Sign Ohio Electrical Services Contract Safe

Document type sign electrical services contract ohio safe

hey welcome everyone thanks for coming out what we thought we'd do today to do it a little different instead of telling you how to do things to improve your safety health we're going to show you what sort of not to do and we're gonna demonstrate that are going to present them and in our way in when I think I need to try to stay out of their way our agency nationwide issues about 140 to 160 what we term significant cases each year and those are cases with penalties in excess of $100,000 and or they may involve novel issues that are that are forthcoming like workplace violence et cetera so what I'm going to do is have our compliance officers talk to a couple cases the names were left out but I want you to see and kind of take it and do some introspection into your own company and see what's important as far as documented safety finding and fixing hazards and when you come into contact with those show what you should probably shouldn't do and and what ends up resulting to a significant case please we wanted to be interactive so raise your hand when you do raise your hand tell me your name your company name and the address of your company so we'll know where to go just kidding I I am just kidding because everyone goes this is Ted I'm gonna ask a quick question but so I'm gonna introduce Emily Lauderback she's a industrial hygienist senior industrial hygienist from the Columbus area office so I'll turn it over to Emily and she can talk about one of the cases she did as how he said my name is Emily Lauderback I've been with the Columbus area office for about seven years now my background is an industrial hygiene so I'm a bobcat and I graduated from oh you seven years ago with a bachelor's degree in industrial hygiene but as I have worked through my career with OSHA I've expanded into a lot of safety aspects as well so I do both in this case I'm gonna be presenting to you today is one of the safety cases that I worked on and it's definitely one of the more interesting ones that I had the opportunity to investigate so I hope you're able to learn something from it so first Inc you're not familiar with what the inspection process is I was just going to kind of briefly go over that so for this particular inspection it was two types of inspections in one we had a complaint filed by an employee that was alleging some injuries on machinery in the workplace and once that complaint came in I happen to notice that the same company was also on OSHA site specific targeting list which if you don't know what that is it's a list that OSHA generates each year of companies that have high injury and illness rates then they send people out me like me out to find out why this company is having such high injury and illness rates so at the time we received this complaint they were already on our list to be inspected anyway so both of those inspections got assigned to me and I went out to take a look and see what was going on so this particular company manufactured plastic blown film products so things like whenever you're in the frozen food section and you see like frozen chicken that thick plastic packaging that it comes in that's the type of product that this company manufactured they it's also used for other industries too auto industry medical device packaging but food packaging is their primary customer so when I show up on site the first thing we do is conduct an opening conference so we just explain to the company why we're there what the inspection process is going to be what they can expect to be happening and on every inspection we're gonna ask for copies of your 300 logon 300 a so make sure you maintain those keep them up to date because it's gonna be the one of the first things we ask for when we show up on site so in this case was no different I asked for their logs they gave me copies I kind of stuck them in my folder and I didn't look at them right that moment I took them back with me and looked at them later then I conducted a walk around the facility and reviewed some of their safety and health programs training records things like that and we also do employee interviews employee interviews are always done in private away from management and anything employees say is always confidential so that's kind of our standard inspection process so after I do my initial opening do my first walk-around of the facility I go home and I'm looking at their injury and illness logs and I noticed that related to the complaint there was three employees in the past twelve months prior to my inspection opening that had received really severe forearm fractures on what was called the winder machines and I'll show you in a minute you'll get pictures and things you can see what a winder machine is so that's a big red flag for us okay in twelve months you've had really serious forearm fractures on the same machine so that's something that I'm definitely going to be investigating further these forearm fractures were very severe the employees their forearm was basically shattered they had to get steel plates put in surgery had to be done it was very severe and at the time of the inspection opening the company hadn't made any effort to correct the hazard these winder machines are the last basically step in the production process of this plastic film so what the winder machine does is it winds the plastic onto like a cardboard core so then it can then be packaged and shipped out so it's just that final step of wrapping the plastic up onto a core so it can be a roll of plastic and the winder machines have what is called a hand-cut mode approximately 30% of the company's products had to be done in this hand-cut mode on these winder machines most of the time the machines were in automatic mode this hand cut mode only had to be used a small portion of the time and that in during this hand cut mode is when the injuries were occurring this is what the winder machine looked like so as you can see here this is the roll of plastic this is their product that's what would be shipped out to their customers to be then you know printed and made into packaging and this is the cardboard core that they wrap it on so during this hand cut mode what they're doing is trying to get the plastic wrapping on this new core and get the the other one ready to package so I actually have a video here the hope we will play so you'll see employee walk up and he's gonna be kind of bending down and looking at the plastic and what he's doing is trying to look for the perforation in the plastic so that it can be the perforation can be broken and it can start rolling on that new core so right here watch him as he pops yeah so whenever this hand-cut mode was happening that's obviously when the injuries were occurring when employees were putting their hands in there and getting that plastic wrapping their arms were getting pulled in and wrapped up between that plastic and the roller and just shattering their forearms also one thing that I thought was really important to note is OSHA had been to this facility before and we had never recognized this hazard prior they hadn't had injuries and if I was just walking through the facility and looked at this winder machine initially it doesn't necessarily look that hazardous because if it's in its automatic mode the employees never touch it it automatically cuts over itself but a certain thicker plastic the machine just wasn't able to cut it over on its own and the employees had to put it in this hand cut mode so that sort of helped me be a better compliance officer but because it taught me okay I need to ask more questions about some of these machines what when we OSHA walks through a facility we're really getting a very small snapshot of what a process looks like we're only seeing it at one point in time and so this particular hazard may not be obvious whenever if I was walking through during automatic mode I probably wouldn't have seen the problem so if it hadn't been for the complaint and the injuries on the logs I may never have realized that this process was even going on another thing that made this case really interesting was I was about four weeks into my inspection I'm gathering documents interviewing employees trying to build my case and we receive another complaint and this time it was from the surgeon who had been conducting all these surgeries on the employees who beginning hurt this happened to a fourth person while my inspection was actually open so within approximately a 12-month period we had four people that this had happened to during this same process and that's pretty rare we don't usually get complaints from medical professionals but it actually would be great if we got more of them because they know you know if they start seeing a trend of okay I'm getting a lot of people from this company getting amputations or getting you know things like that going on we would love to know about that so that was a kind of a unique situation for us this is a photo of what one of the employees looked like immediately after the accident one of the employees that I got had a chance to interview had actually snapped a picture with his phone while he was at the hospital and sent it to me so that I could use it for my case file and that's not something we get the opportunity to get very often either because most of our information comes from the employer and they wouldn't have those kinds of photos but he was willing to share that with me and didn't mind if I shared it with all of you so you know that gives you a really good visual of how severe these injuries were and the company still at this point was continuing to operate as normal nothing had been done to try to prevent it from happening again throughout the entire inspection the company kept arguing there was no way to abate the hazard this hand-cut mode had to be done for them to make this particular product there was nothing they could do to fix the hazard they wanted to just keep operating as normal and oh well if people keep getting their arms mangled they needed to make their product but ultimately it was actually a super easy fix that cost them nothing so all they did was adjust the torque on the machine so that you'll see in a minute he's able to just grab that rotating shaft and it will stop so there's no there's not nearly as much power to it it doesn't have the power behind it to be able to break someone's arm like it did before it was after the citations were already issued and I probably took three to four months for my investigation and then it was during their abatement period so it probably took them six months from the time that I opened my inspection before they they made this change so you can kind of get an idea of how easy the fix was I didn't put this information in there but they did end up getting a willful citation for that I mean obviously it was it was a willful act that for people had been that severely injured and they hadn't made any effort to fix it so they got a willful machine guarding violation do you have any questions about the case at all I believe the total penalty was around 80,000 so it wasn't technically what OSHA calls a significant case because it wasn't over 100 they had recently hired a safety consultant and had all the proper paperwork in place so they had their written safety programs and training records and things like that or they would have gotten a lot more citations if they didn't have all that paperwork they had just recently put into place yeah maybe I should restate his question if anybody didn't hear it he wanted to know if the company had called the manufacturer and asked them to come in and help with the problem they did call the manufacturer in after the inspection was opened and they kind of realized that they were in trouble with OSHA they did call the manufacturer in I don't know if the manufacturer was ever ever able to help I know at one point the manufacturer was telling them the same thing they were saying that this hand cut mode was normal that's how the machine should be operated they didn't know what to tell them I don't know if the manufacturer came up with the solution to fix it or if the company came up with that I'm not sure that would be he was asking if maybe other companies who use the same kind of machine should be contacted and followed up with that's not something that OSHA usually does you know we have to have some other reason to be in there an employee complaint or something like that we have no way to get a list of companies that use that machine but yeah I would hope that by doing things like this we can presentations like this we can kind of get the word out and maybe some of those companies will become aware but yeah we don't we don't know that's a great idea we could maybe reach out to that company and that's you know we had a fatality a couple years ago on a winder machine two up in the Cleveland area got scalped and pulled into it and it's horrible you know but sorry so I mean this is serious stuff and you can see the importance of you know keeping your injury and illness logs and reviewing them and doing a thorough accident or incident investigation to come up with corrective measures and once again BWC is an excellent resource to come out for free and give you their expertise and ideas as well so you know don't forget to use them their question over there yeah I mean we we don't know all the companies that this company provided the machinery to but yeah yeah I mean we could that's a really good idea and you know that's that's something we'll take up with with with Emily afterwards I think that's a really good idea this is unique but yeah I mean if there's a similar situation where we find some stuff when we do reach out to the manufacturers in in often in a lot of times a manufacturer or somebody that you buy equipment from they'll tell you well that's how it comes and we didn't do anything for it but in this case what would a great idea we could save some other arms on that one yeah the question was it's just something that OSHA could issue a safety bulletin out and get it disseminated yes that's that's another good way we've tried to do that in different formats we've got a lot of safety bulletins on different incidents investigations we'll have to check the status of this one to make sure we can do that but the question is was did the manufacturer give operation instructions for this machine and was the company following them they were following them this hand cut mode according to the manufacturer was a normal mode for this machine to be operated in yes there was somebody over here our investigations are a lengthy process sometimes it just takes a long time to get in contact with all the people that we want to talk to for example most of these four people who got injured no longer worked at the company so I had to like track down their phone numbers and schedule meetings to get a hold of one of them and interview them and then once I get done with my case then it has to get reviewed by our regional office so sometimes it just takes some time to go through all those steps to get the approval before we can issue safety there's several levels of review in a case that's got wilful violations that's going to add some time to it because you know we're putting our case together to make sure that what we go forward with is accurate and that we can support a court so it does extend it so any other question did the employees no longer work there due to the injury they were never fired by the company or anything like that for being hurt but they these were basically entry-level jobs the employees working on these winder machines day one on the job you're making nine bucks an hour and you're walking onto this machine so a lot of times they had a huge turnover at this company anyway they had like it was like 120 percent turnover or something like that so they couldn't hold on to employees at all so I think most what you wouldn't wouldn't work there so all right we're about how the how the injured employees turned out how their health is the injured employees none of them lost their arms they were able to repair the damage to some extent but the ones that I was able to get a hold of an interview still we're having issues even you know a year six mont s to a year after the injury they had still had a lot of numbness and tingling in their arm they had not really regained full use of their arm yet I want to get to next one so thank you Emily next presenter mr. donello Jindra she is assistant area director in the Cleveland area office this is a case she did as a compliance officer in the Cleveland area office so I will turn it over to Danelle Thank You Howie like how I said my name is Janelle Jindra I've been with OSHA 30 years I know how I started when I was 10 so I've seen all aspects of OSHA I started off in clerical have been a compliance officer now I'm an assistant area director so as a CO show I'd like to present a case that I ran into a couple years ago and this was a can manufacturing company just some basic information regarding the company the company has been inspected 27 times between 1972 and 2006 there had been approximately 11 citations received four to twelve a one and two citations received four to twelve a three double I the difference in those two is a three double is point of operation on equipment okay where the actual work is being performed on machine the company also has been inspected seven times throughout region five since 2006 so as you can see already they know OSHA the past six inspections have been in response to formal complaints filed by employees all right we received a complaint in 2009 alleging numerous pieces of equipment were not guarded I was the lucky Co show that got to go out and do the inspection in 2012 we received another complaint alleging that all the equipment that I cited in 2009 had never been a pro you know guarded adequately or guards were put on and then removed State management officials from 2009 as I arrived in 2012 nobody changed when I went out there I cited approximately 30 instances of machine guarding all right from shears flitters welding lines compound in lines lays you name it nothing was guarded I also projecting shaft and pulleys machine-specific lockout training for lockout fire extinguisher training in 2009 the company came in for an informal conference met with the area director a settlement agreement was signed some abatement dates and some of the guarding issues were extended for three months because it was going to take them time to fabricate to fabricate guards and put them on and we agreed as long as they did something in the interim to protect employees and the company had no issue with abating all the other proposed citations then it gets better the company sent us in beautiful abatement pictures certifications signed by you know managers of the company you know big old photos showing you know this is now garden we took it looks beautiful employees protected 2012 rolls around we receive another formal complaint alleging equip the same equipment that was cited in 2009 is unguarded so I go out there I show the complaint to you know the managers and ask him what's going on they just sort of look at me like a deer in the headlights like okay let's go let's go take a walk out there and see what's happening we go out there and I just basically stood there and shook my head like what happened the production manner just manager just looked at me and shook his head he had no explanation why our guards missing you know who took them off employers are like within inches of you know the point of operation the funny thing is they had one line line too that was fully automated I'm talking like curtains barrier guards I mean I set off the light curtain by getting too close to it shut the whole machine down why they didn't do it for the rest of the equipment in the plan got me hanging I really don't know they told me this is a prototype what does that mean what do you mean by prototype well we tried it out on this one well for how long oh it's been this way for a year so now it's no longer a prototype so you know it's working so why didn't you roll it out out to the rest of the equipment no reason when I did my management interviews you know I just want to know what happen from 2009 to 2012 you sent us in all this beautiful abatement what happened to it and really managers just basically said well setup took off the guards never put him back on nobody ever insured as far as management to ensure that the guards were put back on nobody was ever disciplined for not putting guards back on he had no excuse why the splitters and shears were not guarded like the prototype tape line and he didn't know what happened to the guards that were on in 2009 I come out in 2012 they're just God he didn't know what happened to him willful egregious what I did is because they had so many pieces of equipment on certain pieces of equipment that I cited in 2009 and they and that I still found unguarded in 2012 we went willful egregious meaning instance by instance meaning for this machine line to or line for I'm sending you $70,000 line five seventy thousand dollars line six seventy thousand dollars the first time I was nice I grouped it all together with a lot of instances this time I'm not so nice as you can see the abatement photo they sent us submitted in 2009 they have a fixed guard the current violation I don't know what happened to the to the guarding you can just lift it right up it was not interlocked anything so you could clear jams very easily without shutting the machinery down right same thing guarded and as you can see they had a line going through this where the guard couldn't even come down that bar so even if you wanted to pull the guard down you couldn't again fix guards same thing 2009 they showed me you know look at it's all fixed bolted can't lift it up current violation just open it right up go in there make adjustments now this piece of equipment they had identical to line to their prototype line which they guarded with light curtains barrier guards this one I could reach my whole hand in nothing same thing here here's line to see all the bells and whistles God like curtains barrier guard I mean you can't get in there if you wanted to to make something egregious there has to be certain criteria met and this company met it number one the employer has an extensive history of prior violations with OSHA I showed you in the previous slides we've been out there 27 times you know since 1972 the company has also been cited multiple times for machine guarding the employer knew of the requirement regarding based on their previous OSHA citations not only in the Cleveland area but in other areas throughout region 5 where the company has been cited at their other plans same management that I dealt with in 2009 was there in 2012 nothing changed and also the company had pieces of equipment in the facility that were adequately guarded with light curtains and safety mats so they knew what guarding was why they chose not to put it on the rest of the lines you know production have to get done you have to get it done have to get it out the door here's just a quick synopsis of like I said the egregious on all the different lines that I cited $70,000 piece and why was there of course I found some other violations some repeats so that got mixed into that mixed into the mix too with the total penalty at five hundred eighty nine thousand that it be known if you get cited by OSHA you send in the abatement documentation please make sure the stuff stays on because you never know when we're gonna get a call and me Janelle anybody else from my office is gonna come knocking on your door and we don't like to see the deer in the headlights or well I don't know what happened well what do you mean it's your company any questions go ahead and all those inspections the question was at throughout all those years have they ever had significant injuries yes they have it was lucky enough not at the facility I was at but at their other plans they've had numerous amputations that OSHA has inspected correct so that's another reason why you know this equipment is dangerous you've had amputations on it same equipment at other facilities you know at their other plants and nothing we were amazed though that there weren't more injuries at this specific facility one of the things we found out it was a very veteran workplace there was no turnover it was a unionized facility and the people had worked on these machines for a lot a lot of time we think that their training and understanding of the equipment they've probably helped them avoid the hazards but you know they let this go that the employers changed it to help for for production and that led us to this this case here so it's very important when you submit abatement documentation we just had another couple cases where they said they took a picture of the light curtains in their installed it and then we came back on a follow-up which we tried to follow up on around five to ten percent they were laying there with dust on top disconnected because they just weren't working right they kept shutting down production and will that kind of what they're supposed to do if you get in there but anyhow it's this this case turned into something bigger because the employer misrepresenting what the picture was and when we came back and it was different so if you're going to change a process it's very important that you have interim protective measures on something that you put in place so the employees know this is a step towards us getting to a final correction if the guard needs not working and you're not able to do it you know and you can also request a additional abatement time if you need to to try to figure out something that works best for your facility and we work we'll work with you on that this question is you know it's simple fixes yeah they were very simple fixes bring down the guard bolt the guard I mean it was all stuff that you know they had done before this particular company no they did not have one person dedicated to safety they had HR dealing with safety HR never walked in the plant HR is so I'm like you know she didn't even know what the equipment really did so that was a problem there since this case though I mean like you know how he said it is a union facility they're going for you know the 501 and I think they're hiring in a safety person they have to do audits now all part of you know a settlement so trying to keep on top of it so hopefully the culture will change because like he said I mean the workers there were had been there like 3040 years so I think the complaint was not only based because they lied to OSHA but also they're bringing in a younger crowd now they're bringing in these babies and they don't want these younger kids that aren't familiar with this equipment getting amputations so two other things to know about this situation and I thought contributed to this this condition it was it the corporate structure of recently acquired corporate structure change had a very good on paper and some of the things they were trying to do corporate safety program the problem is when if you're not checking on what the local managers are doing it seems like local management kids the disconnect so the disconnect happens when they don't follow through on things so another contributing factors will ask for your safety inspections in the records of the minutes for that and when we see repeated items coming up each month and the safety committee means or they stop having them and they don't fix them that's an indicator dust that you don't have a good system in place to track issues to completion and that was the case in this no one was making sure that these items that were coming up and being plained about locally we're getting fixed and that made it worse and then the employees got frustrated and obviously we started getting cost so it's important that your internal systems that you're fixing things and you communicate to the employees which you've done so they see that you're responding to it that way they're they feel you're taking ownership versus they have to call us to intervene so alright thanks - no good - next so this is Janelle Mattia she's an industrial hygienist in her office does a great job senior industrial hygienist in the Cleveland area office and she's got a couple cases here if we get on you know like like way but we want to talk to you two about falsification of documents but this one is an interesting case dealing with a ceramic tile and countertop fabricating company it is something we run into quite often they're making countertops for your kitchen your home and this was a small mom-and-pop shop so when we originally got in there real small staff about nine employees I was out there for a complaint that was alleging silica lack of personal protective equipment inadequate ventilation extension cords running through water where employees were standing this was back in 2012 so we opened we did an opening conference like Emily said before we went through the process what I learned from when I first walked in is the company was dry cutting their tile and granite the first question from an IH is why why are we still in the Stone Age of dry cutting most companies are going to a wet process and for this individual this the owner of the company his thought was I was trained on doing it this way for 30 years I'm treating these guys the same way I was and his thought was it was more of a hazardous condition - wet cut because of the fear of spraying the water into the employees face and getting all over the safety glasses so I went ahead and started and one of the other thing too is employees were providing their own personal protective equipment they did not have any health and safety programs there they did have a lot of electrical issues in or what polishing area so I did some area sampling this all operator was good the web polisher was good it was my fabricator he had a very high over exposure in four hours okay so this is time weighted adding in my beautiful extra zeros they get for the other four hours in four hours he was five times the permissible exposure limit okay so as you can see let's see if I can get this point or going okay so this is my what polisher right here this is your saw operator right here and this was my fabricator and I'm not sure if you can see it all that well but the guy was covered in white I had some darker jackets on I had white all over he just from touching things so there's still exposure was quite high as you could have seen from the sample results as well okay so these are some plain view hazards that I have to dress all I'm out there so we're gonna go through these a little quick but here is a unguarded saw and how I knew he was unguarded cuz I had I ended up watching the cell operator over there as it's running moving a stencil around trying to line up and cut perfectly his his his product so he was exposing himself right to the blade so this is a plain view hazard we had to address simple things mid rails open sided floors make sure you're guarding these things put the guard put the mid rails on put the guard up there these are simple things you can do in-house and avoid a citation okay okay this is my my electrical so we started off a lot of her electrical problems but put in a shower curtains not really going to protect all that much from wetness um so this was this was they had a lot of her problems with the electrical but this was just the start of it as you can see we had to cite him for not marking the equipment for not having install the correct circuit breaker switched switchboards any wet location another thing is everything was her reverse polarity so I'm dealing with not only not hanging things suited for what conditions but the polarity was reversed on the electric system okay simple things to blocking your electrical okay do not block your electrical put some lines around give yourself 30 inches away from your panels especially if you're expecting employees to go back there to turn things on and off do not block the exits this is the only exit in there and it's black okay give yourself some clearance make sure people can get to the doors so he issued citations Miura's 15 citations originally issued with three other than serious penalties it wasn't that bad it was about thirty thousand by the time they came in and did the informal we give him a nice break okay what the p oblem was in this situation was that they gave us a date they said I'm gonna get ventilation system some salt I'm gonna correct these things we're still look over exposures you will see OSHA again okay we do follow-ups and because we have to this is a very serious thing taken by us and that's because we have emphasis programs based on it so when we do not get something from you you are not sending an abatement you are not saying as in sample your results you will see me so I went back nothing was corrected I had to do a follow-up inspection in May 2013 I show up they told us they were going to install ventilation in February nothing was installed I had to do additional air sampling once again fabricators were being overexposed within four hours we also had to cite them for not give you the sample result so their employees you need to make sure you're giving if you're doing air sampling if you're doing air monitoring your facility you need to give your sampling results to the employees so they understand what they're being exposed to and how much that is that's a very important thing too so this is one of my employees on the right-hand side this is who doesn't even do an industrial hygiene work okay so for when we do silica sampling we do something we use a system called a cyclone the purpose says is it takes up the light stuff and it puts it on filter the heavy stuff goes on the bottom all right this is my what I'm dumping out of the grip pots okay the grip pots at the bottom section your cyclone that has a ton of dust he's coming out of a grip Pat for four hours I had MDM twice and that was to protect from overfill the over over filling my filters and make sure that my system was running this accurate as possible with my my pump system so that's a that's a lot of dust for us to get in a system all right so we had to reissue citations we issued failure to abate citations failure to abate citations are seven thousand dollars a day for every day you have not abated things okay so by the time we got done we had always failure to abate citations all of these were failure to abate the vile penalties with a second case was one hundred thirty six thousand four hundred dollars and this is detrimental on a small company but the thing is they knew what they were supposed to be doing we walked him through we gave them programs we setup deadlines we did as much as we could to make sure we kept them on track and when you don't answer our phone calls one you don't send us in petition to modify abatement dates we come back okay so stay in communication with your compliance officers if you're having an OSHA inspection keep in touch what was done we got the ventilation system installed and everything was corrected okay this whole second inspection could have been alleviated if we would have done what was supposed to be done in the beginning okay anybody have any questions on this one we were good to go although we may be has the new silica standard me change that also any other questions okay look at the Howie's favorite okay so this is another one I did this one was a very interesting case because of the whole process of how the legal system gets involved in the OSHA side of it in current that means our solicitors attorneys court proceedings warrants that kind of thing this company was a waste recycling company it took in your general trash but including hospital waste and the importance of his cases we're going to go over how warrants work why not to falsify your documents this in case you wondered depositions how OSHA once we issue citations we still have the right to amendment okay and how court here in proceedings work and what the end what our judge found in the final decision it's a little background on the company there are a larger facility about 80 employees they had been previously inspected by ocean 2010 mm-hmm and then I showed up in 2012 this current complaint that I was out on in 2012 was alleging that employees were not provided puncture resistant gloves and the employees were being exposed to use hospital needles it's kind of worried but bear with me so I show up on site in 2012 and I meet with the plant manager part of our proceedings is we do ask for a document request if you know we're having some issues with getting me out and you know on the plant floor we'll go through some documents I'll ask for certain things we've request health and safety programs so during the opening conference the company provided me some provided me a health and safety binder which contained Health and Safety meeting agendas corresponding training sign offs and so I went ahead and answer four copies of things the planet manager who I was meeting with was also their health and safety manager he was in charge of conducting training he was in charge of maintaining the records and the records that he had provided me he said where whose most recent records this is what he had been doing so what happened is after the opening conference after I collected these basic documents they told me go get a warrant all right the company has the right to deny us under and it has those gives us the right to deny entry they can deny us when we first walk in the door they can denies employ interviewing employees they can deny us from walk in the facility what I have to do is go meet with a federal judge and given the reasons why I should be able to get in this on his property with a warrant so I met with thee so took about 33 days between the opening conference and to return with a federal warrant so between those 33 days we get back we do a walk around we do some employee interviews and what we've learned from the employees is that boys were not being trained on the blood-borne pathogen program there was no annual training on the blood-borne pathogen program for older employees some employees had had B vaccines some of them didn't they had no PPE training the PPE was ankle ppyou was inadequate there was no annual fire extinguisher training and they were having about six to ten fires a quarter and now it's just because of the amount of material they were getting in so they're having these little fires all over the place and they were having needle sticks so we had a variety of a variety of things we're learning through employee interviews these employees were manually sorting on conveyors wasting so when you put your trash in a black bag there would be somebody you know it gets thrown on the line and somebody would come up with a box cutter and cut it open and the trash would fall out and the people would sort through me annually work through the trash pick up some metals put it here some larger items they take off and throw down another shoe so we had people handling this garbage but the biggest concern was not so much our daily garbage is it the medical stuff that's coming through listening to some of the stories from these employees of what they were getting in through the metal from the metal Cole Haas local hospitals was you know quite disturbing so the company provided on day two when I showed up when I showed up they had their attorneys there they had the general manager there and they had about five different officials so on day two we do a little we do a closing small closing conference with them kind of tell them what we're seeing we we learn from the employees just kind of give them some ideas of what citations they may be seen just so we can have some type of closure of course during this initial closing the company gets all up in arms says no no no no no I've got more training documents I have got more things for you I said okay well bring him over send it on over to me okay so I gave him some time they had to hunt down these training documents so what happened was that we started noticing when this new drank document started coming in a lot of things were little fishies such as people's names were exactly in the same order but totally different dates the year apart we had people showing up on logs that were no longer weren't even employees yet at the time they weren't even employees at the company so how could somebody be having training and something when it's a year prior to their employment let me let me interject for you go any further and so so I've seen a couple of you before in a professional level you know I'm a nice guy right I mean I deal straight with people so when Janelle brings this information to us you know we had a couple options number one is is we pulling the managers in here and ask him the questions do a deposition and then slip the the falsified records in front of them and slam dunk and now I've worked with this attorney before and I said you know what we talked with our attorneys I said I'm gonna call this guy's because maybe he doesn't know maybe he unbeknownst to him he provided me with some documents that weren't necessarily representing what they were saying they were doing so I called this gentleman and I said okay can you we're looking I think you need to look at them and talk to the employer and say see that that that these are representative of what you want to send us because it looks like they're not accurate so I played the nice guy because I am a nice guy I swear to you and so it gave them a chance you know to be forthright and retract this but this started getting you know very suspicious because I'm like wait a second I'm flipping through all these documents I mean that's another thing Tuesday tried to drown us in documents go ahead drown me because I'm gonna sit there and I'm gonna pick through each one because I'm a very thorough person in and then I started looking at names okay I knew people's hire dates and that's when things started definitely foreseeing that there was you know other things are going on um so of course I'm wondering why are people showing up on logs when obviously they weren't there I have unearthing tools you could tell that they weren't even really good false not to falsify document you could tell things were changed on them so for the reasoning of why they falsify them you know we started to ask these questions and of course a plan manager throws his hands up it said I didn't do it I said okay you didn't do it who did he blamed a dead secretary yeah so during the course of my inspection the secretary passed away she had cancer and I'm sitting there going that's that's pretty low that's the low with the low you're blaming somebody who's on their deathbed for taking those last couple weeks of her life to come in and falsify those documents that was low and you know of course I can't interview her I can't ask questions so it's like you know how this is your explanation so we did an initial citations of we issued five repeats and one serious citation the nice guy Howie 34,000 we were nice this was nice okay a couple months later we weren't so nice this is what the initial penalties were they were issued we were scheduled for a hearing in June 4th 2013 so what we did was we did depositions that's part of what our attorneys do they'll go drag the compliance officers in we'll sit down with the companies our managers or attorneys will ask some questions during the course of the deposition were things came to light suddenly new programs came to light and definitely we could tell that there was some falsification going on so our attorneys said you know what we're gonna reinvent these citations so we we amended the original citations for us to amend the citations we need to go to the federal judge and say we want to change what we originally issued we changed it we went from thirty four thousand a two hundred and thirty one thousand and then we went to court this is a citation grid of kind of what you know how we issued things what changed you can see we went from seven thousand to 70,000 showing some how things were grouped okay so that's where the that's where the 231 came out so what you're hearing um we spent two days in court the solicitor subpoenaed several of our employees that we had done interviews with and the company brought in management i sat on the stand for two days and the company's argument was that they had the deceased secretary made the false documents that they did the train and that the employees misunderstood OSHA's questions and that the employees were illiterate okay because I had to have them you know read their statements they were trying to argue that the employees couldn't read so of course the judge is going to give him a piece of paper and say read this and that's what that judge did he's to Hannam the employees papers and ask them to read in they were not illiterate they weren't quite able to read their own statements their stories have changed a year later from one extreme to the other and so everything came down to that first day you know those first set of interviews for me that's when employees minds are the freshest for us we get you know really good statements from him it's not a year later when they come into a courtroom if they even go into a courtroom that's usually when things have changed and they do they change for the company so what are they of happening is we have won and affirmed all butts won citations in court this company went from thirty thousand dollars to two hundred thirty one thousand just because we had to amend the citations we lost one one citation and that was the only one we lost was for the hepatitis B vaccination and that was because some of the employees that we they didn't have records of the employees had previous Hep B vaccines from another improvement that we were able to hunt down the records so we ended up losing that one but that was okay because in the end we want all the other ones it was a good case but you don't want to falsify documents be honest yeah in a couple other things that that came out you know in I've heard this and a couple of the other sessions the judge is going to do a credibility determination on the witness statements a couple things that came out were there earlier statements that the Jenelle had taken and they changed them it also came out that the witnesses that testified on the company's behalf that we're still employees were driven to the hearing by the manager so maybe not maybe not the smartest it could be perceived that the manager is is intimidating them and I think that the judge noted that in the decision now this to be fair to the company that this was this was appealed the decision was final and it is public record but the company has appealed appealed that decision turn next to the review commission so don't falsify just just say you didn't train them we've we've got an interview statement if you don't have the records if they if they we've had cases where they've forgotten to sign them and they did do the thing but this was a little little extreme so but but this the last Center it also says is when we issue a citation it's not a final order yet so it's very important that you come into the informal ironically I had offered this company it was around twenty some thousand to settle just to correct their stuff ah they didn't take it they were adamant that they were right and they had done all this training but you know that that's fine we can amend those things so if we get additional information that supports changing the violations and we can change it if we issue the wrong citation and you come in and argue well you shoulda sided 247 into or you know whatever instead of two twelve all right we'll go ahead and change that but what we want to get to is the the hazard and make sure it's correct it properly so any other questions about that case or anything one minute to go yeah the question was can individuals get charged for falsifying documentation yes we've been using it more we didn't use it in this case it can be done and we've had criminal prosecutions for falsifying the information our the US Attorney's very interested in these cases and we are pursuing them more thank you very much thanks Jenelle and enjoy the rest of compass