put the
bags to keep them from falling on the floor.
So there were two doctors and myself. We spent
a couple of minutes in there and then we left. The
doctors came out with me, which left nobody in the morgue.
Well, one of the problems we had on the site, is
people would come on the site. And you have to
appreciate, in New York City, I think there's somewhere in
the neighborhood of 45,000 New York City policemen,
several thousand fire department employees.
But everybody in an agency, I think, in New
York--and Pat can correct me if I'm wrong--has a badge.
If you have a badge, that's golden. If you've got a
badge, you can come on that site at that particular time
and nobody will stop you. So we had, I'll bet, all 45,000
New York City police coming and going at one time or
another.
Well, this particular individual--and you can
buy these tee shirts anywhere in New York, NYPD tee
shirts, or FDNY tee shirts, or sweat shirts, or ball caps.
This individual came out on the site and he had an NYPD
tee shirt and an NYPD ball cap. He had taken a crayon, a
yellowish crayon, and drew a badge and put it in a plastic
holder and had it on his chest, and got right in the site.
Evidently, he got, also, right in the American
Express building, and somehow he got in the morgue. He
was rifling credit cards out of the body bags.
So, evidently, they caught him. They did catch
him. All that they would tell us the next day, was that
he's no longer with us.
Now, that can be interpreted in a lot of ways.
It can be interpreted that he's in jail somewhere, or it
can be interpreted that he's in one of those body bags
inside the morgue. But stories like that are just
terrible.
But it goes to show you, I think, that even in
--and this is my opinion--a tragic situation like this,
there's always somebody, some thing, or some people that
want to take advantage of the situation to better
themselves in one way or another. But this particular
individual, I don't think, got any better out of the deal.
The dollar loss is estimated at $3.7 billion.
That's the current estimate by the New York City Mayor's
Office of Emergency Management and FEMA. I would think,
as we continue to go down to the basement levels, this
number could go up.
They initially had four prime contractors on
site: Amec, Bovis, Tully, an Turner. They were all given
a designated area to work and given certain tasks to do,
and they did very well at these particular tasks.
There were some complications. One, there were
no contracts, and there has never been a contract let to
any of these contractors. They're all working on verbal
agreements. There's no indemnity clauses for any of the
contractors. They're all working on a wing and a prayer.
And there's no worker's comp insurance coverage
yet, even though three or four insurance companies bid the
OCIP, Owner-Controlled Insurance Policy, and one was
awarded it. It is not agreed to or signed yet.
So, there are a lot of things happening out
there under the Mayor's Emergency Declaration and a lot of
permits were all taken away, and a lot of barriers dropped
immediately so things could be done immediately. They
have been, and it has worked very well.
Turner has completed their work. They're
basically off the site. Now they're down to Amec, Bovis,
and Tully. They'll be going down to probably two by the
end of this year.
Currently, we've reduced down to 400 crafts: 150
New York fire department, two 75-person tours. That was a
big fiasco that made the print in the news. The fire
department was very unhappy because the mayor cut them to
25, and then they moved it back up as a public relations
thing to keep the problems down. New York Police
Department HAS 125, and 150 volunteer people. They are
all working 7 days a week, 24 hours a day. This is not
going to change.
They will be working 7/24s until the very end
because there is still the Firemen's Widows' Coalition and
the Spouses Coalition, and the other coalitions that have
been formed by the families of non-fire department and
police department personnel who continually hold out hope
--although it is false--that somebody may be found alive.
It is evident to those of us in the business,
and everybody in the fire department, the police
department, and all those who are thinking with their head
and not their heart, that that is impossible after this
amount of time.
But these coalitions, as Pat can share with you,
are very vocal. They get a lot of prime time on CNN and
the New York City TV stations. They carry a lot of clout.
We had an opportunity to meet with the Firemen's Union and
the Fire Chiefs' Union, and we're going to be meeting with
the Widows' Coalition sometime in the near future.
Not so much about Bechtel taking over the job
and running the project, which is a whole other story and
I'm not going to get into that, but to assure them that
everybody on that site, the only interest they have, is to
make sure that bodies are properly removed, and properly
honored, and properly taken care of.
There was one incident that occurred where a
body--parts of a body, two parts of a person's body--were
accidently picked up and dropped in a dump truck and they
were found by an FBI agent who was scanning the truck
before it left the site. Procedures have been changed now
so that will never happen again.
But that made for a lot of unrest in the
coalitions. Because of that, the mayor got a lot of heat
and the city got a lot of heat, and everybody else took a
lot of heat for that. And rightly so, I think, because
that should have never happened.
MS. CLARK: The other part of that, is you may
have heard on Veteran's Day the site was closed, or at
least it was closed for construction-related operations.
They still had dust suppression and fire suppression. We
had a skeletal safety crew there around the clock.
What happened, though, there was a lot of very
adverse reaction from these groups that Stu mentioned.
The plans to close for Thanksgiving had to be scrapped.
That, in itself, caused a great deal of problem because
the construction employees are very, very tired. They're
exhausted. They've been working very long hours
continuously and there's a limited number of them, to be
honest.
They really, really were looking for that day
off. The companies were looking for it, too, because
they're not really having a lot of time to be able to do
any maintenance or work on their equipment, which is just
getting incredibly beaten up. This is new equipment. If
you saw it, you would never believe it was new when it
came on the site. I'm sure we have some pictures that
will show that.
But basically the mayor came out, as soon as
this uproar started, and said, no, no. We realize that we
shouldn't have shut the site for Veteran's Day and we're
going to keep it open for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and
every other holiday.
Well, what they finally decided then to do,
which is probably what they should have thought of
originally, is to say that they would continue recovery
operations, which is what they did for Thanksgiving.
There were about five or six grapplers working. A heavy
component of the recovery teams, the fire, police, and the
Port Authority Police, were there.
We did keep more than a skeletal crew of safety
on the job since there was going to be some activity. We
didn't do our sampling activities that day, but we also
kept our respirator group open. Some of us, including me,
went to the site several times that day just to make sure
that we did have some appropriate coverage.
We were pretty concerned that, given the unrest
about the situation -- because the construction workers
were not happy even with this limited amount of activity
that was going to be going on, and there was some concern
that there might be some demonstrations on their part.
But everything went okay. There were some
events that day where they did have some positives
identified, so it all worked out rather well. The same
kind of thing will occur on Christmas and New Year's.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: The next few slides show you
each building in sequence and tell you a little bit about
what it is. The thing to look at here is this area right
here.
We named these the Coliseum Areas, because if
you kind of think back to Greek mythology, it kind of
looks like an old coliseum. At night when the smoke was
coming up, and at daybreak, and at sunset, this was really
an eerie-looking piece, when you looked at the sun going
down and the sun coming up. It kind of set it in your
mind as kind of an old coliseum.
Building 2, the South Tower. You can see a
piece of the coliseum. Here in the background is Banker's
Trust. Liberty One is over here. So, you can look at
that on your little maps.
Three, was the old Marriott Vista Hotel. When
the towers came down, it came down right on top of this.
I mean, this was totally crushed and destroyed.
MS. CLARK: That's the one that took the brunt
of the damage during the 1993 bombing.
MR. BURKHAMMER: The same. Yes. Four, gutted,
burned out, collapsed, partially standing. It's now down
completely.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: Five. The Northeast Plaza
Building was seven stories. It was partially destroyed.
It was kind of amazing to look at this building because
structurally, from a sense of looking at it like this, it
was a wreck. But it was so unstable and so gutted, that
we had no choice but to take it down.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: Six is here. This was the
Custom's house. This is where OSHA had their offices, on
the top floor up here. Again, it was crushed and
mutilated.
I want you to remember this. See this hole
here? I want you to remember that hole because there's a
story that goes with this hole.
Richard Middleson, who's the area director for
Lower Manhattan, Pat's person, and I became pretty good
friends. He was pretty amazed when he saw this huge hole
in the middle of this building. And it goes all the way
down. I mean, it's a complete hole that goes all the way
down to the bottom. But, again, there's a little story
here I'll share with you later.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: Seven collapsed at 5:20 p.m.
that night. The part that hadn't collapsed was collapsed
in the following two days and brought down. This was the
Turner work here. This is completely all gone now. This
looks like this, basically, now.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: Bob Adams was the S&H Director
for the Department of Design and Construction. Every
morning, we had a safety meeting where basically all the
agencies, all the contractors, subcontractors, fire
department, police department, as I said, came in here to
the PS-89, which is where our headquarters were
temporarily. We had a morning safety briefing in the
morning meeting.
Prior to this, the fire incident command had a
7:00 meeting every morning to plan the fire meeting, and
then we had our meeting. Right after this meeting was a
9:00 construction meeting, where all the contractors got
together and planned the day's activities.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: This is a shot from the roof of
90 West, which if you look on your map, is an old decor
building that had a huge scaffolding around it because
they were fixing it, cleaning it, and were going to
restore it somewhat. A lot of the scaffolding was broken
and pieced.
What they wanted to do is just take a bulldozer
in and bulldoze down the scaffolding. We said, no, you're
not going to do that. What would have happened if they
did, was those cross-pieces would have acted like spears
and shot out all over everywhere and could have
potentially injured a lot of people.
But if you'll look at the view here, you can see
from a rooftop view, somewhat, the debris and the mangled
mess, and, again, the fires and the smoke.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: Search and rescue personnel.
You can look at the people up here and you can get a feel
for how huge this debris pile was. These are human beings
standing up here from the fire department working.
I would say they're 80 to 100 feet up in the air
where you see them here. You look at some of these beams
--and we'll talk about them later--a lot of these beams
weigh in the tons and they're just mangled like pretzels.
Again, it shows the sheer force when that
building came down and the inertia of that building being
crushed. When the building came down, it was somewhat
ironic because the top of the building became the bottom,
and the bottom of the building became the top because, as
I said, as it came down, it came back up.
So, the force drove the building down to the
ground. The bottom part that was already down on the
ground was forced back up again. So the bottom of the
building is at the top of the pile, and then the top of
the building is the bottom of the pile.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: This is a Plaza view with WTC 2
in the background, and 1 in the foreground, and again,
some of the equipment.
As Pat said, this equipment has been working
non-stop since September 11th/September 12th, in that time
span, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. They change out the
operator, but they don't have a lot of time to service the
equipment.
So one of the big concerns we had from a safety
standpoint was the equipment breaking down. So we tried
to come up with a system where we would work 6 days a
week, 24 hours a day, and use the seventh day for
maintenance of the equipment.
Again, as Pat shared, that caused so much
consternation, we couldn't do that. The hour meters on
the rigs were useless because they couldn't stop them at
service time.
So what they ended up doing, was servicing them
on the run, basically. If we had a problem with a crane
or we thought that the cable needed changed, we'd just
shut the crane down. That's the only way we could get it
to a point where they could stop it, shut it down, service
it, clean it.
We became the bad guys for shutting the cranes
down. Pat and I have a story about a crane inspection
team that we put together that you'll see a little later,
but it's really a classic.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: This is between Tower 1 and 2
where a lot of the debris was forced down into the
underground areas, as you saw in the picture of the
underground, into the shopping mall area.
If you'll look at a lot of these beams, they're
still connected together somewhat. The ones that are
connected together, of course, weigh a whole lot more than
the ones that aren't connected together. I'll give you an
example in a little bit.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: Initially, all the work was
done with buckets and by hand because there were some cell
phones calls that people were under the debris. They
didn't know exactly where they were. We found a couple,
three of the people that actually did call out and we were
able to find them.
On Wednesday the 13th, was the actual last day
that we found anybody alive, and that was eight firemen
that we found alive that day. Nobody has been found alive
since the 13th.
But they call the dog out. The dog comes out,
does what the dog does, and either tells them yes or no.
If it's yes, the whole site basically rushes over.
There's thousands of people lined up with buckets passing
debris back and forth, in and out, to get down to
hopefully where this person is and that the person is
alive.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: Tower 2. Again, you can see
two rescue workers in there, and again, the debris and the
dust. The white powdery film is everywhere. It was just
everywhere on the whole thing.
CHAIRMAN KRUL: Those are rescue workers, just
below your flag?
MR. BURKHAMMER: Right here? These two?
CHAIRMAN KRUL: Yes.
MR. BURKHAMMER: Yes.
CHAIRMAN KRUL: And down here in the middle just
below the flag.
MR. BURKHAMMER: Here? No. Just these two are
the only two people.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: This kind of gives you a feel
for when they're attempting to find a survivor. You can
see right in here, this is where they think he is. You
can just see everybody running over to help in any way
they can. This is a close-up view of the firemen in here.
They did find a person in here, but unfortunately the
person didn't survive.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: But the hard part was, you can
see back here the beam coming down. For every opening
like this you have maybe a foot in or two feet in, is just
a stop, a wall, a crack of debris.
A lot of the people, unfortunately, that were
trapped under this were trapped under debris and there was
no way to actually get in there because it took too long
to cut these pieces out.
When you cut them out, you're going to have a
fire because of all the powdery debris, the paper, trash,
and stuff in the back. So the only thing you could do,
was try to fit yourself in.
We had several midgets that came in that do
mining work and caisson work and they used them to get in
these very, very tight, small, little areas as best they
could where a normal 5' or 6', plus or minus, 200-pound
human could not get. So the smaller individuals were able
to fit in these little crevices like this and actually
help identify and find people.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: This is myself and Richard
Middleson, one of the many tours he and I took together on
the site, identifying problems and looking for things we
could do to improve the safety on the site.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: Again, here's another example
of a huge steel-matted area that came down in the
collapse. Again, you can see the rescue workers. These
are pretty big guys. I mean, these are 6'-plus, 200-plus
pound people. They just look like ants on this pile.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: This is World Trade Center 4.
Again, you can see the fire and the smoke, which continued
for a long period of time.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: There were several American
flags raised in and around the site. This is not the one
you've seen a lot of on TV. I'll show you that one in a
minute.
Again, you can get a picture here of the debris,
the smoke, the fire, the trash. You actually see people
in respirators, which was a big, big problem, to get these
firemen and policemen--especially the firemen and
policemen--to understand that these respirators were there
for their protection.
Yes, they were a pain in the butt and they
caused a lot of heat in breathing, but they were going to
prevent a lot of potential problems down the road.
When you're talking to these guys, their sole
mindset is, find people, find people, find people, put out
the fire, find people, and they never thought of
themselves. It was very difficult to get them to think of
themselves.
It was also very difficult to get them to wear
their fire helmets or to get them in hard hats, let alone
get a respirator on them. Here's some that happen to have
a respirator on, which is encouraging.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: Again, just a shot of the back
of 4, and Tower 2. Again, the firemen. These are looking
for people, any way to find bodies down in this mangled
mess.
If you watched real closely on TV when the plane
hit the tower and the fire ball erupted, you saw this shot
come out the other end of the World Trade Center. This is
it. This is the engine off the plane. This is what came
out the front end and was buried under the debris pile of
2. So this is the casing and the engine, in fact, is
intact up in here.
This is the casing off the American Airlines
flight that erupted and exploded and the thing that shot
out the front end that you could see if you really
watched. If they slowed the film down, you'd see this
coming out the front like a bullet. This is what they
recovered and it's sitting over at the Staten Island
landfill. It's kind of eerie to look at it sitting there.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: Again, we had one Bechtel ES&H
person and an OSHA person. We teamed up together, days
and nights. We went around in teams of two. It was a
great learning experience for both. We identified a lot
of problems. We were able to correct a lot of problems.
By having the OSHA person with us, it allowed us
to do some things and shut down some things that, without
them, we could have eventually probably done, but it would
have been a struggle, at best.
But with us working together, teaming together,
and identifying problems and concerns together, we got a
lot more done and provided a lot safer atmosphere to work
in, I think, than we would have if we had not been a team
effort.
MS. CLARK: And maybe this is a good time to
explain our role at the site. Initially, whenever there's
a response to an emergency, we certainly are there
providing technical assistance and guidance, and trying
not to interfere with the emergency operations, but to
make sure that they are occurring in the safest way
possible. That's the tack that we took here.
On the safety side, we very quickly joined up
with Bechtel and did they safety monitoring teams.
Basically, we had six people per shift, 18 a day. We
still have that. When Bechtel left the site, we pretty
much took over that function ourselves and we've since
been continuing that.
We found that, moving in this way doing the
compliance assistance, has been pretty successful. We
have actually entered into a partnership recently. Two
weeks ago, the Secretary came up and we signed a
partnership agreement with the now two co-incident
commanders.
The fire department, several weeks ago, was
joined in their incident command by the city Department of
Design and Construction. So, they are the co-incident
commanders at the site. They are part of the partnership,
along with the four primes.
Actually, it was a joint venture, Turner Plaza--they were still on the site at that time--Bovis, Amec, and
Tully, as well as the two major employer and employee
associations, the Building Trade Employers Association of
New York and the Building Construction Trades Council of
Greater New York, as well as the Contractors Association
of Greater New York, and the General Contractor's
Association. They're all part of this partnership.
Basically, the commitment is to continue to work
together to support the environmental safety and health
plan, which actually Bechtel was the primary author of, to
continue to support that and to share information, both
from the safety monitoring and also from the risk
assessment.
The bottom line is to make sure that the site is
as safe as possible. We certainly don't want to lose any
more lives there or encounter any serious injuries. So,
we are continuing to work in this cooperative fashion.
We are doing some enforcement outside the
confines of the project area. The project area is defined
very carefully by what work is under the Department of
Design and Construction's control for contractors who are
working on some of those buildings outside that suffered
damage that Stu showed you earlier.
There's a lot of activity going on there.
There, we are doing focused inspections. We are basically
looking at the four causes of most of the construction
fatalities as our way of focusing those inspections.
But within what we've called the so-called green
line--it was actually painted at one point. I don't know
that there's any of that green paint left--but pretty much
the Plaza itself now, and the little keystone area that
was 7, inside that area we're still continuing to provide
technical advice and assistance and it has been working
quite well.
Jointly, we basically are getting the job done
identifying the hazards and working on getting them abated
immediately.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: What you see here, is Building
4, the collapsed part of 4, and what's left of 5.
There's a Plaza area right in here between these
two buildings. A lot of people used that Plaza area,
unfortunately, for an observation deck. They would walk
out and you could get an excellent view of the entire
ground zero site by walking out in this Plaza.
The problem was, the Plaza was very unstable.
We had barricaded it off, we had flagged it off, we had
tried to get the police to keep people out of there. The
problem was, it was the police and the firemen bringing
their families out, and their kids--which was no place to
do that--to look at the site.
So on this particular day, in this particular
area, about 5:30, 6:00 at night, one of our guys on one of
our teams observed 16 policemen, their wives, and their
kids out in the Plaza on the other side of the barricades,
out taking pictures and looking at the debris. We went
out and hassled them, and hassled them, and hassled them,
and finally they left.
As they got about down to where this group of
people are, the Plaza collapsed down completely, about a
25-foot collapse down into the basement area, and it would
have killed every one of them. We were extremely
fortunate that our guys happened to, A) walk by there,
number one, and B) had enough foresight to hassle them and
get them out of there, C) they got out of there and they
lived.
MS. CLARK: And the sad part of that is, two
weeks later, Bill Gillen and I were making one of our
Sunday tours and we were in that area. Now there was this
huge sign that said, "Unstable Area - Do Not Enter," big,
fluorescent orange letters, enormous. No one could miss
it. And what do we see, but two groups. One, a group
that a few of the people had hart hats on, but they were
dressed in obviously civilian clothes, wives and friends,
with some people. Then the other one was a New York City
police officer in his dress uniform, with a woman in high
heels out there. We're standing back. This also is an
area, at this point, where respirators are required. That
is the way the plume would sort of flow. We're in our
respirators trying to shout with the respirators on, get
their attention.
I don't know what they thought we were doing.
We're going like this (gesturing) telling them to come
back. It took us a good 10 minutes to get them back. And
we're saying, do you realize what's going on? We asked
the police officer if he was aware of what had happened
just two weeks before. He said, oh, I heard about that,
but I didn't think that was here.
So, this visitor problem continues, I hate to
say this, to this day. Even though the site is shrinking
as far as the area that's controlled and the number of
entrances, it is still an amazing tourist attraction, so
to speak.
Stu is absolutely right. If you have any badge
whatsoever, it doesn't matter if it's from Connecticut, or
there was a whole crew from Canada the other day. On
Sundays it's very bad. Hundreds of people come through
there. You're constantly going up and checking with them
and then escorting them out.
MR. BURKHAMMER: If you can think in your mind
of all the celebrities in the world, all the foreign heads
of state, just anybody you think is important in your
mind, they've probably been there. All the way from Julia
Roberts to every football team you can imagine. The
Wrestling Federation was out.
The big thing was, these individuals would sign
hard hats. They would sign their autograph on the
workers' hard hats. You'd see workers with masses of
signatures on their hard hat. A lot of jobs, people put
stickers on their hard hats. Well, this particular one
they put signatures of celebrities on their hard hats.
The Julia Roberts one was interesting because we
didn't know she was there. We found her out in tennis
shoes and a tank top and a pair of shorts with a couple of
firemen walking her out onto the pile. Now, normally
Julia Roberts in a tank top, tennis shoes, and shorts
wouldn't bother me at all.
But, unfortunately, in this particular case it
bothered me greatly because if she walked out into that
pile, and she was heading right for the plume, she had no
respirator, no hard hat, no safety glasses, no nothing.
So we were able to go up and very politely
explain to her that she was walking into a death trap, and
she turned around and left. But that's kind of what we've
had to put up with.
So we built a visitor's stand on the southeast
or southwest corner of the site in hopes that the visitors
would migrate to the viewing stand. Some did, some
didn't.
The biggest problem we had was getting Mayor
Guiliani to wear a hard hat. We finally achieved that,
even though he always had his New York baseball cap on
whenever you saw him on TV.
We finally got a hard hat on him. We never
could get a respirator or safety glasses on him, but we
did get a hart hat on him. The only reason we did that,
we ordered a special hard hat that said, "VIP - Mayor,"
and it worked.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: Man baskets were a huge
problem, as Pat can attest. All the way from non-certified man baskets, improperly constructed man baskets,
improperly placed man baskets, man baskets hanging from
cranes that weren't certified to carry man baskets, too
many people in the man baskets, et cetera, et cetera, et
cetera. We were shutting man baskets down, if not every
hour, at least every other hour and pulling people out,
and making issues of man baskets. It's still a problem
today.
MS. CLARK: It's much, much better. Part of
that, I think, is the crane team effort, which we'll show
in a few minutes. This is a good man baskets. I was
going to say, did you have a picture of the one that was
the dumpster?
MR. BURKHAMMER: Yes, we have it but it's not
here.
MS. CLARK: They actually had a dumpster that
they retrofitted to become a personnel hoist. It was
interesting. It was under the direction of the fire
department, I should say.
MR. BURKHAMMER: One of the concerns was being
able to get torches and plasma arcs up in the air so they
could cut this high steel. The only way feasibly to do
that, is a man basket. But, unfortunately, to do it,
you've got to have immense heat and you have to have
several cylinders in the man basket along with personnel
to do the cutting.
So the only thing they could figure out that
they could make big enough, was a big, huge Dempsey
Dumpster and they put 20 cylinders in there and 4 people,
each with cutting torches, hanging over the side trying to
cut steel, until we caught them and politely explained to
them that that was a no-no and we're not going to use the
Dempsey Dumpster.
But it was a real concern because, even going up
in the air and cutting this huge steel with these torches,
and in some cases using the plasma arcing, you needed so
much intense heat that you'd suck up the cylinders
unbelievably fast.
So, they had to dream up a way to get the
cylinders back and forth. They would weld shackles on top
of the cylinder caps and hook up to the shackle and jerk
the cylinders up, until we caught them doing that and that
ended.
So, they had every trick in the book. We became
real jerks because we were preventing them from doing what
they thought was right to help clean up the site.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: Here's an example of the crane
team. We had 32 pieces of equipment on site at the height
of the work. It was a mess. You'll see a slide that
shows you a lot of it. The swing radiuses were greatly
cut. Every time they'd move, they'd move into another
piece. A lot of them, back-up alarms didn't work or they
turned them off, or you couldn't hear, anyway.
Some operators didn't have licenses. Just
everything you can imagine that went wrong on some of
these cranes, we found: rigging, lineage. A lot of it was
due to no maintenance and not being able to work on the
equipment.
So we systematically decided that we'd go around
to each rig and inspect each rig, and we did. We had a
laundry list of things that we found that were wrong.
Liberty Mutual, who is the awardee of the OCIP, also sent
a crane team around to do theirs, and we compared our
notes and we were basically identical in the things we
observed and found. So, we systematically got each
contractor to work off the list, and they did. They did a
fairly good job.
CHAIRMAN KRUL: We're going to take a brief
break in Stu and Pat's presentation. Assistant Secretary
of Labor for OSHA, Mr. Henshaw, is here, along with Davis
Layne, is it Bruce?
MR. SWANSON: Yes.
CHAIRMAN KRUL: Would you like to introduce them
both?
MR. SWANSON: I thought I say Gary Vischer come
in, too.
CHAIRMAN KRUL: Mr. Secretary, why don't you
come up here and take a chair. Welcome.
MR. HENSHAW: Good morning. How are you?
MR. SWANSON: I think it would be helpful, Bob.
I know you already went around and introduced yourselves
this morning. But for John's benefit, perhaps you could
do it again?
CHAIRMAN KRUL: Great. John, why don't you
start?
(Whereupon, the committee members and attendees
introduced themselves.)
MR. HENSHAW: Good. If I could have Gary
Vischer stand. Gary is back in the room. He is Deputy
Assistant Secretary. And Davis Layne. Most of you know
Davis. If you don't, you'll know him quickly. But it's
an honor to be here and I'm glad that we have an
opportunity to talk a little bit.
I don't know your schedule. Stu and Pat were in
the middle of their presentation. Do you want me to just
sort of --
MR. SWANSON: We had anticipated that and
planned to break around you, whenever you could arrive.
We will avail ourselves of your presence and then we'll
get back to Stu and Pat when you have to move on.
MR. HENSHAW: You say, plan to break around me.
Did you want to break while I'm talking?
(Laughter)
REMARKS
By John L. Henshaw, Assistant Secretary, OSHA |
MR. HENSHAW: Okay. I've got a few minutes. I
guess what I'd like to do, if this is okay with the group,
is sort of explain some of the priorities and what we, as
the Agency, are working towards in the upcoming years.
Does that seem appropriate?
MR. SWANSON: Totally.
MR. HENSHAW: I didn't get a chance to meet
everybody. But, in the introductions, I have your names
and where you're from. Hopefully, in the very near future
we'll have a chance to talk on an individual basis and we
can talk some more about various issues.
Let me just tell you who I am. Obviously, I'm
not as familiar with the construction side as I am to the
general industry side of safety and health and OSHA. But
I'm quickly, with Bruce's help, coming up to speed. It
seems Bruce has more issues than some other groups.
I'd like to do this in several pieces. I want
to let you know who I am and what kind of person I am, and
how I intend to operate as we go through these next few
years, also then discuss some priorities, what I see the
priorities are for the Agency, and then some impressions
that I have in respect to the Agency, and working
relationships with various groups such as this Advisory
Committee.
Let me just give you a little background. I've
been in this business for over 26 years. I am a safety
and health professional, first. My number-one result and
goal, is reducing injuries, illnesses and fatalities.
That's my number-one mission. I have received a mandate
from the President and Secretary Chao to accomplish that
result. That's what I'm here for.
I'm a very mission-oriented and results-oriented
kind of person. I'll be looking at driving the injury and
illness rates down, and fatalities down. That's got to be
our number-one goal.
How we get there, is what we're going to talk
about. That's the priorities, that's the methodologies we
use, that's how we approach this and how we, hopefully,
will show that these kinds of methodologies, these kinds
of approaches, will result in injury and illness
reduction.
I'm also very much, in my view, a "we" person in
the sense that it's going to take all of us to make this
happen. It's going to take a collective effort of the
great people in the Agency, as well as those great
professionals and managers in the private sector who are
really where the rubber meets the road, where the job gets
done, where safety and health is really reduced to
practice and realize, on a day-by-day, hour-by-hour basis.
It can't be done by one group who's isolated.
It has to be by all of us. It has to be employers, it has
to be workers, it has to be government sort of working
together on making all of this happen.
That's not only the best way of doing it, the
most efficient way of doing it, but also the most
sustaining way of doing it. Whatever we do has to be
sustaining. It has to survive over time. It has to show
positive results. That will be the basis upon which, now,
we can do even better improvements as the years to come.
So that's where I come from. That's my
philosophical view of safety and health and approach to
driving what we're all about in this room, is injury and
illness and fatality reduction.
Let me get into, sort of, priorities. The
concepts around team, the concepts around getting people
engaged will be reflected in some of these priorities that
I'll speak about.
It will be reflected in the things you'll be
hearing--you already heard, probably--and what you'll be
hearing in the near future as to how we move forward in
accomplishing this.
I'm coming also with a clear understanding that
the Agency's 30 years' history has done a great job in
what it's been charged to do. There are always the bumps
in the road, there are obviously things that can be
improved on, but the Agency has done a great job.
The Agency is needed. OSHA needs to be here.
It needs to work in partnership with employers and
employees. It needs to work in partnership, obviously,
with the members of Congress. We will strive to improve
those kinds of partnerships.
But the Agency has been successful. My goal is
to grow those things that have been successful, even to
really make it even more successful based on the history,
the experience that we have, and the knowledge we've
gained in using various tools to drive that kind of
performance.
I want to make sure we continue to drive that
using all the tools that the Agency has at its disposal
and it's been given authority to do under the OSH Act.
I think some of the things that Pat and Stu were
talking about in respect to the World Trade Center is an
example of that, and the value the Agency can bring. When
we look at all those tools, how can we be successful in
realizing real-time safety and health reduction and
avoiding serious injury and fatalities in places such as
the World Trade Center?
I commend Pat, and Stu for his leadership early
on, in the effort at the World Trade Center. Pat and her
team have done an excellent job in sort of pulling our
resources together and delivering the bottom line, which
is injury and illness reduction at the World Trade Center,
and using some unusual techniques, unusual things that
possibly the Agency has not been noted for in the past.
But that's okay. I think the proof is in the pudding.
I think the kinds of work that's being done at
the World Trade Center, the kinds of successes we've had
at the World Trade Center, certainly the partnership in
bringing the primes together, the workers, and the city
together, has been a prime example of what we can
accomplish if we work together.
The World Trade Center, in my view, is a sacred
site to this Nation. We cannot afford, and we do not want
to lose, another life at that site. We'll do everything
in our power to make sure that happens. It's in our power
to do the kinds of things that Pat and her staff are
doing, and we'll continue to do that and be successful.
That is an example.
With anthrax, there's another example of some
things that we're doing that I'll speak about a little bit
later, but I don't want to consume too much of your time.
Let me get into the four priorities. I think
the World Trade Center and anthrax are examples of how
some of those priorities are playing out.
Number one, is I've been involved in this
business since 1975. I know the value of enforcement. I
know the value of strong, fair, and effective enforcement.
That's got to be the underpinning of what we're all about.
That's where we've had successes in driving
performance around organizations that may not have seen
the light, organizations that may not have decided to
comply or exercise good safety and health programs.
Through enforcement, we've been able to turn a
number of companies around. That's the goal, is turning
them around so they are now performing more appropriately
and protecting workers and driving injuries and illnesses
down.
But we need to have a strong, fair, and
effective enforcement policy. There are some ideas around
that that you've probably read about or you've heard talk
about in how to make that happen. Obviously, the how is
the difficult part. How can we make it more effective?
One of the things, is make sure our targeting is
right on target. I firmly believe there are only a few
employers out there that need the enforcement tool to
comply or need the enforcement tool to understand the
value of safety and health.
I believe there are other employers out there
that would see using a different tool. It doesn't have to
be enforcement. I'll talk about those other tools in a
second.
But there are some that will only respond to
enforcement, so enforcement is necessary. But when I say
"effective enforcement," I also mean -- and I've mentioned
this to -- we had a management meeting a couple of weeks
ago and we talked about, the purpose of enforcement is to
achieve result. That result is injury and illness
reduction.
If we continue to go back to the same employer
over, and over, and over again for the same kind of
citation and non-compliance, then we've failed in
achieving the result, which is compliance in injury and
illness reduction.
We have failed in getting them convinced there
is value in safety and health, value in compliance, and
they need to comply. We've convinced in that message.
So, we need to find a different way of really
approaching those employers who constantly come up as far
as not complying and not protecting workers. We've got to
find a different way.
Continuously to cite over and over and over
again, to me as a safety professional, is repulsive in the
sense that we're allowing, now, the penalties to be
incorporated into the cost of doing business. That
doesn't sit right with me. We've got to find a different
way of doing that.
So we've got to find different ways to make our
enforcement effort -- if the strategy is to effect a
change, impact a change, and result in a change, we've got
to find a different way of approaching those employers.
It doesn't mean we're going to stop from citing,
but we've got to find a different way to convince them, to
sell them, that there's a better way of doing it besides
not complying with the law. That's what I mean by
"effective enforcement."
It may be the way we sell it, by the way we, in
a close-out, we sell the value of safety and health, the
way we relate to the employer, the way we provide the
incentives that are necessary for them to come on board
and comply. We've got to find different ways of doing
that.
Another way of effective enforcement, and you've
heard this before, is I'd certainly like to engage in
improving the quality of our compliance officers.
Before I go there, I want to just stress --
somebody asked me in the past, not too long ago, what was
my biggest surprise when I came to the Agency? My biggest
surprise is the quality of the people and the sincerity of
the people in the Agency.
I have never seen a more dedicated group of
people, more sincere, a more mission-driven group of
people than I've seen in the Occupational Safety and
Health Administration. It doesn't mean that they weren't
existing. Obviously, they did. They've existed since the
beginning.
It's just, I didn't see that until I really got
immersed into the Agency. But I've been very impressed
with the quality of the people in the Agency. I'm
probably preaching to the choir here for many of you, as
it is. But I have been very impressed with the quality of
our folks.
Having said that, however, I also believe that
we're only as good as the people who succeed us. The
people who succeed me and others have to be better than we
are. They have to be much better than we are, just like
our children. We want our children to be better than we
are because we know some of the bad things that we did.
We want them to be better.
But, nonetheless, we want the people who succeed
us, the new people that come into the Agency, to even be
better than the people that are already in the Agency.
We're going to strive to improve the quality of the folks
that are coming into the Agency and improve the quality of
the training that we provide our employees.
And I would also like to get them a flavor of
business. One of the proposals that we threw out in the
management meeting is that our folks have an internship
with the outside, with the private sector, so they realize
what the private sector has to go through to accomplish
the result that we're looking for. It's not necessarily
real easy to comply with the standard. It's not digital.
There's a lot more work that goes into compliance and
sustained compliance than just, it's on paper, do it. It
takes a lot of work.
So one of the notions that we talked about is
providing some sort of internship or some sort of
incorporation of the real-world activities into our
compliance officers' training so they can appreciate that
and be more effective in selling to the employer what
we're trying to accomplish.
If we know the language, if we know the
business, we have a better opportunity of selling the
concepts we're trying to sell during the close-out
sessions of an inspection.
Now, I think on the construction side you have
done more of that, probably, in some of the other areas,
so I commend you for doing that. I think we need to
continue to do more, so we'll work on doing more of those
things. I think we need to continue to do more, so we'll
work on doing more of those things.
The other piece of being more effective, is the
credentialing. I think most of you heard that we as an
Agency are going to value credentials, value a
certification that's based on an outside certification
board, not inside the Agency, but outside, so we can be
judged, and our people can be judged, at the same level of
competency as the outside world is being judged on.
The people in your organizations are getting
certifications. We want to do the same thing. We want to
use sort of the same baseline as far as level of
competency.
Certification, or those kinds of activities, are
not the end all, of course. They're only the beginning.
But we want to raise the bottom, raise the bar, of our
starting employees and value that within the Agency.
Fair enforcement means our strategy on how we
issue penalties, how we conduct inspections and make sure
they're fair. We want to make sure that we target those
employers who need enforcement to respond and not target
those where we can use some other tools. We need to have
a strategy and begin to gather numbers.
This is results-oriented and we'll be measuring
those results. The measurement tools that we use have to
derive the right kind of consequences. We don't want
measure tools that derive unintended consequences, or
unfairness, or other kinds of things that may happen.
So, we're working on that and we'll have some
useful information as our task forces begin to flesh out
the concepts around fair, effective, and strong
enforcement.
The second priority that I'd like to talk to you
about, and I really believe this -- you put in -- I use
this analogy. You put in a dollar in enforcement, you get
a dollar out on impact. A dollar out of impact is injury
and illness reduction compliance.
Now, if you hit the same employer three or four
times, you put a dollar in and you get 50 cents out
because you've diluted it over three times, or 75 cents.
So, to be really effective, dollar in, you get a dollar
out.
I think, on compliance assistance, education,
outreach, and training, you put a dollar in, you could get
$10 out on impact. I think the impact is injury and
illness reduction compliance with the standards.
The Secretary has made this statement many
times, how important compliance assistance is. So, as the
President, we're going to make it happen. We're going to
show that there's value there and it will produce positive
results within the Agency.
We're going to show that, through education,
outreach, training, and compliance assistance, we will put
a dollar in and we're going to get $10 out in respect to
impact. Over the next several years, we're going to
emphasize and show that to the rest of the world, that
this is a useful tool in getting that accomplished.
Again, I'm operating on the premise that a
majority of the employers, we don't need the enforcement
stick to get it done. We need the education, outreach,
compliance assistance to get it done. We're going to show
that in the next few years, and how productive that is.
Now, as I mentioned earlier, these priorities
are not anything new to the Agency. They've already been
done in the Agency. What I want to do, is express them
even more and capitalize on the good success that the
Agency has had.
Compliance assistance has been around for a long
time. As you know, we've got a compliance assistance
specialist in every area office in the Nation. We have
been using compliance assistance and it has been
productive. It has been useful. We're going to grow that
even more and emphasize that even more.
The reason is, we've shown success on these
things. Now we want to take them even the next step
further and show even more positive results.
I know you're not getting a briefing on
recordkeeping, but there is sort of a major outreach
effort that we're undergoing for the recordkeeping
standard. We've got somewhere like 200 downlinks now, I
think, of satellite training that will happen on December
12th.
I don't know how many employees and employers
that that's going to touch, but obviously we want to touch
as many people as we possibly can. We've got over 200
downlinks now already signed up, and we're going to have a
lot more before December 12th.
We're going to deliver that training to the
people who need to know. We've also communicated with 125
trade associates, gave them the information and are
engaging them to be part of the training effort so they
can train their members. The idea is to get the
information to every workplace in this country so they
know how to comply.
Yesterday, we signed an agreement with the Small
Business Development Centers, of which there are 1,100
across the country. They're going to help us. These
folks are designed to help small businesses get going on
lots of issues. One of them, now, is going to be safety
and health.
Now, these are not going to be experts, of
course. But at least they'll be able to talk to small
businesses, identify an issue, and help them find the
resources to get it resolved. At least there's a go-to
person in these Development Centers where small businesses
can go to.
I don't know what this is. It may be in safety
and health, it may be in EPA, it may be something else.
At least they can go to these Small Business Development
Centers, of which there are 1,100 across the country, and
get some help. They, in turn, will communicate with OSHA
and other agencies to make sure.
Now, we're the only Agency that signed the
agreement with the Business Development Centers, and I
hope this will be a model for the rest of the country over
the next few years. That's just an example of outreach,
example of education and compliance assistance that we're
going to be doing more of.
The third priority that I want to share with
you, is the voluntary and partnership emphasis. We have
had -- and this is another prime example of some great
successes that we've had in respect to partnerships. You
guys have been involved in those anyway. You know how
effective they are.
We want to grow those. We want to have more
partnerships. We want to have more voluntary programs.
I'm coming from the private side and I know that one size
does not fit all. I know that, tailoring it to my company
in my previous life was critical. Tailoring it to my
culture, in respect to my culture, was critical.
The employees in my company, having them
participate in developing the efforts around whatever that
program is that achieves that result, which is injury and
illness reduction, it's critical to tailor it to those
organizations, to those businesses. So, I know one size
does not fit all.
Through the voluntary and partnership effort, we
can encourage people to voluntarily step up to the plate,
do what they know is right, do it consistent with their
culture, with their organization. The bottom line, again,
is producing positive results, which is injury and illness
reduction.
As long as that can be achieved, I don't care
how it's done. As long as it's honest, as long as it's
producing real results, who cares? The Act says our job
is to ensure that people are safe. As long as that
insurance can be achieved, I don't care how it's done.
Through voluntary programs and partnerships, I think we
can drive that kind of proactive approach around safety
and health.
We've got good examples. We mentioned a couple
of them. Pat probably already mentioned the signing of
the agreement with the World Trade Center. We're working
on a couple of others in the New York
area. We've got lots of them all over the country.
I don't know how many there are, but they're in
the thousands of partnerships that we've had and exercised
within the Agency, some small, some very local, some
larger.
Obviously, you know many of them already for the
construction side. We'll do a lot more of those--many,
many more of those, again--as long as we can produce the
results and prove that it is reducing injury and illness
and fatalities within this country.
The last priority that I want to talk about, and
this is sort of a general conceptual issue, is the Agency,
OSHA, needs to be a part of -- and the only other word I
use is leading or being a part of the leadership around
the dialogue of the value of safety and health.
We need to be out there. The value is not just
compliance with standards. The value is safety and
health. The value is around human capital. The value is
preserving life, preserving and reducing injuries and
illnesses.
The value is making the best of our employees,
of the workers out there so they can be successful and we
can be successful as a federal agency, and our economy
will be successful.
That is the most critical thing. We need to be
out there, as an Agency, articulating the value of human
capital and the value of reducing injury and illness in
safety and health programs. We need to be out there
speaking it. Not just what the standard says. We need to
be out there above that and driving the safety and health
performance.
How that's going to play out, that was part of
our management meeting the other day when we were talking
about, how can we do that? How can we participate in this
dialogue? How can we be up front encouraging further
development around the safety and health issues? There's
lots of ideas around that. But it means being vocal. It
means being visible.
It means using the bloody pulpit to drive the
value around safety and health. It means being active.
It means also taking some risk in respect to either being
misperceived, or somebody misunderstands the message.
We've got to be willing to take that risk and then
obviously correcting it if there is a misperception.
But no one can criticize us for saying what we
value is human life and injury and illness reduction.
That's what we're all about. That's what Congress has
charged us to do. Using the dialogue and getting in front
of everybody and articulating the value of safety and
health is a part of that.
This administration is behind that. Secretary
Chao is behind it. I'm sure we'll have a few people
question us from time to time as to what we're doing, but
we'll be prepared to answer those questions. But the
bottom line will be showing injury and illness reduction,
fatality reductions.
That's all I had. Let me, if I could, just add
a piece on anthrax because I think it does play a little
bit into this.
I did not mention the regulatory agenda, I did
not mention ergonomics, I did not mention all those other
things. I mean, those were all pieces of the pie. I'm
giving you the overall perspective, the overall
challenges, and the overall vision. We'll deal with those
issues as they come up, and we must do that.
Let me just go to the anthrax issue. After
September 11th, all of our lives had changed. I
personally, as everybody in this room, on September 11th -- our views now of what our job was became more centered
now around our own personal safety, around the safety of
our loved ones, the safety of our workers, the safety of
our communities. They became the more centering kind of
events that all of us went through.
Now, that is something that we ought to be proud
of as Americans because this is what we're all about. It
also speaks to the safety and health professionals.
That's what we're all about. We value human life. We
value ourselves, our loved ones, the people we work with.
We value their safety. This gives us an even stronger
footing to continue the message around safety and health.
But what September 11th did, was it created some
additional issues that OSHA needs to step up to and to
participate in. Again, it's being a leader. It gave us
the opportunity to lead. I think what Pat and her team
are doing in New York is an example of that, because there
are some issues around enforcement and some other things
that are being questioned.
The fact, is, leadership is being exercised, all
the tools are being used, and we are showing great
results. We want to continue with that kind of leadership
in driving some breakthrough thinking around how to
achieve the bottom line, which is injury and illness
reduction.
The 9/11 is the first time, at least in the
history of OSHA, that war time has been on our soil and
war time now has been in our workplaces, and anthrax, in
particular, in the mail issue.
We are going to participate in dealing with
bioterrorism or war time in the workplace. We are
workplace experts in the Agency. We deal with experts.
We deal with workplaces. We have contacts with
workplaces. We have contact with the workers. That is
our area of specialization. OSHA is going to step up to
that plate and make sure that we provide the necessary
tools to our workplaces.
One of the tools that we have embarked on, is
the anthrax issue. As all of you know, there are lots of
things going on, certainly, when anthrax came about and
where it was going, and how to protect, and a lot of
uncertainty, a lot of concern about our employees being
protected, what's the best way to do this or that.
What we decided to do, was the Agency, with the
help of the postal workers, the Postal Service, the
government, CDC -- we are not trying to invent any wheel
here.
What we want to do is take the knowledge that's
out there already and reduce it to practice and make it
available to all the workplaces in this country so that
they know how to assess the risk based on other people's
information.
I mean, we're not going to be the FBI. We're
not going to be providing bulletins around, there's a risk
at this workplace. We've got other systems in place that
will identify that.
CDC is certainly the expert on communicable
disease, and disease in general. We're going to rely on
their expertise. NIOSH, being part of the HHS
organization, we'll rely on them. They're a part of our
work around the anthrax.
Certainly in the case of mail handling, the
Postal Service, and the postal workers, they're a part of
this work that we've put forward in respect to this
anthrax matrix.
Again, the idea is to provide guidance, provide
tools to workplaces where they can use it to reassure
their employees and protect them.
The anthrax issue -- as soon as the word got out
that we were doing this for anthrax, the big concern was,
what was OSHA doing in respect to creating new
requirements?
There's a perception out there that, any time
OSHA gets involved, there's a standard somewhere in the
wings. I want to dispel that. Every time OSHA is
involved does not necessarily mean there are going to be
new requirements or there is going to be a standard, or
additional duty of care established from a legal
standpoint.
The idea around anthrax, is get the best
information out there to the people who need to know, to
the people who have to use it. It's not adding any more
additional requirements. It's not a back door rulemaking,
it's not any other kind of activity. It's strictly
providing guidance to the people who need it, to the
workers, and to the community who needs to be reassured.
That's the purpose behind it.
We'll continue to do those sorts of things.
Now, as the need arises for standards, obviously, we'll
address that. But if there's a thinking that any time
OSHA gets involved there's a standard in the wings, I want
to dispel that quickly. That doesn't necessarily mean
that's the case.
When it's appropriate, there will be. When it's
not appropriate, we'll deliver that tool, that technique,
that guidance as quickly as we can and get it out to the
people who need to know and need to protect their
employees.
That's the anthrax. There will be some other
things as we go through this whole bioterrorism and
homeland security issues. We'll be doing more and more of
those kinds of efforts, again, to get the information out
so people can be protected, so people can be reassured.
That's it. I'll open it up to questions, if you
have any questions.
CHAIRMAN KRUL: Committee? Anyone?
MR. BURKHAMMER: I'd like to express my
gratitude for being at the World Trade Center, and the
effort of Pat, Richard, Bob McGee, and yourself, for
providing very, very talented OSHA compliance officers
that came back to the World Trade Center and participated
on Pat's team, and with us together.
They were class acts. They were professional.
We had a couple of exceptions, as I did on my team, and we
both took care of those exceptions. But for the main, it
was an outstanding effort.
The professionalism your people brought that
contributed to mine, and I hope vice versa, really did a
lot. Pat really needs to be commended for her efforts,
tirelessly. I mean, she was out there days, nights,
weekends in her work clothes, out there in the field
working the beat and doing the things, like she said
earlier, about getting people off the Plaza.
And Gil Gillen, and the other folks in New York
that just -- you know, position wasn't an issue. It was
protecting the people and not letting anybody else die on
that site.
There were several occasions where we really
came close. Thank God, we didn't get hit. But a couple
of times I would go to the directors' meetings at night
and sit there and say, I'm not going to be the one to go
tell the mayor we just killed somebody, so clean up your
act. It worked in a lot of instances.
But, again, please, please, think about Pat and
her team and the outstanding effort they did. They really
need to be commended.
MR. HENSHAW: I agree 150 percent. Pat and I
talk on a regular basis. I know where to find her on her
cell phone, and she's probably in the green zone or in the
pile. But, yes, her leadership has been excellent.
I'd also like to say--and you've probably
already covered this, Pat--that the 600 or so of the OSHA
folks from state programs, state consultations --
MS. CLARK: We haven't gotten to that yet.
MR. HENSHAW: Oh. I'm not going to steal your
thunder. Never mind.
MS. CLARK: And it's 700.
MR. HENSHAW: Is it 700? There's a lot of
people involved. That's another example of -- I'm not
going to give you the numbers because you're going to give
the numbers. I'm very, very proud to be part of the
Agency.
I'm proud to be part of the Agency because some
of the stuff that I've seen at the World Trade Center,
some of the great stuff I've seen on partnership,
compliance, and the compliance assistance side -- I'm very
proud to be a part of the Agency. Pat just makes me even
prouder, and her team.
CHAIRMAN KRUL: Tom?
MR. BRODERICK: Has OSHA's role been defined in
this new organization of homeland security? Has there
been an interaction between the Agency? What do you
foresee it would be?
MR. HENSHAW: Yes. We are part of that matrix
for homeland security. I don't know if you've seen that
matrix. You'd have a headache if you saw it. I mean,
it's a pretty complicated set of boxes. But we're in
there.
I know OSHA has come up numerous times in
respect to providing the tools that we talked about--anthrax being one of them--around the homeland security.
We are part of groups and discussions that the President
and others have organized. We're continuing to find that.
I mean, there's a lot of interagency activity,
and who provides what. The idea is obviously not to
duplicate, but the idea is to take the best of all
agencies and the best information, and who can deliver on
those in the best way and most effective way.
I can say, I don't have a lot of detail to offer
at this point, but OSHA is viewed very high in that area.
It is the Agency that deals with workplaces. We are the
avenue and the way we're going to deal with workplaces.
We are going to be providing tools, direction, guidance,
as necessary as these things are developed and worked out.
So, we don't have all the detail yet. We're
meeting on a regular basis, on a constant basis, about how
that's going to play out. But OSHA is in a prominent
position to not only step up to the plate, but also to
deliver and to be successful.
CHAIRMAN KRUL: Marie?
DR. SWEENEY: Mr. Secretary, thank you for
coming.
I had the opportunity to participate on CDC's
response team for anthrax in Atlanta and we had some
really good interaction with the OSHA folks.
One of the lessons learned, was that there
really was not good information in lay language about
respirator use, about what kind of respirators to use. Of
course, that was all evolving as it was going on.
But I think that's something to think about in
terms of your goal for compliance assistance and education
and outreach, is to get information in sort of bite-sized
chunks and in lay language, get it up on your Web site as
quickly as possible.
Also, you missed our discussion earlier this
morning about, we have a workgroup on multilingual issues
on construction sites. I think OSHA has to spend a little
more time putting things into the Spanish language or into
other languages, getting it up on your Web site, linking
to other Web sites.
So I think part of it is, let's see about
getting OSHA issues up in a little more usable form, not
only for the worker and the foreman, but for the health
and safety professional so they can hand it out.
MR. HENSHAW: That's a good point. I'm just
relaying common language respirators. We've got a run on
Army-Navy stores on respirators. Can you imagine how many
people have bought respirators at an Army-Navy store
that's been around for 50 years? They're going to think
they're going to work. Well, that's public kind of
information.
But one of the things that we're talking about
in respect to workplaces, is educating workers is a great
way to get information to families, especially on things
like respirators. You educate workers as to what is right
respirator protection.
You give them some tools they can take home and
talk to their family about so they don't go buy $40 gas
masks from World War II. That's another delivery
mechanism to get to the general public and we need to do
more on that.
One thing for sure, is we are not going to do
things perfect and we're not going to let perfection get
in the way of doing good, in the sense that we're going to
get the best we can out there and then be willing to get
criticism or builds on what we're doing. We're not going
to take it as criticism. We're going to take it like,
yeah, that can be more effective. Yeah, that's a good
idea. And we're going to improve that.
So, we're not going to be sensitive to
additional ideas and builds on what we're doing, or there
may be a better way, do it this way. That's fine. We're
going to learn that and we're going to learn as we go and
build on that.
So, any suggestions you have like those two --
Spanish, we know, is an issue, or non-English speaking.
It's not just Spanish, but that's a big one.
We've got a task force already involved, as you
may or may not know. One of the chores, or one of the
responsibilities of that task force that John Miles is
heading up is figuring out, how can we get to the Hispanic
population more effectively. How can we deliver products?
How can we get to the right organizations? Who can
provide the training, provide the cultural shift that
there might be in respect to value of human life and the
way we operate here.
If we've got a lot of immigrants, they may not
have the same cultural background in respect to safety as
we have. We need to let them understand, this is the way
it is. They have some rights, and they have the ability,
and there's some learning and responsibility that goes
along with it.
So, I mean, there are a bunch of those things
that we need to do, and I hope, Marie, you can help us do
that.
CHAIRMAN KRUL: Felipe?
MR. DEVORA: Thank you.
Mr. Secretary, in that same vein, I have been
talking to John Miles, since he's in our region, and we
are initiating some of those programs at the local level
with the outreach OSHA offices.
But the comment I wanted to make about this
group, especially about the Advisory Committee, in the
last four years that I've been a part of this -- I think
four years, or four-plus years. Time flies by. But it
has been a very progressive, very proactive group.
Again, we've already formed, a year ago, a
Diversity in the Workplace Committee and we have begun
initial talks with John Miles on his initiatives and how
this group can help him to reach those goals.
But I think you'll also find that, with the
Advisory Committee on Construction Safety and Health,
you're going to find a group that's willing to take on
some very difficult issues and measure them in terms of
large construction companies like Bechtel, to small- and
medium-sized companies, or mom-and-pops around the
country.
So our audience is diverse. I think we would
serve at your pleasure. I think everybody on this
committee would agree to that, with difficult issues
regarding construction specifically. To that end, with
the Directorate of Construction, I think you're blessed
with a very good team there as well.
MR. HENSHAW: Did he pay you?
MR. DEVORA: No.
(Laughter)
MR. DEVORA: Not yet.
MR. HENSHAW: Not yet.
(Laughter)
MR. SWANSON: That will never happen!
(Laughter)
MR. HENSHAW: There's another reason to be proud
to be part of the Agency. Bruce has done a great job, and
his team.
CHAIRMAN KRUL: Jane?
MS. WILLIAMS: Mr. Secretary, I do appreciate
you sharing your priorities. I think it's very important
for this committee to hear those and see where your focus
is going so we can be sure to put our efforts to your use.
I was reviewing the regulatory agenda that came
out on Monday. In the completed items, there were certain
things that caught my eye, needless to say, sanitation.
I'm wondering if you would have any comments for us on
that today.
MR. HENSHAW: I alluded to, the regulatory
agenda -- not everything is going to fit the regulatory
model. The regulatory agenda was set up for what we can
accomplish as far as achieving milestones in the next 12
months.
It doesn't mean that issue is not important. It
doesn't mean that we're not going to address it in a
different way. It means, in the next 12 months, we don't
have any milestones to identify. The priorities are such
that it doesn't fit the regulatory agenda now.
It doesn't necessarily mean it's not an issue.
It doesn't necessarily mean there's not another way of
doing it. There might be. I certainly would entertain,
and I know Bruce would, any ideas this committee has in
respect to how to accomplish that.
What I don't want, is at the end of some period
to say, well, we didn't address the safety and health
issues because we didn't get a standard out. We can't
wait 10 years to show positive results. We've got to get
something done now. Especially if there is an issue,
let's get it done now. There may be other ways of doing
it.
Maybe there's guidelines, maybe there's tools,
maybe there's education. Maybe there's all kinds of other
things that may not have to go through this regulatory
process, which we all know takes a lot of time, effort,
and energy.
We need to be challenged on how we can deliver
on that besides just going through the regulatory scheme.
Until that regulatory scheme is modified in some way, it's
going to take time to do that, and it takes a lot of
resources.
So the regulatory agenda was put together: what
can we accomplish in the next 12 months? What are those
milestones we can accomplish? That's the basis for it.
It doesn't mean that any one of those issues that fall off
of the regulatory agenda are not important. They are. We
just need to be creative on how we can deliver.
We may not get 100 percent of where we want to
go, but I'll be happy with 50 percent, 60 percent. Just
think of the lives saved and the inconveniences we've
avoided, and the injuries and illnesses we've reduced if
we institute something that may not get all the way to the
wall, but at least it will get some way to the wall.
So the regulatory agenda, as it stands, if
there's anything you can help us do in accomplishing the
result, which is getting injury and illness and improving
safety at our work sites, I'd entertain any ideas.
MS. WILLIAMS: Mr. Secretary, would the vehicle
for me to do that then--specifically sanitation--be for me
to communicate with Mr. Swanson as to some of the issues I
think we could be pursuing in that vein to accomplish our
goals?
MR. HENSHAW: Yes. This committee would be the
group that we'd be expecting that kind of advice from.
MS. WILLIAMS: Very good, sir.
CHAIRMAN KRUL: Larry?
MR. EDGINTON: Thank you, Bob.
Thank you for coming this morning, Mr. Henshaw.
I guess my thinking, in sort of picking up in an area
where Jane started. I think it has more to do with just
the nature of the relationship between this committee and
the Agency.
What I haven't heard you talk about yet this
morning, and I know you're running in place every day just
trying to stay even, is any thoughts that you have about
what it is that we are, what value we can bring to the
agency.
Probably, like another 15,000, 20,000 other
crazy people in the world, on Monday I was looking at the
semi-annual regulatory agenda. What caught my eye about
it was a couple of things, perhaps, and I think, on
balance, good.
One, that you're tempted to do a better job in
what I'll call managing expectations, trying to lay out
what it is that you realistically think you can do versus
what you can't.
But in terms of a couple of areas that seem to
suggest to me that the decision was made that it's not
important but we can't do it now, it occurred to me that
two of those areas, sanitation, construction safety and
health programs, were both areas that ACCSH had spent
hundreds, if not thousands, of hours on in their
workgroups.
With some fair amount of kicking, biting, and
scratching sometimes amongst the workgroup members and
amongst this body, a consensus was reached that this was
something important for the Agency to do.
It occurred to me that, in terms of process, we
need to be thinking more about how we all deal with this
kind of a situation, if I'm making any sense to you.
I don't think it was your intention to send a
message to ACCSH or individuals and organizations that
were involved in these workgroups that you didn't value
their work. I guess my point is, my concern is, that may
be the perception, unless they hear something otherwise.
MR. HENSHAW: I think there may be some maybe
rethinking a little bit. I'm coming in cold. I haven't
met you guys before. I don't know all the great work
you're doing. But maybe I can just best express it by,
here's an expectation I would have of this group.
My expectation would be that this group would
help us deal with issues, the serious issues, the
important issues, what are high priority, what are not
high priority.
The group would also help us decide, what is the
best way to deliver on that and don't automatically assume
that the only process is the regulatory process. MR. EDGINTON: I agree.
MR. HENSHAW: So, given the constraints we have
and all the other things that we have to deal with,
because the Agency is more than construction, obviously,
so we need to factor all those in.
But this group deals with construction. How can
we deliver that? One route may be a regulatory route.
Well, if that's blocked, if that's not possible, what's
another avenue? We'll, let's find another avenue.
I would hope this group could tell us, what are
those other approaches we can use? Now, some will be
regulatory and we may get those in, but some things, we
might not. That doesn't mean we should stop.
Now, this group needs to maybe back off and say,
okay, if the regulatory avenue is not available to us,
what's another one? Put together the tools, the guidance
that are necessary to help us deliver on it.
Again, the bottom line is, we've got to get the
information out and we've got to show positive results as
quickly as we can.
Now, the tool that we have is not just
regulatory. There was a misperception that advisory
committees only deal with the regulatory agenda. I want
to try to dispel that.
I'm hoping the advisory committees deal with
everything, not only what should be regulatory priorities,
but also, if that's not an avenue, what are other ways to
deliver? Again, the results have got to be impacting the
bottom line, and to my mind, it's injury and illness
reduction.
So if the regulatory process isn't available,
what's next?
MR. EDGINTON: Just to follow up, I guess my
concern about sanitation was--and maybe the thinking
within the Agency has changed--somewhere along the line my
recollection is that there was an opinion expressed within
the Agency that the current sanitation requirements for
construction were not enforceable in their present form.
It was sort of that notion that caused me some
concern when it appeared, at least for now, that we
weren't going to be moving in that area to try to correct
that deficiency.
I always thought that that was part of the ACCSH
workgroup's intention, was to try to correct it for that
basis to start with, to make sure that we had something
that was enforceable, then we could argue about whether or
not it was good enough or not good enough.
I don't want to badger you about this, because
that's not my intention, but rather to bring a focus to
the process we can have to work with each other. I agree
with you that the regulatory approach is not always the
best approach.
Moreover, if it is, how do we explain some of
the problems we continue to have out there? I mean,
there's no argument about that. But I guess I raised
these issues to get us all thinking about it and talking
about it amongst each other again.
MR. HENSHAW: As we see issues around existing
standards, we want to improve those. I mean, we've got to
factor that in. We've got to make sure that we've got in
place is part of the effective thing. Enforcement has to
be effective.
If we've got a defect in our current standard,
we need to start beginning to address those things. So, I
don't know if that's what you were referring to, but
that's certainly within the purview of this Advisory
Committee.
CHAIRMAN KRUL: Mr. Secretary, I know you have
another appointment and you have to go. On behalf of the
committee, I want to thank you for coming here, you and
Davis and the other members of your staff. Any time the
Assistant Secretary comes here before this committee I
think it adds purpose and meaning to our work.
I think our work is dovetailed exactly with
yours. Any time we can have a reduction in, or where
possible elimination of, fatalities, injuries and
illnesses, in the construction industry, in particular,
we'll be there working with you.
We thank you for coming.
MR. HENSHAW: Appreciate it. I look forward to
working with you. Thanks.
CHAIRMAN KRUL: Thank you.
Let's take a 10-minute break.
(Whereupon, at 11:05 a.m., the meeting was
recessed.)
AFTER RECESS
[11:20 a.m.]
CHAIRMAN KRUL: There's a couple more that went
upstairs to get some coffee, but we're going to continue
with Stu's presentation.
But before I turn it back over to them, we do
have the minutes. What I'd like to do, as a matter of
procedure for the committee, is hold onto the meeting
minutes.
During the course of this I'll ask for a motion
for approval or correction at the end of the meeting in
case anybody wants to read them during the meeting, or if
we have to refer back to them. So, I'll ask for that
motion at the end.
I neglected to report that both Owen Smith and
Bill Rhoten could not be in attendance today. I know
Rhoten's out at the AFL-CIO convention. I don't know why
Mr. Smith couldn't make it today. But both of those are
absent.
With that, we want to continue with Pat and
Stu's presentation.
SPECIAL PRESENTATION
WORLD TRADE CENTER - UPDATE (CONTINUED)
By Stewart Burkhammer and Patricia Clark |
MR. BURKHAMMER: Along with the crane inspection
team inspecting the equipment, they also spent a great
deal of time inspecting the rigging, the chokers, and the
slings, and the various pieces of equipment that the
contractors were using to lift this very heavy debris and
steel with.
We were not happy with the findings. Pat, do
you want to elaborate on that?
(Showing of slides)
MS. CLARK: Sure. This is just a good example.
This is one sling and these are just a few of the problems
that were found in just that one sling. I say this is not
atypical. This is probably pretty typical of what we
found in the beginning.
We did about 10 days of work initially when we
started this. At the beginning of this, we were finding
one out of every three slings were pretty defective.
We were not really calling these defective
unless there were really significant issues here. We were
being very reasonable, I think, in what we were pointing
out as problems.
The good news, though, is after a rather free
and frank discussion, I would describe it as such, on
about the seventh day of this inspection team activity,
we, I think, got the attention of the contractors. We had
started in one quadrant, and that contractor's name will
be withheld. But we found an enormous number of problems,
just an enormous number.
We all got together one morning and we started
talking about this. Basically, CDC said to them, this is
a time and materials project, so what's the problem?
Basically, the contractor says, okay, we give up. We'll
get new slings. We'll upgrade the slings.
We also had problems with that as far as some of
the rigging and what they were using. We'll start a daily
inspection scheme. I think they promised something else,
all of which, of course, they were supposed to do anyway.
But we were very happy. Then we proceeded on to
the next one, and we went around among the four quadrants.
I can tell you, by the time we got to the second
contractor, it was amazing how many slings were already
marked "Out of Service." By the time we got to that
fourth one, they had all new equipment there. So, it was
pretty successful.
It was a cooperative effort. The operating
engineers were involved with us as well in this
inspection. I think that's what made it work, it was us
with Bechtel, with the operating engineers, with the
individual crane operators, and the primes. We finally
got a lot of improvements made in this.
What we've continued to do, is every few weeks
we bring back the crane team. We've been going around --
in fact, they were there last week and we have another
crew in this week.
We've been lucky. Within the OSHA family, we
actually have some licensed operating engineers who are
compliance officers who have come out and worked with us.
One of these is Trina Malux from Montana, who has become
well-known on the site, I would say. When she walks on
there, they know what's going to happen. So, that really
has been an enormous change.
I think that clearly the cranes, the rigging,
and the man baskets were one of our major, major concerns
right from the beginning. There's been a remarkable,
remarkable change in that.
MR. BURKHAMMER: One story that goes with the
rigging that kind of hits home to everybody. There were
14 firemen down in a trench by the Vista Hotel. Look on
your map, the Marriott Vista Hotel. They were looking for
recovery potential. The crane nearest them was picking up
a piece of steel. Appreciate, no one knows the weights of
what we're picking up, in defense of the contractors. I
mean, these pieces of steel are humongous in some cases,
high in the tons in weight.
One example, and you'll see in the future, is
there's a 1,000 crane out there. There's only three of
them, I think, in the world, and one of them is at the
World Trade Center. It took two weeks to put it together.
It's just enormous. You can see a picture of it.
But the first time we put the 1,000-ton crane in
use, we were going to snake out a beam out of the South
Tower. He hooked on it and the beam didn't move, but the
whole back of the 1,000-ton crane came off the ground in a
heartbeat, just like that.
Of course, we set it down, shut it down,
reinspected the whole thing, went through the whole nine
yards. But it goes to show that the weights of these
things, the load charts and what type of rigging to use,
and how to rig it, is out the window. It's all done by
feel and by guess.
So, anyway, this one particular piece of beam
that they picked up weighed 16 tons. They cut pad eyes in
it and they rigged it. They picked it up. One of our
team was out in the field and they saw this coming, so
they went and stopped the rig and they took the 14 firemen
out of the hole.
As the last fireman climbed the ladder and was
stepping out onto the ground, the crane then started to
move its piece over to the lay-down area. As it got over
the hole, it suffered metal fatigue and shear and the pad
eye sheared out and the whole beam dropped down in the
hole and landed right where the 14 firemen were, and would
have killed every one of them.
So, you know, you add that 14 to the 16 police
and family, there's 30 right there. There were some other
incidents. OSHA and I, together, sat down one day and we
kind of came up with a number. There were 41 people whose
lives were saved by the Bechtel/OSHA team that was going
around at the site pulling people out of harm's way. But
this rigging is an example that the contractors talked
about. They condemned 51 of their 65 pieces of rigging.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: Again, here's another sample.
Not only did we work days on the team, we worked nights.
OSHA had three 8-hour shifts that were rotating, we had
two 12-hour shifts we were rotating. Here's another
sampler team going around doing their thing. They were
constantly walking the site.
I would say, out of the 24-hour day, 23 and a
half hours we had people on the site, other than taking a
short break for something to eat, something to drink, or
going to the restroom, or sitting down for a breather.
For the most part, these people were on the run all day,
every day.
MS. CLARK: And you notice our person, who has
the Visi-Vest with the orange on. You can see us taking
some notes. What we did initially, is we were trying to
be less obtrusive and not have them writing out there.
But we felt that, after a while, we needed to really look
at trends and try to analyze what was happening.
In fact, that led us to do the crane initiative,
and another one I'll mention later. But we started out
just by keeping some notes on these pads that we had
written up so that we could develop a database. We have
now actually moved to Palm Pilots. Yes, we've got high-tech, Stu.
MR. BURKHAMMER: Oh, wow.
MS. CLARK: In which we can download this
information. What we're doing, is on a weekly basis we
meet with the contractors, the employee reps. We sort of
host an OSHA meeting. Bechtel, in the early days, was
coming to those, the DDC, and now the fire department. We
basically go over what we're seeing, then we decide what
our next initiative would be.
After the cranes and the rigging, we found that
there are a lot of problems with the cylinder storage and
the oxygen tube trailers on the site. In fact, I don't
know if you have our picture, but we have this incredible
picture of their answer to storage of the compressed
cylinders. It was to strap them on the back of an oxygen
tube truck.
MR. BURKHAMMER: No, I don't have that one.
MS. CLARK: Yes. That was one of our better
episodes where, before we took the picture, we got in
there. That initiative actually was one we worked on with
the fire department. They issued some bulletins.
Before, you used to see cylinders strewn about
the project everywhere because there's so much burning and
cutting going on, as Stu mentioned. That became a major
problem. There's so much oxygen being used, that they
bring in all of these tube trailers and were just parking
them everywhere. There were really a lot of dangerous
situations that were presenting themselves.
So, we put an emphasis on that and now I would
say it's the exception, not the rule, to see some problems
with the cylinders. But it's a constantly changing
environment and we have to keep looking at these hazard
trends and devising new initiatives to address them.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: Here's the 1,000-ton crane.
This is one of the many toolbox sessions we had. When we
first got there, they weren't having any training or any
type of employee orientation, or any type of information
flow. We instituted that.
On the night shift, they would get groups of
people like this together and either the Bechtel or the
OSHA safety reps would conduct the training session.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: Again, inspecting equipment on
the day shift, night shift. It didn't matter when it was,
we continued to do everything the same to provide
continuity between the shifts.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: This is one of the aerial shots
that the fire department took. Every day they would fly
over and do infrareds and they would do aerial shots.
Infrared was basically to show where the fire was, whether
it was decreasing, increasing, or moving. But they would
also take some aerial shots like this.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: This is the American Express
building here, which is part of the World Financial
Center. This is World Financial Center I, II, III.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: This little piece in the center
here is the Winter Garden, which was a beautifully glassed
structure full of trees, plants, and flowers and was
beautiful.
Now, from the front of it, it's a gutted mess.
If you go around and walk the back here, it's almost in
perfect condition. You wouldn't even know if you walked
behind these buildings and didn't understand this was
here. You'd think nothing had happened. All the damage
was done in the fronts of all of these, but in the backs--except for dust, dirt, and debris--it was pretty clean.
We talked about the hole in Building 6. If you
look, there's actually two holes. There's a small hole
here, and then this large hole here, which basically was
done when the tower fell and it leaned a little bit. All
the debris basically crushed this center circle here. You
can see this area right here of Building 6.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: This is another shot of 6 from
the outside. So if you saw the skeleton, you wouldn't
really realize that these huge holes were in this
building, because the outside structure, just looking at
it, looks like a normal building.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: This is the telephone building.
You'll see on your map where it's located. These holes
here are facing Vessey, where debris flew over from the
tower collapses and broke the windows and imbedded pieces
of material and crushed out the area here.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: UPS. This is two blocks from
ground zero. So, you can see the damage it caused to a
vehicle two blocks away. This was a UPS truck, burned and
gutted pretty bad.
Again, OSHA and Bechtel worked constantly
together, providing services in safety and health and
environmental coverage.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: This is an office building on
Vessey Street. This is one block away from ground zero.
Again, you can see the destruction and devastation.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: This is the back of the
telephone building. The only way we could get water to
Building 7 to put out the fire was to use the fire
hydrants inside this building and spray out the window,
and hopefully it would carry over.
What happened after about four days of this,
there was so much water leakage in the building, the sixth
floor in this area right here collapsed onto the fifth
floor. So, these became one real quick. It was just
because of the water damage. Nobody was hurt, nobody was
injured. But because of the huge amount of water that was
leaking and dripping inside of this building, it
collapsed.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: This is OSHA's field -- they
had one in PS-89 and a field one.
MS. CLARK: Right. One of the things we did
very early on -- in fact, John was there on the 13th and
he realized there was a desperate need for personal
protective equipment. So, he got on the phone to a lot of
the manufacturers and actually asked them to send
equipment.
It really did pour in then. What happened is,
the National Guard basically served as our quartermaster.
They kept it and maintained it, and then they would parcel
it out to us. We took over the responsibility of issuing
a lot of this. It was very clear early on that getting
any respirator on these people was important.
Doing much more than what we called a "fit
check," which really is where we're checking the seals and
doing a little, sort of, stand-up training while we were
doing this was about as much as we could get.
We've estimated now that we've given out over
110,000 respirators. It was as high as 4,000 a day in the
first days, probably the first two weeks, and it's down to
more like 100 a day now. In the last month, we moved to a
trailer we call Site Ops. That's right at the corner of
the Plaza now.
In the past month we'd been working with MSA and
Valen. MSA donated the services of Valen Occupational
Safety and Health to do quantitative fit testing. They
just moved out over the weekend and we've now assumed that
responsibility. So, hopefully by January 1, there will be
a positive requirement that everyone that works on the
site has to have a quantitative fit test.
We're also doing the testing for the fire
department. Because they were a little concerned about
working with a private vendor, they came to us and we said
we'd be happy to do that for them.
(Changing of slides)
MS. CLARK: This is a little outpost that we had
over on the southwest side of the Plaza in order to be
able to cover both areas. Do you have a picture of the
Gator?
MR. BURKHAMMER: No.
MS. CLARK: Maybe not. No. We also have an
operation we call, sort of, our mobile operation. We have
a Gator. It's a little powered industrial truck there
that we use, or ATV, actually, that we use. Initially, we
were taking it as close to the pile as possible.
If we saw people that weren't wearing it, we'd
go out and try to get their attention and get them into
some personal protective equipment. Now we're also using
it to do compliance checks.
One of the things that we've consistently found
is very difficult, even though it's a much more controlled
site, it's still really hard to get the respirators on and
keep them on.
With our risk assessment, we've been able to
define the area where they're needed: people who are
working over, on, or under the pile, and certain task-specific operations like cutting and burning, no matter
where, and dry debris loading and unloading of trucks.
Even with that limited number of operations and
areas where you need it, it's still really hard to get
some of these people to wear it consistently.
MR. BURKHAMMER: You can see a corner of your
Gator there.
MS. CLARK: Oh. Yes, you're right. There it
is. In fact, it's stocked. This is the team that goes
out and gets people to wear the equipment.
But the other thing that they're doing, is on an
hourly basis they go to an area and they try to do some
compliance checks and they determine what is needed: do
you need hard hats, safety glasses, and goggles? Then
they determine, are those contractor employees? Whose are
they? Is it fire, police, or visitors, or whatever, and
try to do that.
We've been able to give some feedback during our
contractor meetings on this, and I think it's helping,
realizing that somebody's watching and keeping track of
it.
What we find, is we're getting very good
compliance from the contractor employees, better from
fire, less good from the police, overall. So, that hasn't
changed.
MR. BURKHAMMER: That was polite.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: Sampling. We collectively,
between OSHA and NIOSH, City Health, the EPA, we had a
subcontractor, ATC, the operating engineers, the
Teamsters, Verizon, ConEd, and surprisingly, the Church of
Scientology, all did sampling at one time or another on
the site.
Also, the parents of the students of Stuyvesent
High School, which is located just off of Chambers and
West Street. They were so concerned about reopening the
school, that they employed an environmental firm to take
sampling in Stuyvesent High School, even though the EPA
was doing that on a regular basis.
During the two months-plus that I was there, we
probably conducted 10,000 samples. Contrary to an article
that was written by a colleague of mine, it is not a
hazardous waste dump site.
MS. CLARK: We still are there. ATC is there,
too, working with DDC. EPA is doing more of the city
public monitoring. Basically, we have 10 people a day
doing risk assessment, six on the day shift and then two
each on the evening and night shifts. It is important
that we continue to do this risk assessment because things
have changed over time.
When we first started, we started on the 13th in
the Financial District because, as Stu mentioned early on,
that plume really went east over the Financial District,
dumped an incredible amount of debris and dust there,
eventually Brooklyn, then out to sea. The concern, as you
well know, was to get the market up and running again.
So, EPA and OSHA went in on the 13th and there
weren't any people working in that area. So what we did,
is we put pumps on our compliance officers and had them
walk grids around the Financial District to try to
simulate what worker exposure would be. We looked for
asbestos and silica at that point.
Meanwhile, EPA was using their HEPA vacuum
trucks and the Sanitation Department was doing that power
washing that Stu mentioned, just, incredibly, cleaning out
that area. It is amazing what they got out of there. If
you look at pictures before and after, it's just
incredible.
The good news, is that all of our samples were
well, well below even almost detection limits for
asbestos, so that was good. We were able to get the
market up and running on that Monday.
We continued sampling throughout the rest of
that week just to make sure that changes or debris that
were continuing perhaps to come over from the Plaza area
weren't going to change that.
But then around the 21st, we really moved to
doing sampling in ever-decreasing concentric circles to
the pile. The purpose of that was to sort of clear areas.
Basically, we found that the 90 square blocks around the
pile, we weren't finding anything.
That's when we said you don't need the
respiratory protection in those areas. We were able to
keep shrinking that as time went on, until just, as I
talked about before, the rubble pile itself in those
several operations.
What's happened, though, is that we have started
to find some more samples at what we would call apparent
over-exposures. Remember, these aren't real typical
operations here.
But what we're starting to see now is, as there
is more below-grade work, there's more areas that are
somewhat confined--not necessarily all confined spaces
under the standards rule but just below grade--you do have
pockets where, especially with the metals, we are getting
some high exposures.
The antenna that was on top of the World Trade
Center II, an enormously large piece of that came down
intact and they were doing some cutting on that.
Unfortunately, that individual really did come
down with a very high exposure and ultimately was
hospitalized for another issue, which his physician says
was not related to the lead, but we're still looking into
that.
But we have a concern about the people who are
doing the cutting and the burning and we are very
concerned about whether the respiratory protection is
sufficient.
Up to this point, we've gone with a half-face
elastomeric facepiece with a triple combination cartridge,
the HEPA P-100 with acid gases and organic vapor. For the
early exposures for the cutters, that was sufficient. But
we have now gotten a few that are higher when they're
doing these very unique operations, like the antenna. So,
that's a little bit of concern.
They're also doing some drilling on the slurry
wall. Are you going to talk about that?
MR. BURKHAMMER: Yes.
MS. CLARK: Yes. I'll talk about the silica
issue then.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: Again, there were several dozen
taxi cabs that are constantly roaming around the World
Trade Center and the hotel, and as you can imagine, this
is an example of what happened to one of the many dozens
of cabs. They all pretty much look like this. This piece
of metal here that you see is part of the aluminum
flashing that came off World Trade Center II. Both I and
II had these aluminum skins on them.
Part of the thing the mayor wanted to do, was to
save as much of this aluminum skin as we could save. So
they have a special storage pile where we're collecting a
lot of this aluminum skin-type material.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: This is the dead center of the
16-and-a-half-acre site. This was erected by the firemen
and that's what generated this picture that all of you
have probably seen in numerous places. It was unique.
This pole that it is erected on is not a flag
pole, per se. It's an antenna. You can see some of the
antenna that was on top of the World Trade Center. So,
they took this, cut off the bottom of it and fixed it so
they could erect some flags to this. That's this pole
that you see here, is this one here.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: Again, we spent a lot of time
with the contractor safety representatives, the teams did,
to try to get them to understand what we wanted to
accomplish out there. For the most part, they were very
willing. They wanted to do anything we asked them to do.
Sometimes they got a little flack from their management,
but we were able to fix that rather quickly.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: This is the Dow Jones Financial
Building. It's one of the World Financial Center
buildings. You can see a lot of the damage was done to
the columns that are holding up this huge structure.
Part of the problem with this particular
building here, is that these columns, as you can see--and
there's many of them that go around here--were so severely
damaged that one time there was some thought that they
would have to take this particular building down.
But now they've come up with some engineering
design to just reshore and put additional beams into here
and fortify these to keep from tearing down this building.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: This is inside the lobby of
that same building. It was kind of eerie when we first
went in there on the 13th. There were some lights
actually burning around there. One escalator was actually
running, carrying debris up to the top. The other one
wasn't running. This was kind of what we saw on the
inside of a lot of these buildings that we were in.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: ConEd and Verizon were out
there continually doing their best to restore cables,
communications, power. We had a real power problem
initially. For the first couple of weeks we didn't have
any power except generator power. ConEd was working their
rear ends off day and night, same as everybody else, to
try to restore power.
But you can get a picture here. This is just
all people you see back here. All this is bodies, and
workers, and volunteers, and people trying to help, just
hundreds and hundreds.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: This is the Banker's Trust
building. This is the piece of steel that came from Tower
II. The weight was calculated at 23 and a half tons.
What they decided to do with this, all this had to be
stripped out and all this had to be cut back and removed.
So they started by cutting pieces off this to
kind of reduce the weight, but then they were afraid that
this whole thing would shift on them. So what they ended
up doing, was going up here and they cleaned out as much
of this debris as they could clean out, and cut it from
here.
We had a 150-foot exclusion zone around this
whole area and the bottom. As they started cutting this,
the hope was that it would fall straight down. Indeed, it
did. It fell down and laid down and they were able to get
this piece out of here.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: This is one of these huge box
beams that was all over the place, way too heavy to lift,
way too heavy to even load in a truck. So they had to cut
them into sections. We had several ironworkers, that
that's all they did day and night, was sit on these things
and cut, cut, cut, cut.
To make a cut like you see here completely
around this thing to break it off, was probably a nine-hour job, to make this one cut that he's making here.
This guy wouldn't make the entire cut. They'd break out
another guy, another guy, another guy.
But the bottles of acetylene and oxygen that had
to be used to do all this was thousands, and thousands,
and thousands of bottles. We also had the tube trucks
that were a pain in the butt, because they always parked
them in the wrong place, or cranes were swinging over them
with stuff.
We finally had to put the Jersey barriers around
them and get them away from the thing so it wouldn't get
hit or struck. Some of them did, and we are fortunate we
didn't blow it up.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: This is the front side of
American Express. You can see this set of beams. There's
one, two, and then this one goes in and actually cuts up
into this floor right here. So this piece is imbedded in
here and this is about 19 tons' worth of steel right here.
The theory was, or the problem was, that this
whole side was so unstable right here that we were afraid,
and the engineers were afraid, if we took this out it
might collapse this upper portion of this building. The
thinking was that what was keeping this up was actually
this piece of steel. We left this here for a long period
of time because they didn't know what to do with it. We
didn't know how to cut it, and we didn't know how to get
it out. There was really no safe way to put a basket up
there or do anything. So it just kind of sat there for a
while. After we left, I understand they went in.
MS. CLARK: Yes. It's out now. As a matter of
fact, this building is reoccupied. DDC uses it as their
headquarters and we have a desk there up on about the 30th
floor, probably over around here. A great view of the
Plaza. But they're still doing a good bit of work.
They were doing some work on Sunday on the 26th
floor and they had started before the fire department had
come and set up their fire watch. Unfortunately, there
was a huge fire down about the third floor level. Smoke
was billowing out, so we had to have an evacuation.
Luckily, there were only about 25 people up on
the 30th floor at that point and they all got out. By the
time they got to about the eighth floor they were starting
to smell the smoke. By the time they got to third and
fourth floor, the fire department was there with hoses and
they were putting it out.
But it was a little tense. It sort of goes to
my concern about reoccupying this building. But there is
definitely the concern that they're trying to shrink the
perimeter of the work project area and that they really
want to make it more defined and bring everything in.
This is sort of the logical place.
The other parts of the Financial Center are also
reoccupied, some of the Dow Jones building. It's amazing.
As Stu said, if you look at it from the west side, it
looks pretty normal. They've even done some nice work on
the facades and some of the other areas. It's very
strange. It's a really weird sensation when you look from
one side to the other.
MR. BURKHAMMER: If you look at your map, you
can kind of get a feel. This steel came out of World
Trade Center II, which was about 250 yards away from here.
This is the 24th, 25th, 26th floors right here. So that
steel flew in mid-air to Tower II straight across and
imbedded itself here.
So if you look at the tonnage here, flying
across the air and landing and just shooting straight into
this building, the force that caused that had to be just
unbelievable. Just absolutely unbelievable.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: One of the many dogs they had
on the site. A sad part is, three dogs were lost. One,
heat exhaustion, one severe burns to their feet and lower
body. These dogs are really trained unbelievably and
they're trained to find live people.
Some of them are trained to find bodies, but a
lot of them are trained to find live people. One dog got
so upset or stressed, they said, because he could never
find anybody alive, they had to shoot him because he went
crazy.
These booties were put on the dogs who were
burning their feet. Most of the workers are on their
fifth or sixth pair of shoes because the pile was so hot
from the fire that the shoes were melting on the bottom.
The steel in the steel shanks and the steel toes
were carrying the heat up and burning the feet of the
workers, so we used all kinds of tricks, pads, and
everything, to kind of cushion the heat from coming into
the shoes. Mostly, they were changing out shoes every
other day, basically.
Now, Sears sent in a railroad carload of work
shoes and they could go in and trade out the shoes any
time. A lot of the first aid cases on the job were burns
from the feet and hands, legs, knees, arms. Anything that
could be touched or exposed usually got burned.
When I left on the 7th of November--I've been
back several times since, but Bechtel left officially on
the 7th--there were 1,119 cases reported through the DMATs
(the medical facilities) and I'm not sure what the number
is now.
But most of those cases were either burns or
respiratory ailments. The only serious injuries they had
at the time that I was there, they had a broken arm, one
guy had two broken arms, and on guy had a broken leg.
MS. CLARK: And that's still pretty typical, the
fractures. There's been maybe 13 or 15 by now. Some
concussions. The one thing about the numbers, those were
city health department figures that they were putting out.
They have since stopped doing that.
The DMAT has gone and MedCorps is now taking
over the medical aspects at the site. But one of the
concerns we had early on, is that these really were
interventions. There was no way we could make any
correlation between OSHA recordables.
If you looked at it, they have very
comprehensive break-outs. If somebody asked for a pair of
glasses and they gave out a pair of glasses, that would
count as an intervention. Unfortunately, it came up in
this total of injuries and illnesses. We finally got them
to take out some of those, but it still was very
difficult.
So about a couple of weeks ago we had gone to
the contractors and gotten the 200 logs, and we've tried
our best to estimate sort of a site figure for what would
be the rate, the injury and illness rate, for the site for
contractor workers.
Basically, we've come up with--and I knew I was
going to have a problem. Does anyone know what the rate
is for demolition? It is at the national average. It's
either 4.3 or 3.4. It is right at that. It's exactly
what the national average is.
Which, considering this site, considering what
is going on there, the kinds of operations, the ever-changing environment, I think, is really, really
incredible. I'm very thankful that it is such.
Of course, we don't want any of those injuries
to occur, but it is encouraging to know that that is the
situation right now, that there have been no fatalities
and no life-threatening injuries, and very, very few
hospitalizations. I think I could count them on one hand,
the times people have actually had to stay overnight.
(Changing of slides)
MS. CLARK: This is, as I mentioned before, we
were doing the fit checks. This is early on when we were
in PS-89, which was the command center for everyone. It
was the site command center for quite a while.
Remember, you saw us all sitting on those little
seats. It used to be pretty amazing, at those 8:00
meetings, to see Stu on one of those little chairs that
they have for kindergarten students. I wish I had a
picture of that. I probably could make a little money off
of that one.
MR. BURKHAMMER: I did find a new diet in New
York. It's called work. The only good thing I got out of
it, was I lost 28 pounds in two months. So, I certainly
feel a lot better physically.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: Remember, back in the hole I
showed you in Building 6? This cross, just looking like
this with the little jagged edges, and this was cleaned
up, was in the dead center of that hole. We took this
cross out of the hole and we moved it over. There's a big
concrete abutment that sits in here, and this cross sits
on top of that concrete abutment.
All the workers come in past that during the
morning, during the evening, and during the day, and it's
a real inspiration to the team out there, that this was
actually a piece that was left in the dead center of that
huge hole. This was the only thing left standing.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: President Bush was out. You
can say what you want about the guy, whether you're a
Democrat or Republican, but I think the day he came out
there on 9/14 and he walked out onto the site and he stood
up and he gave a very rousing, very, very encouraging
speech, and then he took the time, not to run back and
rush and get in his car and leave, but he took 45 minutes
from the time he left the stand, shaking the hands of as
many workers as he could, talking to them, sharing with
them, walking down to his car.
This is the vehicle that he's in, and I'm right
next to this fellow right here. The Secret Service guys,
you can see around here, too. But he didn't waiver, even
though the guys, I'm sure, wanted him out of there. He
wouldn't go. He just took his time and he thanked
everybody, and was very appreciative, very sincere, and
very warm.
A lot of the people really appreciated him
taking the time to do that, and that was a big effort on
his part. I'm sure more of an effort than these folks
wanted him to do. But he wouldn't leave. He just hung in
there.
There was a lady in front of me, over behind
this fellow's nose, that was a New York City police
officer, a very robust lady, very tough, very course-type
talking lady. She broke down in tears. She could hardly
control her emotions. He gave her a hug and thanked her.
Guiliani was right behind Bush, and he also gave her a hug
and thanked her.
I think, as far as psychological impact to that
particular New York City police officer, those two hugs
probably did more for her psyche than anything anybody
else could have done.
(Changing of slides)
MR. BURKHAMMER: Maybe you've seen this on TV.
This is the Firemen's Memorial. It was built in France
and it was shipped over to be sent out to Seattle. It was
designed and built to be sent out to Seattle. It was
Seattle or Pittsburgh. I think it was Seattle. Where did
you think it was?
MS. CLARK: I thought it was somewhere in the
Midwest.
MR. BURKHAMMER: Oh, did you?
MS. CLARK: Yes.
MR. BURKHAMMER: Somewhere in the Midwest, or
Seattle, or Pittsburgh.
CHAIRMAN KRUL: Somewhere in between.
MR. BURKHAMMER: Anyway, they left it in New
York. This became a huge tourist attraction. People, as
you can see, would light candles and put flags and flowers
around this thing as kind of a memorial to all of the
firefighters.
Also on your map, right next to the Banker's
Trust building, is Firehouse 10. Firehouse 10 lost every
one of their firemen but one, and the one fireman that
wasn't lost was home sick the day that the emergency
occurred.
One of the priests, or the chaplain, was a
Franciscan brother. There's a story written about him
that's really moving, if you have an opportunity to read
it. It tells the story of how he gave his life saving and
ministering to others. The firemen in New York deserve a
tremendous amount of praise and credit and thanks for all
they did. That's the end of the show.
Questions? Comments? Anything that you'd like
to ask?
CHAIRMAN KRUL: Jean, you look quizzical.
MS. WILLIAMS: I just can't imagine having to
experience everything that he has. I just think it was an
incredible opportunity. I commend you, Stu, for hanging
in there and being able to represent construction as well
as you did.
MR. BURKHAMMER: Thank you. It was an
experience that I never thought I would seen, had never
seen before, and I certainly never want to see it again,
in this country or any country.
CHAIRMAN KRUL: Well, we thank both of you for
your efforts.
Go ahead, Tom.
MR. BRODERICK: I have been involved with the
City of Chicago. I'm sure that a number of major cities
have been severely shaken by this experience, as the whole
country has.
The Building Department for the City of Chicago
is trying to grapple with what they should be doing, and
so forth. I'm just wondering if there's been any effort
to study the lessons learned, and the ongoing lessons,
bottle them, and make them available to other cities to
model rescue efforts, or how the organization came
together, what the organization looks like now. Is there
a role that ACCSH could play in facilitating this kind of
education for other metropolitan areas?
MS. CLARK: Well, it's interesting that you
mention that, because it just occurred to me that we
didn't mention how all of this came together and the sort
of additional problem that occurred. Building 7 housed on
the 23rd floor the Office of Emergency Management, the
Mayor's office that would handle it.
It was a state-of-the-art bunker, had all the
plans for how you would respond to such an emergency. It
was in Building 7. They evacuated, obviously, when this
happened and that building didn't collapse, or start to
collapse, until around 5:30 or so that day.
But that caused an enormous issue about what to
do, where to regroup. It took a while, although not very
long, actually. They were in the Javits Center for a
little while, then eventually they established a command
center at Pier 92, where every imaginable agency, federal,
state, and city, had a desk. It was just last weekend,
actually, that the non-city agencies have moved out.
That's why our representative is not at Pier 92, but down
at the AmEx Building.
But I think there is certainly talk about this,
but to be honest, most of us are still so involved, still,
in day-to-day operations and dealing with that.
Some of the other groups, though, on the
outside, like NIOSH, for instance, on December 11th and
12th, in New York, is hosting a conference dealing with
respirators, personal protective equipment but very much
attuned to the respiratory protection for first
responders. I think it's an invitation-only.
MR. BURKHAMMER: He is running it.
MS. CLARK: Oh. You're running it. Okay. We
should talk about it then. Some of the other groups have
started to talk about risk assessment. All of the
agencies dealing with the air sampling and the risk
assessment started out having twice-daily calls. Now it's
down to about twice a week, but there is some work around
there.
But on the issue as a whole, about just the
emergency response, I'm not sure that any agency is yet
ready to say, we can take a moment to breathe and start to
do that. But I know it needs to be done, and it should be
done.
CHAIRMAN KRUL: Larry?
MR. EDGINTON: Bob, my own organization has
started thinking about this notion of who emergency
responders are. I think in this country, when you talk
about emergency response, you tend to think of police,
fire, and EMTs, maybe.
We had our first experiences in California, with
San Francisco and earthquakes, when we had members
involved there in both search and rescue, and eventually
demolition operations.
We really started to bring more of a focus to
it, I guess, after Oklahoma City and our involvement with
the Murrah Building there.
I guess my thought is, as we ask ourself as
ACCSH, what can we be doing, I think one of the things we
can do is to think about how it is that we prepare
construction workers to become emergency responders,
because we have that happen on a somewhat regular basis.
We have that happen on occasion during the
construction process itself. We've seen that up in
Connecticut, for example, when we've had building
collapses. I think it's worth talking about that some
more as we think about our charge in terms of just what it
is.
For example, we felt very comfortable with New
York and most of our members there at least understanding
PPE, PPE selection, and those kinds of things, but that is
not the case, necessarily, for everybody else.
I guess that's the only thought I have to offer
about that. I mean, Stu's presentation was an excellent
one. I remember being on the phone at 6:30 in the morning
on the morning of the 12th with one of our business
managers up in New York City.
I said, Joe, what do you people need? He said,
outside of some PPE issues, the real problem we have is
nobody knows what the hell it is that we're doing. That's
sort of a notion that has really stayed with me through
this entire thing. But I think the key is, and others
have mentioned it, is we know more now about those things
than we did before.
I think that's another part of this, is how we
chronicle what our learning experiences are so as to apply
them in the future no matter what part we have in all of
this.
MR. BURKHAMMER: I think we spend a lot of time
in our life being great reactors. The World Trade Center
is a classic example, I think, of how we react to
different types of situations. I think we're very poor
proactors. I think the World Trade Center showed that
also. Except for the Sherson Lehman person, and probably
some of the federal agencies, most of those people, I
don't think, were prepared for anything of this magnitude.
September 11th changed everybody's life, as John
indicated. It changed the way we do business, changed the
way we think, changed the way worker safety is going to be
handled. It changed the way high-rise safety and
commercial safety work is going to be done. The way we
erect buildings now, I think in the future, is certainly
going to be changed.
They have already come out with a design for the
new "safe" building, the impenetrable building where, even
if an airplane hits it, the airplane is supposed to bounce
off and fall down to the ground. I'd like to see that
building, but they supposedly have this design that says
they have one.
But, on a serious note, I think each and every
one of us have to take a real hard look at our companies
and how we plan our business, how we go about assessing
our offices. Especially in Bechtel, to have a fire drill,
is a huge annoyance to the executives and senior members
of the company, but they do it.
They do it because I tell them to do it. But,
other than that, it's a struggle, at best. Then they
don't think you're really having one when you have one,
and some of them don't even want to get up out of their
chair and go outside.
So, I think we really, as safety professionals
and health professionals, have to change our approach. We
have to start pressing harder internally to keep our
employees out of harm's way.
If senior management does not want to
participate or does not want to be involved, don't quit.
Don't give up. Just keep hammering away, and hammering
away, and hammering away, and hammering away. Pretty
soon, they're going to get it. I think more of them are
getting it, certainly, after September 11th.
CHAIRMAN KRUL: Okay. Let's break for lunch.
Be back here by 1:15.
(Whereupon, at 12:12 p.m. the meeting was
recessed for lunch.)
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