Recovering from Tropical Storm Harvey will be a dangerous process and can present multiple safety hazards to workers, according to experts.
One of the biggest workplace safety risks will be employees completing unfamiliar tasks in the process of recovering from the storm, which made landfall on the Texas Gulf coast as a Category 4 hurricane.
“You have all kinds of different hazards that recovery and response workers face,” said Jordan Barab, Washington D.C.-based former deputy assistant secretary at the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration. “You have people working on the roof of houses, you have people working in the contaminated water, you’ve got confined spaces, you have people trying to deal with electrical outages, you have people trying to deal with fallen trees, heavy machinery. There is an uncountable number of hazard that can affect workers.”