Chipping away at safety

Tuesday, May 20, 2008 | 2:07 a.m.

A once-mandatory safety precaution at high-rise construction work sites was all but dropped three years ago following an interpretation of regulations by a federal agency.

The agency sending out the interpretation was the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which reason dictates would be interested in strengthening protections for workers, not weakening them.

But over the past several years OSHA has been sending directives to its field offices across the country that contain new interpretations of long-standing regulations, interpretations that often undermine safety.

Las Vegas Sun reporter Alexandra Berzon, whose ongoing investigation of construction safety on the Strip has included accounts of the accidents that have killed 10 workers in 17 months, disclosed OSHA’s practice of reinterpreting its regulations in a story in Sunday’s edition.

Berzon focused on one new interpretation of a safety rule that had been in place for decades. In high-rise construction, to prevent a worker from falling through temporary decking and dropping several stories to almost certain death, the rule had been to always place safety netting, or decking, not more than 30 feet below work areas.

But OSHA reinterpreted that once hard and fast rule, saying it is unnecessary if workers wear harnesses tethered to beams or other secure structures.

At least two of the deaths profiled by Berzon at Strip construction sites might have been prevented if safety nets had been installed. Harnesses are not always worn, nor are they always tethered to secure structures, as Berzon’s reporting has shown.

The local business agent of the International Association of Ironworkers raised this issue in a letter to Nevada’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Not all states have their own OSHAs, but those that do are supposed to have regulations equally as stringent as the federal OSHA’s.

But they can also have regulations that are more strict. Berzon reported that California’s OSHA, for example, never relaxed its safety net rule. Nevada OSHA should show that kind of independence, too, and reject any reinterpretation that would compromise worker safety.