IowaWatch (https://iowawatch.org/tag/fairwarning/)
Iowa hospital representatives are not surprised by an American College of Emergency Physicians survey revealing that nearly 50 percent of emergency physicians have been physically assaulted on the job. An IowaWatch supplement to a FairWarning story.
Slaps, kicks, bites and curses are daily hazards faced by staff in hundreds of emergency rooms. And the threat of workplace violence seems to be getting worse.
The Justice Department announced a 22-count indictment Thursday against a Nebraska railroad services company and its owners related to an April 2015 explosion that killed two workers and seriously injured a third.
The victims include a Bible college student in Iowa who was bicycling home from work, a 13-year-old Michigan boy riding in his older sister’s car and a Minnesota school bus driver picking up the morning newspaper in front of his home. All were killed in recent years by distracted drivers who had been texting or looking at their GPS. Yet none of the drivers responsible for those deaths spent more than a few days behind bars. Although there are no national statistics on the results of prosecutions brought against distracted drivers who kill or severely injure someone, light punishment appears to be the norm. An informal review by FairWarning of prosecutions of distracted drivers — cases gleaned from news reports over the last five years that involved more than 100 deaths overall –- found that few were sentenced to serve for more than a month or two, or given fines of more than $1,000.
Graham Brown was headed to his job as a computer technician when a drowsy big-rig driver swerved into his path and struck his car, sending it flying off a rural Illinois road and into a field. The effect of the trucker’s firm not having enough insurance coverage was devastating.
The U.S. military and Department of Energy have been allowed to continue the open burning and detonation of explosives and, in a few cases, even radioactive wastes under a 1980 exemption from the Environmental Protection Agency. One of those sites is in Iowa.
The scope of deadly hazards such as texting and drug use by drivers may be underestimated and not adequately addressed because police aren’t collecting enough information at crash scenes, according to a new report.
OSHA has stopped issuing announcements of enforcement actions. One involving John Deere was made public, though, before a news blackout coinciding with the new Trump Administration began, Fairwarning.org reports.
Six years into a national severe violator program – arguably the broadest workplace safety initiative launched during the Obama administration – more than 500 businesses are on a list of bad actors, this Fairwarning.org report reveals.
In April, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention raised to 535,000 its estimate of the number of American children with potentially dangerous levels of lead in their blood. The number of children found to have high levels of lead in their blood has been declining nationally over the past few years. Iowa, too, has seen a decline. In 2008, 624 children were found to have high levels of lead in their blood, data from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention shows. That number dropped to 323 in 2009.