Search Our Site

Neil Eckelberger and his wife Robin want to know why Travelers Indemnity Company would schedule a doctor appointment for Neil 60 miles away, when there are several physicians he could see nearby. "Going to New Port Richey is over 123 miles for us round trip," Robin said. But Neil has no choice. He suffered severe injuries in a workplace explosion in Sept. 2017. According to state law, Travelers, his employer's workers' compensation insurance carrier, calls the shots. Click to read more:

A Florida landscaping company faces a $16,108 fine from OSHA after a worker died in temperatures around 100 degrees last August. Nakomis-based Olin Landscaping had a clean OSHA record for at least the five years before Saturday, Aug. 25. The Department of Labor says the heat index that afternoon got up between 97 and 103 degrees as Olin's workers tended to a house on Marigold Road in Venice. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration described the tragedy: "An employee was using a lawn edger for approximately six hours and began to feel lightheaded. The employee was placed in the shade and given a sports beverage and water to drink. The employee began to feel better and went back to work where he soon passed out and unresponsive. The employee began to have 'seizure-like' activity and experienced multiple organ failure, severe dehydration, and hyperthermia." Click to read more:

It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye, and an expensive worker’s comp claim is kicked into motion. In the course of the work day, it’s easy to forget to wear safety googles, glasses, or face shields. Ask the 2,000 people a day who injure their eyes on the job. 10 – 20% go blind, either temporarily or permanently. OSHA determined that in 90% of the accidents, the correct eye protection would have prevented the injury. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) notes that 70% of eye injuries at work are caused by flying or falling objects or sparks striking the eye, and estimates that nearly three-fifth of the objects were smaller than a pinhead. Something as simple as wearing the proper eye protection could prevent 90% of eye injury claims, so why doesn’t anyone want to wear it? There are three main factors, poorly fitting, uncomfortable equipment which hinders vision, little to no training about the proper eyewear, and worker self-consciousness. Getting Comfortable You, as the employer, are responsible for making sure your crew has the right eye protection. When it comes to safety glasses, one size doesn’t fit all. Many employees complain about their eye protection not fitting properly. Common complaints include glasses that are too tight, which can lead to headaches, lose fitting glasses that slide off, scratches, and blurry lenses which impede vision, and leads to eye fatigue. In Florida, fogging glasses is a big concern. If workers are too busy paying attention to adjusting safety glasses, it slows down the speed and overall quality of work. Poorly fitting glasses can be a safety risk too, when the wearer is focused on the glasses and not on the task at hand. Having adjustable, comfortable eyewear can drastically improve a worker’s compliance to PPE safety rules. When buying safety equipment, employers should take into consideration the suitability for job conditions, and a fair combination of protection and comfort. Training Do your workers know what type of eye protection to wear and when? BLS reported that while the vast majority of employers furnished eye protection, about 40% of the workers received no training on when and what kind of eyewear to use. Specific tasks call for the correct eye and face protection. While wearing at least some eyewear helps, the proper type could prevent or minimize injuries even further. Eliminating Excuses When personal protection equipment is uncomfortable and unattractive, worker compliance drops. The most common excuses are: “They’re uncomfortable.” “I look stupid.” “They look ridiculous.” “I’ve never needed it before.” “It’s not necessary, the employer is just doing a CYA.” “I can’t find it.” “I don’t have the time.” “It won’t happen to me.” “I don’t want to.” “I forgot.” Excuses stem from avoidance for taking responsibility, why they don’t understand why they should do something, or lack of motivation to change habits. The most cost effective way (link to article: Personal Protection Equipment: Reducing Costs Not Safety) to make sure your workers are wearing comfortable eye protection is to let them buy the necessary eyewear so it fits properly, and to reimburse the employee for the purchase. If the worker feels like they made the choice based on their comfort and style, they’re more likely to wear it. It gives the worker a sense of control, instead of feeling oppressed or forced. Another way to get company-wide compliance is to make sure that the supervisors set a clear example, and that the most respected team members wear safety glasses, and talk to their co-workers about why the protection is needed. This makes it clear to the rest of the crew that the right thing to do is to wear protective eyewear. Tips to Prevent Workplace Eye Injuries Identify areas and tasks that present eye hazards by inspecting all work areas, tasks and equipment for eye hazards. Workers need protective eyewear that fits well and is comfortable. Have eyewear fitted by an eye care professional or someone trained to do this. Provide repairs for eyewear and require each worker to be in charge of their own gear. Have ongoing safety talks to highlight the need for protective eyewear. Add eye safety to your regular employee training programs and to new employee orientation. Make sure everyone understands not only why they need to wear eye protection, but which type of eyewear is designed for the specific task or hazard. During training or safety meetings, review your company policy on discipline for failure to use PPE. Talk about how the costs of injuries and downtime will affect them. If workers get the proper training, understand why they need to wear eye protection, and have a say in choosing it, they’re more likely to take their safety seriously.

Lifting objects or manually handling materials puts workers at risk for back injuries. More than 111,000 such injuries requiring days away from work were recorded in 2017, according to Injury Facts, an online database created by the National Safety Council. What can employers and workers do to prevent them? Risk prevention “When efforts to prevent injuries from [manual material handling] focus on only one risk factor, they do not significantly reduce the injury rate,” the Canadian Center for Occupational Health and Safety states. “A more successful approach combines knowledge of ergonomics, engineering, the work environment, and human capabilities and limitations.” CCOHS recommends eliminating or decreasing demand for heavy manual material handling tasks, reducing stressful body movements and the pace of work, increasing rest breaks, and improving environmental conditions. Click to read more.

Florida has more than 41,191 pending immigration court proceedings underway. New data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a research organization out of Syracuse University which tracks federal agencies, show about 6,000 of those cases are in central Florida and the Tampa area, with the majority in Orange and Hillsborough counties. Miami-Dade County has 11,380 cases, the highest in the state. Click here to read more:

Immigration officials on Wednesday arrested some 280 employees of a North Texas tech company suspected of knowingly hiring illegal immigrants, the largest such single-company sweep in 11 years. More than 200 law enforcement personnel took part in the operation at CVE Technology Group in Allen, north of Dallas. Officials said the company refurbishes and repairs telecommunications equipment, including cellphones. "The numbers of the administrative arrests we made today hint at the significant scope of this criminal investigation," Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Special Agent in Charge Katrina Berger said at a news conference. Berger said investigators had worked on the case for "at least a year" after receiving "many tips that they [CVE] were hiring illegal aliens who were using fraudulent documents." Click to read more:

The threats that make enclosure thermal management necessary to begin with reach the height of their destructive energies all at once, once a year, in the summertime. While some logistics of manufacturing become vastly less complicated in the summer sun, several interrelated changes in the weather threaten the critical electronics that allow production lines to operate. These factors—heat, debris, and moisture—must be planned for and neutralized. Fortunately, with the right equipment, staying ahead of summer conditions to ensure maximum up-time requires relatively few and simple interventions. Best practices for getting the most out of electrical cooling equipment in the summer months center on two basic steps: set up equipment right and perform preventive maintenance. Click to read more

The wire shouldn’t have been “hot.” But someone forgot to turn off the electrical boxes at the strip mall Joseph Barrs had been hired to help remodel. When the sheet of thin metal mesh that Barrs was holding touched an uncapped electrical wire, the blast of current knocked him backward off a seven-foot scaffold onto the concrete below. “When my head hit the concrete, I just saw a ball of fire and that’s all I remember,” Barrs said in a recent interview. A Naples police officer who responded to the scene wrote that she found Barrs “lying on the ground, shaking, and drifting in and out of consciousness.” He woke up in a hospital bed at the Lee Memorial Hospital in Fort Myers three hours later, having been taken there by air ambulance. His ordeal was just beginning. Click here to read more:

Six men working for a Deerfield Beach general contracting firm are accused of avoiding millions of dollars in worker's compensation premiums and payroll taxes in an intricate multi-year fraud. The owners of Richard and Rice Construction LLC and four others were arrested this week on suspicion of taking part in the scheme that used shell companies to hide employee wages, according to a Broward Sheriff's Office arrest affidavit. Click here to read more:

A dangerous fraud scheme has infiltrated the construction industry in Florida over the last several years. Usually involving residential home building, it started in South Florida but has swept northward to encompass most major cities in the state. The scheme revolves around “shell companies,” which on the surface look legitimate and have proper workers comp coverage, but in reality are operating a giant pool of off-the-books labor and are hiding millions of dollars of unreported payroll. Click here to read more:

Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis and the Department of Financial Services (DFS) today announced the recent arrest of Carlos Contreras, owner of DJC Builders & Construction. Contreras allegedly obtained a fraudulent workers’ compensation policy by underreporting the number of staff he employed, the company’s annual payroll amount and the company’s scope of work. By providing false information on the application, Contreras illegally avoided paying more than $1,000,000 in premium payments for an adequate policy. Click here to read more:

The U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has cited Action Concrete Construction Inc. for exposing its employees to fall hazards and eye injuries. The company faces proposed penalties of $59,864. During its investigation of the company’s Panama City Beach worksite, OSHA inspectors identified one willful violation for failing to install guardrails or use personal fall arrest systems while employees worked at a height of 11 feet. OSHA also cited the company for allowing employees to use a pneumatic air gun without proper eye protection. The inspection was part of OSHA’s Regional Emphasis Program for Falls in Construction. Click to read more: