June 2009

  • ASSE PREVIEW: A Fiesta in Texas
  • EMPLOYEE GIFTS & INCENTIVES:Tonic For Tough Times
  • AEDS & CPR: Both Are Crucial
  • HAND PROTECTION: Why Awareness Matters
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Cover Story

Lessons Learned from Las Vegas

By Mary Watters

June 3, 2008, was not just another hot day on the Las Vegas Strip. After 12 workers died in 18 months on Strip construction projects (an average of one worker every six weeks), some 7,000 construction workers on the CityCenter and Cosmopolitan work sites walked off the job over safety concerns.


Features

Deep in the Heart of Safety

By Marc Barrera

To the thousands of visitors planning to attend the American Society of Safety Engineers' Safety 2009 conference and expo, symbols are valuable tools. At the job site, symbols can warn workers of imminent danger, advise them about proper PPE, or convey the quickest egress route during an emergency.


Buying an AED is Just the First Step

By Hank Constantine

For many organizations, buying automated external defibrillators (AEDs) is the purchase of a bigticket item. For most consumers, a car is a big-ticket item. But buying AEDs is not at all like buying cars, where the effort ends when you park it in your garage for the first time. From then on, all you need to do is drive it around and put oil in it.


It's A Great Time to Try Incentives

By OH&S Staff

Incentive programs demonstrate their power to produce better results during a tough economy, All Star Incentive Marketing President Brian Galonek agrees. In a Jan. 20, 2009, interview with the OH&S editor, he said safety professionals are especially eager to try incentives because they've exhausted the tried-and-true ways of improving safety metrics. Excerpts from the conversation follow.


Grasping Hand Safety

By Robert Pater, Ron Bowles

Whatever can you do to get a handle on safety? Specifically, to prevent injuries to fingers, wrists, hands, and arms that are common to many industries, especially where people use hand tools, assemble, work on machines, lift, load, cut, push, pull, and more?


Vision Testing for the Safety Professional Part 2

By William Margaretta, Barry R. Weissman

Since the publication of our first article ("Vision Testing: A Blind Spot in Occupational Safety," February 2009, page 47), we have been asked many questions, and most people wanted references to the research data.


Personalize Hearing Conservation for Hearing-Impaired Workers

By Theresa Y. Schulz

Workers often don't file for hearing loss compensation until they retire. But with workers staying in the workforce longer, will the compensation bill eventually be larger? There are ways to prevent noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL), even for those workers who may already have some level of hearing impairment.


Departments

We're Waiting

By Jerry Laws

How satisfying it would be to sit down with a few thousand of you at 1 p.m. June 29 inside San Antonio's downtown convention center to hear the new OSHA assistant secretary explain the new cranes and derricks rule at a plenary session of ASSE's Safety 2009. I intend to be there, but one or both of the others almost certainly will not.


Artificial Intelligence