Occupational Safety Engineering Chapter 1

Question 1.14: What disadvantage can be seen in placing the safety and health manager within the personnel department? The growing importance of engineering to workplace safety and health strains the placement of the safety and health manager within the personnel department, which traditionally has little interaction with engineering. This also places the Safety and Health Manager in an adversarial position with enforcement officials. Question 1.18: Compare the missions of OSHA and EPA. Why might the same person within a given industrial plant have the responsibility for dealing with both agencies? OSHA is concerned with hazardous exposures to workers such as worker safety and health. EPA is concerned with hazardous exposures to the public, particularly as these hazards affect the earth, water, and atmosphere. Many safety and health hazards inside the plant and outside are the same, or are caused by the same chemical agents or physical factors. Thus a firm's compliance with both EPA and OSHA regulations are often the responsibility of the same individual. Question 1.23: Discuss the instances where environmental protection can have a positive impact on a firms bottom line. Firms can comply with environmental concerns while simultaneously improving their profitability through: (1) lowering healthcare costs through reductions in employee tobacco use; (2) reducing energy costs through less dependence on petroleum products; (3) achieving preferred government tax status through reductions in carbon emissions; and (4) improved employee health through the use of environmentally safe products (i.e. less reliance on caustic chemicals and processes that produce harmful emissions). Question 1.25: Explain the relationship between green engineering and global warming. Progressive legislation mandating green engineering has been aimed at reducing the use of carbon fuels and their contribution to the global warming problem. This legislation often identifies carbon emissions as a leading cause of global warming. Question 1.27: In the 1960s a movement within the field of safety began to recognize the benefits of lifecycle planning and design. What name has been used to identify this movement? What society has been recognized to be dedicated to this movement? This life-cycle planning movement actually began in the mid1950s with the aerospace industry in California. The movement considered safety as a system to be planned for and considered in every step of the engineering process and it became known as systems safety. Systems safety is especially important in fields where an accident can be catastrophic, such as in airlines, aerospace, and hospitals. In 1964, the Systems Safety Society was chartered in California, and the concept soon spread throughout the United States and to foreign countries. Question 1.35: Explain the three principal reasons that health hazards are more difficult to identify than safety hazards. Health hazards are more difficult to identify than safety hazards because: 1. Industrial hygienists must separate general worker decreases in health from long-term health deterioration due to prolonged exposure to mildly adverse conditions. 2. Health hazards are only identifiable through the use of sophisticated meters and pumps that test for microscopic, insidious, and unseen hazards that can be just as lethal as obvious safety hazards. 3. Signs of occupational illness are often identical to common symptoms arising from normally occurring illnesses encountered off the job.