Solar Installer’s Death Points to Job Hazards in a Growing, Green Industry

[Dead_Parrot]

Hans Petersen took a deadly misstep in April while checking his work on a rooftop solar power installation atop a Northern California public housing complex. Petersen, working without a safety harness or a barrier to prevent a fall, tumbled off the pitched roof and landed three stories below on a concrete walkway. He was airlifted to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

Following a six-month investigation, California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health is now seeking $26,500 in fines against SolarCity, Petersen’s employer, in connection with the death of the 30-year-old solar panel installer. The company has been cited by the state agency for one “serious” violation of failing to ensure that employees used fall-protection gear.

SolarCity was also cited last week for two “general” violations. According to agency inspectors, the company failed to train supervisors on the safety and health hazards faced by workers at the site and did not provide Cal/OSHA with records demonstrating that any fall-protection program was carried out.

<snip>

No one keeps comprehensive figures on injuries or deaths in the the solar installation industry. However, California health authorities have investigated three workplace deaths in the industry in slightly over two years.

More at http://www.fairwarning.org/2010/10/solar-installers-death-points-to-job-hazards-in-a-growing-green-industry/

Readers comment at the article: "Are any of these installation companies organized? Or are you aware of any ongoing union organizing in the field?" Anyone know?

[AlecBGreen]

1. 3 deaths in two years?

I would bet cash money that more people have choked to death on fishbones in the same time period.

Not to minimize their deaths or the need for safety, but whats the point? Any job in the trades (welding, electricity, etc) carries an inherent risk of injury or death.

[madokie]

2. casting asparagus

[Dead_Parrot]

3. well, it's hardly armageddon

But as the article points out, "installing solar panels combines three of the most injury-prone jobs — roofing, carpentry and electrical work — making it particularly risky". Hard to tell, though, as nobody is looking.

I did think - perhaps optimistically - than on a board where we have dozens of threads about the theoretical dangers of eating the mud at Vermont Yankee, actual dead people might spark a tiny bit of sympathy or interest.

Apparently, we don't give a shit.

Oh well.

[madokie]

4. Read a little of this for some light on an injury prone occupation

http://www.osha.gov/SLTC/healthcarefacilities/training/activity_1.html

If we're going to be talking about dangerous as in getting hurt work.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

PURPOSE: To understand why nursing home work can be hazardous to your health.

TASK:

You have just been to a training program on back injury prevention. You go back to your facility and a co-worker asks you what you learned. You tell her that nursing home work causes more injuries than construction or mining. She doesn't believe you. She says that younger workers aren't "tough" enough and that many workers are too careless these days.

Please answer the following questions. Refer to at least two factsheets in this chapter in your response.

1. What do you say to her? List three or four responses.


2. Why has the back injury rate gotten worse over the past 10 years? List three or four responses.


Fact Sheet 1

Good news, bad news and back news

Caring for yourself helps you care better for your residents. You don't have to care until it hurts. Getting hurt is not part of the job. Our jobs can be safer. Unsafe jobs should be fixed before you find yourself out on your back.

THE BAD NEWS

Nursing home work can be dangerous work. What you do for a living may lead to more back injuries than working in construction, in a warehouse, or even a coal mine.1

In 1993, nearly 17 out of every 100 nursing home workers lost work time due to an illness or injury on the job. That's a total of 216,400 injuries and illness with untold pain and suffering.2 Only meat processing plants and car manufacturing plants had more injuries.

The number of back injuries mentioned here only count the reported injuries. The true number could be much higher. One study of nursing personnel showed that only one third of those workers who had back pain on the job filed and incident report.3 Most used their own sick time. Many workers are afraid they will lose their jobs if they report an incident. They simply can't afford to be sick.

THE BACK NEWS

One out of every four injuries in general industry are due to back sprain and strain. Yet back and shoulder injuries are responsible for 54 percent - over half - of all injuries and illnesses among nursing assistants.4 While the number of back injuries is going down in manufacturing, the number has gone up among nursing assistants over the last 10 years.

Fact Sheet 2

Big, getting bigger, and growing fast

Nursing homes are the fastest-growing part of the health-care industry. People are living longer. The Census Bureau says that 40 years from now there will be 70 million over age 65. Nine million of them will be over age 85. That's three times as many people over age 85 as we have today.5 More old people means more nursing homes. That's plenty of new jobs for nursing assistants.

GROWING PAINS

Sicker residents are entering nursing homes. Many hospitals are shortening the length of a hospital stay because of changes in medical procedures, lack of money, or lack of beds. Medicare also limits the number of hospital days that it will pay for.

Many elderly hospital patients are too sick to go home. But they can't afford to stay in a hospital with the expensive daily price tag. Nursing homes are the solution.

Some nursing home industry studies guess that 10 to 20 percent of acute-care hospital patients can be moved out of hospitals and into nursing homes which provide some of the care found in hospitals, but at a lower cost.6 This is called sub-acute care.

These sub-acute patients are becoming nursing home residents. This changes the kind and amount of work that will be done by nursing assistants in nursing homes.

Nursing home owners are excited. This new group of elderly residents is worth up to $10 billion in new money for the nursing home industry.7 But what does this mean for nursing assistants?

* Sicker residents
* More dependant residents
* More lifting and transferring
* More risk of getting a sprain or strain injury


Fact Sheet 3

Losing Time

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, nearly 80 percent of all back and shoulder injuries are due to handling and transferring residents. In other words, nearly 80 percent of all back injuries are related to overexertion from lifting, pulling, pushing, holding, carrying, and turning motions.8

Altogether, more than 66,500 injuries that resulted in days away from work were reported among nursing assistants in 1992.9 In some cases, many days, weeks, or months were spent away from work. This lost time hurts:

* the income of the injured worker
* the families who depend on the hurt worker
* residents who suffer from lack of care
* the employer who must pay for replacement help

In addition, the cost of workers' compensation premiums rises.

REMEMBER: Most injuries aren't reported. What we see is the tip of the iceberg. And what we're seeing is high enough.

Fact Sheet 4

Dropping like Flies

Nursing assistants do nearly all of the lifting, transferring, and heavy work in a nursing home. High staff turnover is a big problem in nursing homes. Many nursing assistants quit before their first year is up. A big turnover in nursing home staff means lots of problems for everyone.

When the staff turnover is high, patient care is affected. There are fewer experienced and well-trained staff. If not enough nursing assistants or equipment are available on a shift, workers tend to do the heavy lifting alone.

Why do nursing assistants quit?

* Low pay
* Stressful working conditions
* On-the-job injuries.

BARELY SURVIVING

In one year in Wisconsin, one out of three full-time nursing assistants had been at their present job less than a year.10 Wisconsin is just like other states. High turnover tells us what is really going on.

Fact Sheet 5

The stakes are high

Prevention of back injuries is smart business. Management can save lots of money.

* Individual back injury claims have cost as much as $90,000. Run-of-the-mill claims can cost $15,000 to $118,000.11 Your employer pays in a couple of ways:

1. Increased workers compensation costs

2. Cost of hiring and training replacement workers.

* Nursing home work is hazardous and expensive. Just ask any insurance company. In Pennsylvania, nursing homes paid almost five times more in workers' compensation premiums than hospitals.12
* The nursing home industry paid $1 billion in workers' compensation insurance costs in 1994.13 The average size nursing home lays out $50,000 to $100,000 per year for insurance.14 We sure could fix a lot of workplace safety problems with that kind of cash.

And we provide a big chunk of that money-Taxpayers pay into the Medicare system. Medicare pays for most (75 percent) of the inpatient days for residents in nursing homes.15

Fact Sheet 6

Solutions that work: Companies can save money

Nursing home operators who have started back injury programs have found these programs can prevent injuries and save money.

* A nursing home in Wisconsin was studied to see which job tasks were most stressful to nursing assistants. These stressful tasks changed when nursing assistants were given new equipment and were trained to use it properly. During the 12 months of the study, injuries dropped 43 percent. There was also a big drop in lost or restricted workdays.16

* The Kennebec Long Term Care facility in Maine lost 573 work days in 1991. By 1994, the number of lost days had dropped to 25. How? A back injury prevention program was put into place. Workers were told never to lift alone. Twelve new lifts were bought after nursing assistants chose the kind they wanted. Kennebec's management said they would make money from the program even if only two injuries were prevented.17

* Meridian Healthcare Company saved $800,000 in workers' compensation premium costs in 1993 after starting a back injury prevention program.18

Summary

Can nursing home work be hazardous to your health?

1 The nursing home business is the fastest-growing part of the health-care industry. People are living longer. They are also being transferred out of hospitals more quickly. This means more sick and dependent residents will be entering nursing homes.

2 Nursing home work can lead to more back injuries than construction or mining. The number of sprain and strain injuries is skyrocketing. Most of these injuries are due to overexertion from lifting and transferring residents.

3 We only see the tip of the iceberg. The numbers of injuries are really
higher than the numbers show since many workers don't report injuries.
Instead they use their sick time, suffer quietly, or quit their jobs.

4 The turnover among nursing assistants is extremely high. Workers quit because of stressful working conditions. High turnover means short staffing, lifting alone and poor resident care.

5 Back injuries are costing nursing home owners a lot of money. Some injury prevention programs can save a lot of money. Preventing injuries is smart business. Everyone would benefit.

[Dead_Parrot]

5. was there a point to that? nt

[madokie]

6. My point was that nursing home care givers is a very injury prone job

'installing solar panels combines three of the most injury-prone jobs — roofing, carpentry and electrical work'

in other words many jobs are injury prone so I ask you what was the point of your post, really and not your stated one.

[Dead_Parrot]

7. Sorry, it really was as stated

You can pull out the OSHA sheet for caregivers because there is one: You can't for solar installers because as far as OSHA are concerned, it's not a job - I think they get lumped in with A/C installers. So no government figures, and from the sound of it no union figures.

Meanwhile, an increasing number of new installers are going out with inadequate training and some of them aren't coming back.

This isn't some call to shut down teh evul solar industry - a bit of regulation should sort it out - but it is a problem: At least I thought so, but it seems we're all carefully not looking at it.

[madokie]

11. Alrighty then

I see, my bad :blush:

[Dead_Parrot]

13. I should think so too

I mean, I never make assumptions about posters' motives.

Ahem.

(coughbullshitcough)

:)

[NNadir]

9. Well, given that this is a continuously tiny and useless form of energy and given the fact that...

...the semiconductor industry is notable for having its toxicity issues swept under the rug, it is significant.

This is a very dirty industry, and the only reason that this fact is not noticed is that the industry is tiny and insignificant, and hasn't done much.

The figures for the United States for 2008 tell the whole story:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/solar.renewables/page/trends/table1.html

After more than 50 years of mindless oblivious cheering, the whole industry can't produce 0.1% of US energy demand.

Heckuva job.

[struggle4progress]

8. Common industrial accidents like this happen at nuke plants too

I once downloaded, one at a time, a thousand or so NRC reports covering a few years, just to see what was happening. People died in falls from ladders, morons came to work drunk and drove their cars into ditches, the whole reactor operator crew went to lunch and left the control panel unattended ...

[Dead_Parrot]

10. Two things spring to mind:

The first is, since nuclear power generates about a thousand times more energy than solar, one would expect the death toll at nuclear plants to run into the thousands per year if the two are equally safe. I haven't checked, but I'm pretty sure that's not the case.

But, that's just me being annoying. A more salient point is that you were actually able to download a thousand or so reports from the NRC, because the reports actually exist.

[struggle4progress]

12. If you can actually produce a good estimate of comparable death rates for all accidents,

that would be of interest. The nuclear plants are large very complicated facilities, and the amount of engineering and construction is significant, as is the industrial production required to keep the plants in working order, So a meaningful comparison of industrial casualty rates for nuclear and solar really would require examining a large number of component manufacturers, probably spread out over a number of countries, as the US industrial base has largely been outsourced. One naturally expects the spectrum of accidents to differ, so simply examining a single class of accidents, (say, "deaths from falls") may not provide a very good indication of the casualty issues

The NRC reports exist, of course, because anti-nuclear activists kicked and screamed to make such information available to the public. In my childhood, the nuclear industry and the weapons industry were handled by one and the same regulatory agency, the old Atomic Energy Commission, which largely applied the same national security considerations to weapons and power plant operations. One should also note that much less information has been available in the last decade, since the Bush administration moved to limit access to such information

[Dead_Parrot]

14. If I could actually produce a good estimate of comparable death rates for all accidents,

It would be a miracle. ;)

Even if the accidents are separated out, as you say you then hit the problem of where to draw the boundaries as you work up the supply chains. It's akin to doing full life-cycle analyses, which provides plenty of people with full time work... Still, might be fun to have a stab at some point.

[wtmusic]

18. Deaths per TWh for all energy sources

http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-sources.html

It does make some unverifiable assumptions, but the statistics behind them are sound.

[kristopher]

19. That blog is garbage by a pronuclear idiot.

Go to post 15 below (or follow the link below) to the IAEA pub on mortality for coal and nuclear to see an example of the "sound" "statistics" that the moron used.

http://www.informaworld.com/index/02X48X98DVPW7U96.pdf

H
The number of fatalities associated strictly with the nuclear fuel chain varies widely according to the study, but ExterneE is widely reconginzed and it arrives at 2.6 deaths/TWh excluding major accidents (see remark below on accidents). Estimates rage as high as 23 deaths/TWh for nuclear.

[Dead_Parrot]

20. I've seen that before...

...and whilst he has a good go, it does involve a degree of ass-pulling: I'm inclined not to put too much faith in his figures.

[struggle4progress]

21. I'm not trying to be a smart-ass: people are morons on roofs

I did roofing work for a living, off and on, years ago, and since then I've been on plenty of Habitat roofs

About twenty years back, I volunteered for a worker-safety nonprofit and read part through part of their little (then current) library. There was a bulletin about a rash of fatalities among skylight installers: the guys putting in these plastic bubble skylights would sit on them at breaktime, the plastic would collapse, and the worker would fall into the building. Bad enough in a house, I suppose, but lots of these were skylights in big flatroof industrial buildings, and the fall might be thirty or forty feet onto concrete or industrial machinery

I helped a neighbor re-roof his house a while back. Everybody thought they knew what they were doing, but they didn't. Before you start laying tarpaper, the roof is just slick plywood, which offers little friction, and it's important to keep it clean from sawdust and nails and other debris you can slide on, because if you start sliding, you may not stop -- and the same for tools: they'll slip right down and bomb anybody below. They didn't keep it clean, and one guy even brought up a seven or eight year old family member, who didn't have any business up there :scared:

In many contexts, familiarity breeds carelessness

[Dead_Parrot]

22. Yeah, I've seen similar

Not on roofs, but during my younger days I spent a lot of time rock climbing: I know of a few people who have carefully scaled a cliff, then either unhooked from their protection a few feet too soon or started clowning around on the top.

Wheeeeeee.... splat.

Sigh. Cumulative effect now is I have to resist setting up a belay to clear my gutters. And I live in a single story house... :scared:

[kristopher]

15. No solar, but as a starting point here is some analysis on wind coal and nuclear

The meaning of results: Comparative risk assessments of energy options
Wilson, R; Holland, M; Rabl, A; Dreicer, M
IAEA Bulletin , vol. 41, no. 1, pp. 14-18, 1999
Significant progress has been made in both the development of the techniques of comparative risk assessment, and in the
use and interpretation of their results. This is particularly so for the assessment of options for electricity generation and
transport. The results have become a useful aid to decision-making, though they often need to be integrated with other
social, political, and economic issues before any decision may be made. The main controversies for comparative risk
assessment concern global warming for fossil fuels; catastrophic accidents, particularly for nuclear and large hydropower
plants; and high-level radioactive waste disposal. These issues involve technical and complex social and political questions.
However, comparative risk assessment should provide information in a transparent manner so the limitations and strengths of
results are correctly understood.

http://www.informaworld.com/index /02X48X98DVPW7U96.pdf


The number of fatalities associated strictly with the nuclear fuel chain varies widely according to the study, but ExterneE is widely reconginzed and it arrives at 2.6 deaths/TWh excluding major accidents (see remark below on accidents).



For wind we have a good accounting by Paul Gipe, (2006, 2009) who finds that the number derived from considering ALL KNOWN FATALITIES ASSOCIATED WITH WIND (including incidents that strain credulity to attribute them to the technology) as of 2009 is 0.07/TWh. . Also, there is a very strong case to be made for the position that this already low number hugely exaggerates the actual risks associated with the wind industry.
http://www.wind-works.org/articles/BreathLife.html


One of the most significant issues, however, is the typical glossing over of what deaths are attributable to nuclear. This is
typical of the way that omission is dealt with by nuclear proponents (it is an actual quote from a blog posted on DU in support
of nuclear energy). "The World Health Organization study in 2005 indicated that 50 people died to that point as a direct result
of Chernobyl. 4000 people may eventually die earlier as a result of Chernobyl, but those deaths would be more than 20 years
after the fact and the cause and effect becomes more tenuous."

See http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x261466

[wtmusic]

16. Solar is statistically more dangerous than nuclear because of these types of accidents. nt

[kristopher]

17. The last time you said that falsehood you were quoting an idiot at a blog

who had used a number for nuclear that excluded all almost every area of mortality while doing nothing short of simply manufacturing false completely unsubstantiated numbers for solar.

I'm guessing that is still your "source" for the incredible claim you just made.