UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

DEPARTMENT OF LABOR

OCCUPATIONAL SAFETY AND HEALTH ADMINISTRATION

ADVISORY COMMITTEE ON CONSTRUCTION

SAFETY AND HEALTH

Thursday, January 24, 2008

The meeting came to order at 8:30

a.m. in Room N3437 of the Frances Perkins

Building, 200 Constitution Avenue, N.W.,

Washington, D.C. Linwood Smith, Chairman,

presiding.

PRESENT:

LINWOOD O. SMITH, Chairman

FRANK MIGLIACCIO,JR., Employee Representative

DALE DAVID HAGGERTY, Employee Representative

ROBERT KRUL, Employee Representative

EMMETT M. RUSSELL, Employee Representative

THOMAS L. KAVICKY, Employee Representative

MICHAEL J. THIBODEAUX, Employer Representative

THOMAS SHANAHAN, Employer Representative

DANIEL D. ZARLETTI, Employer Representative

DAN MURPHY, Employer Representative

KEVIN BEAUREGARD, State Representative

STEVEN D. HAWKINS, State Representative

THOMAS A. BRODERICK, Public Representative

ELIZABETH ARIOTO, Public Representative

MATT GILLEN, Federal Representative

STEVEN F. WITT, Designated Federal Official

TABLE OF CONTENTS

[ITEM]{.underline} [PAGE]{.underline}

**Opening Remarks and Introductions** 3

ACCSH Chair Linwood Smith

**Remarks - Directorate of Construction/** 12

**DFO**

Director Steven Witt

**Remarks - Office of Communications** 18

Veneta Chatmon

**Remarks - New Member Welcome** 23

Assistant Secretary Edwin G. Foulke, Jr.

**DSG - General Industry Standards Update** 54

Directorate of Standards and Guidance

**OSHA\'s Role in National Response Plan** 86

Directorate of Science, Technology,

and Medicine

**OSHA\'s Structural Response Team** 112

OES Director Mohammad Ayub

[Afternoon Session]{.underline}

**MN I-35 Bridge Collapse and OSHA\'s** 135

**Role**

Director MN OSHA Jeff Isakson

Area Director Mark Hysell - Eau

Claire, Wisconsin

**DOC - Standards Update** 185

DOC Deputy Director Noah Connell

**Construction Cooperative Programs** 201

Directorate of Cooperative and State

Programs

**Public Comment** 240

ACCSH Chair/Members of the Public

**ACCSH Governance/Work Group Reports** 239

ACCSH Chair/Work Group Co-Chairs

**Remarks/Reconvene January 25, 2008**

P-R-O-C-E-E-D-I-N-G-S

8:34 a.m.

[Opening Remarks and Introductions]{.underline}

MR. SMITH: Okay. Thank you for your attendance today at the Advisory
Committee on Construction Safety and Health.

We appreciate everyone being here.

Just a little business first. The bathrooms, restrooms are right up the
hall to your left. There\'s a break room on the fourth floor, restaurant
up on the sixth.

Please turn your cell phones on vibrate or turn them off. Reception\'s
not real good in here to start with, but that would help.

The first thing we want to do is go around, and we have a lot of new
members up here, but we want to go around the room and introduce the
members of the committee to start with who are all, I believe, sitting
up here.

The only one not here at present is Tom, and he\'s involved in a medical
situation. He should be here shortly. He is in town. So we should have a
full Board today, and hopefully everyone will be present.

So, the first thing we\'d like to do is go around the room and let
everybody introduce themselves, and let\'s start up here at the head
table.

I\'d like the new members particularly to tell a little bit about
yourself, if you will, and we would appreciate that.

Let\'s start with our solicitor.

MS. SHORTALL: My name is Sarah Shortall. I\'m from the Office of the
Solicitor, and I\'m the counsel for ACCSH.

MR. MURPHY: Dan Murphy, Zurich North America.

MS. ARIOTO: Elizabeth Arioto, Consulting Services. My past experience is
10 years as a nurse. I worked for like 13 years with an ironworking
company as their safety director. I worked for the GC as their safety
director for seven years, and I\'m a consultant.

MR. SMITH: Can everyone hear? Can you hear? Okay.

MR. MIGLIACCIO: Frank Migliaccio, Executive Director, Safety and Health,
for the Iron Workers International, and I represent labor.

MR. HAGGERTY: I\'m David Haggerty. I\'m with the International
Brotherhood of Boilermakers, and I represent labor.

MR. HAWKINS: I\'m Steve Hawkins, Assistant Administrator with the
Tennessee OSHA Program.

MR. RUSSELL: Good morning. Emmett Russell with Operating Engineers,
35-year member.

MR. KRUL: Bob Krul with the United Union of Roofers, and I don\'t want
to say how long I\'ve been there, but I also represent labor.

MR. THIBODEAUX: Mike Thibodeaux, Consultant with the National
Association of Homebuilders.

MR. KAVICKY: Tom Kavicky, Safety Director, out of the Chicago and
Northeast Illinois Regional Council of Carpenters.

MR. ZARLETTI: Dan Zarletti, Vice President of Safety for Kenny
Construction Company in Chicago.

MR. BEAUREGARD: Kevin Beauregard, Assistant Deputy Commissioner, North
Carolina Department of Labor, and a State Representative.

MR. GILLEN: Matt Gillen. I\'m the NIOSH Construction Program
Coordinator.

MR. SHANAHAN: Tom Shanahan. I\'m with the National Roofing Contractors
Association. I\'ve been there for 19 years and responsible for their
health, safety and education-related areas.

MR. WITT: Steven Witt, Director of Construction, OSHA.

MR. SMITH: Linwood Smith, T.A. Loving, Goldsboro, North Carolina, and
I\'m an Employer Representative.

Let\'s start right here and go around, if we would.

MR. CARNEY: Dave Carney, Stonesmith Patented Systems.

MR. SCHNEIDER: Scott Schneider with the Laborers Health and Safety Fund
North America.

MR. BURTON: Richard Burton, NESH Institute.

MR. MIDDLETON: George Middleton, Toll Brothers, Inc.

MR. BIRD: Charlie Bird, Balfour Beatty Construction, Fairfax, Virginia.

MR. TRAUGER: Tom Trauger, Winchester Homes.

MS. SHAFER: Carmen Shafer, Grunley-Walsh, Rockville, Maryland.

MS. TRAHAN: Chris Trahan, CPWR.

MR. DRESSLER: Dick Dressler, the Association of Equipment Manufacturers
in Milwaukee.

MS. BILHORN: Susan Bilhorn, Jacobs Engineering.

MS. MYERS: Michele Myers, the Associated General Contractors of America.

MR. AHAL: Bill Ahal, Alberici Corporation, St. Louis.

MR. HENDRICKS: Mark Hendricks with Weyerhaeuser Real Estate Company.

MR. BRUMBAUGH: Larry Brumbaugh, Maracay Homes.

MR. BETHANCOURT: Jeremy Bethancourt, LeBlanc Building Company.

MR. HOLT: Dave Holt, Pardee Homes.

MR. OLIVA: Joel Oliva, the National Commission for the Certification of
Crane Operators.

MR. BRENT: Graham Brent, also with the National Commission for the
Certification of Crane Operators.

MS. PUNJ: Shweta Punj, Inside OSHA.

MS. MORGAN: Theresa Morgan, also with Inside OSHA.

MS. HANSEN: Heidi Hansen, Law Office of Adele Abrams for ASSE.

MR. IBARRA: Robert Ibarra, Directorate of Construction with OSHA.

MR. MASARICK: John Masarick, Independent Electrical Contractors
Association.

MR. CLOUTIER: Steve Cloutier, Bovis Lend Lease out of Charlotte.

MR. BURKHAMMER: Stew Burkhammer, OSHA today, retired tomorrow.

MR. PARSONS: Bill Parsons, OSHA, Directorate of Construction.

MS. CHATMON: Veneta Chatmon, Office of Communications.

MR. SMITH: Right. That\'s our right hand.

The first thing, if you\'re from the public and you would like to speak
during the public comment period, please sign the list at the back in
order that we can look over that list and see how much time we\'ve got
and try to see if we can accommodate you. Please make sure you sign the
list if you\'d like to speak as a member of the public.

The next thing I\'d like to do just very briefly, and it\'s not much
about it, but if you look in the Federal Register, the mission of our
committee, so to speak, or our mission statement, it says, \"The
aforesaid Section 107 requires the Secretary of Labor to seek the advice
of the advisory committee in formulating construction standards
thereunder.\"

So our role is to provide advice to the Secretary of Labor through this
committee on standards that may be promulgated by them.

With that, I welcome you. It\'s real good to be here. We\'ve not had a
lot of meetings recently. This is the second meeting since I\'ve been
chairman. The first meeting, I was in the hospital, I believe, and did
not make myself. So I\'m extremely glad to be here, extremely glad to be
in good health and appreciate it in a lot of ways.

If you would, to the members, minutes are in your packet. I\'d like for
you to look over them from the last meeting that we had, and I\'d like
to have a motion that we accept those, please.

MR. MIGLIACCIO: So moved.

MR. SMITH: Okay. I have a motion. Is there a second?

MR. KRUL: Second.

MR. SMITH: Thank you. Any discussion?

(No response.)

MR. SMITH: All in favor, please say aye.

(Chorus of ayes.)

MR. SMITH: Thank you. All opposed, likewise.

(No response.)

MR. SMITH: Thank you very much. Yes, Bob?

MR. KRUL: Mr. Chairman, just a point of order. The minutes reflect at
the October 11^th^ and 12^th^ meeting that the minutes of the previous
meeting were not available at that meeting and would be made available
at this meeting, and I only see these minutes.

MR. SMITH: Right. Could someone see if we make those available to the
members of the committee today? We would appreciate that.

I want to recognize Bob Krul, Robert Krul. He is our former chairman. He
was a great chairman. I enjoyed serving on this committee under him, and
I\'m already counting on him as an advisor and told him to please let me
know, keep me straight.

So thank you, Bob, for your years of service, we appreciate it very
much, as chairman. Glad you\'re still on the committee.

MR. KRUL: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

MR. SMITH: At this time, we will call on Mr. Witt to make a few
comments.

[Remarks - Directorate of Construction/DFO]{.underline}

MR. WITT: Thank you, Linwood.

First of all, let me welcome the new members of the committee. Thank you
for agreeing to support our advisory committee. Your service is
appreciated, and thanks to those in the audience who have taken the time
to be with us today and hopefully tomorrow, and we look forward to your
participation during the public comment period.

For those who don\'t know me, I\'ve been the Director of Construction
since October of 2006, but I actually have a long relationship with this
committee.

In 1978, almost 30 years ago, I was the counsel to this committee, the
position that Sarah\'s holding now, and I joined the Department of Labor
in 1972.

Some of my previous responsibilities have been Executive Assistant in
OSHA, Director of Technical Support, Director of Health Standards,
Director of Safety Standards, Director of Standards and Guidance, Deputy
Assistant Secretary, now Director of Construction, and I would like to
say that I\'m very pleased with my current assignment.

I\'ve enjoyed working with those involved in the construction industry.
It\'s been a very interesting and challenging 15 or 16 months, and I
look forward to the next two days.

I think we have a full agenda. We\'ll have reports from a number of the
OSHA directorates and some other discussion items, reports from the work
groups. I think we have a lot of work to do the next two days, and I
believe that it will be a productive meeting and we will be, and Linwood
will mention this later, we will be making plans for our next meeting
and hopefully in the near future, we won\'t be waiting as long as we
have since the last meeting in 2006.

Let me just comment for a moment on the nomination process that we
followed. In January of last year, we published a Federal Register
Notice asking for nominees to this committee and were pleased that we
received over 60 nominees, many of them well qualified.

I\'m extremely pleased on the selections that the Secretary of Labor
made. I think we have an excellent committee, a committee with a lot of
experience in the construction area and a lot that they can do to
support this committee and provide advice to the Assistant Secretary.

Based on that very open process, as we move forward in the future, I
think it\'s the Assistant Secretary\'s intention as we fill vacancies as
they occur, as terms expire, we will continue to make this an open and
as transparent a process as possible so we can attract the most
qualified members to this committee.

And with that, I\'m going to turn it back to Linwood and look forward to
the next two days.

MR. SMITH: Thank you.

MS. SHORTALL: I wanted to make one comment about the nominations for
officers.

I wanted to add one other thing about the nominations process. Assistant
Secretary Ed Foulke has wanted to make the process more transparent and
accessible for anyone who\'s interested in viewing the process and/or in
submitting nominations, and so with this last round of nominations, not
only did we put the nomination request in the Federal Register but
everything that we received in response to that was put into the public
record.

So that at any time, if any person would want to check that and see that
information, they\'d be able to do so and we keep that part of our
ongoing docket system.

With that, I also would remind any person who has an interest in the
future in applying, we will continue to put that in the Federal Register
Notice and we will put it in our docket. So we caution you about
submitting certain types of personal information that you wouldn\'t want
to make public, like your birth dates or your Social Security numbers.

Thank you.

MR. SMITH: Thank you. Also, Stew Burkhammer, Stew left the room to go
get these minutes. There will be a retirement party for him tonight
after work across the street at one of the local restaurants. I\'m sure
all of you know him personally, but they\'ve asked that we contribute
\$10 apiece to help defray the cost. They have him a real nice gift and
snacks provided. It will be a cash bar. We\'re looking for a big crowd.

Is Veneta here? Anyway, we will have someone in the room in a little bit
to take up your money if you\'d like to contribute and you\'d like to go
to that. We would certainly be glad to have you. Look forward to seeing
you there tonight after work.

Okay. Veneta was on the agenda. She did meet with us yesterday and went
over the orientation for the new members. We appreciate that. At this
point, we\'re running a little bit ahead of schedule which is a good
thing.

Okay. Right here is the young lady who can take up your money, if you
would like to contribute \$10 and get on the list to go to the party.

Please, if anyone in the back of the room would like to sign up for
Stew\'s retirement party to go and they\'ve got \$10 they\'d like to
contribute, please. Would you raise your hand if you\'d like to \--

MR. WITT: And it\'s 5 to 7 this evening across the street at this really
fancy bar called My Brother\'s Place. So, tie and jacket required. It\'s
upstairs, and we\'ll begin hopefully right after we finish here.

MR. SMITH: Thank you very much. Raise your hands again so she can see
you. Thank you, Leah.

MR. KRUL: If you don\'t have a gun when you go in, they\'ll search you
and give you one.

(Laughter.)

MR. SMITH: Hopefully we\'re going to have a little fun tonight with Stew
and anybody that\'s been in the safety business 43 years needs a little
special recognition.

Okay. We have Veneta, and you want to just give a little update?

MR. WITT: I assume not all of the members were present yesterday
afternoon when you went over the administrative details for the
committee.

Would you just summarize them? We put you on the agenda for a few
minutes. Just summarize what you discussed yesterday afternoon with the
committee members that were present.

[Remarks - Office of Communication]{.underline}

MS. CHATMON: Basically, I shared with the members that were here the
procedures for doing travel as an ACCSH member. Basically, things have
changed. Everything is done by me and my assistant, Frances Durant, and
all I ask that you do is just contact me with your travel arrangement
plans.

I will put in the TA and process it and e-mail you a copy, and upon your
return to your designated locations, I ask that you send back to me your
hotel receipts and any other receipts over \$75, so a voucher can be
processed for reimbursement.

If you need any additional information, you know, please contact me at
202-693-1912, and Frances\'s number is 202-693-1999.

MR. SMITH: Thank you. Any questions for Veneta?

(No response.)

MR. SMITH: Thank you very much. You now have the minutes of the meeting
that was referenced earlier. Take just a second and look over those, and
we\'d like a motion that they be accepted into the report.

Okay. Do we have a motion that they be accepted into the report?

MR. MIGLIACCIO: I make a motion they be accepted.

MR. SMITH: Thank you, Frank. Is there a second?

MR. GILLEN: Second.

MR. SMITH: Thank you, Matt. All in favor, please say aye.

(Chorus of ayes.)

MR. SMITH: Any opposed, likewise.

(No response.)

MR. SMITH: Thank you. Take just a minute, if you will, and look over the
agenda for the meeting, see if you would like anything added or updated
on the agenda.

Any questions or comments about the agenda?

(No response.)

MR. SMITH: Okay. Thank you very much.

Okay. I noticed earlier at least a couple people in the audience that
have been members of this Board before. I\'d like for them to stand and
anybody else that\'s in the audience that\'s been on this Board. Please
stand. We\'d like to thank them for their years of service.

Of course, Stew was once chairman of this Board. I think Steve, you were
chairman, weren\'t you?

MR. CLOUTIER: I was an acting chairman.

MR. SMITH: Okay. Acting chairman, and Scott Schneider, who just recently
went off. Let\'s give them a hand for serving on this committee.

(Applause.)

MR. SMITH: Thank you. We\'re told that Secretary Foulke will be up in
just a couple minutes. So, we\'re kind of waiting on him at this point.

If anybody on the committee has a comment they would like to make at
this time? Yes, sir, Frank?

MR. MIGLIACCIO: Frank Migliaccio. I have a question.

MR. SMITH: Okay.

MR. MIGLIACCIO: Why did we not have a meeting last year?

MR. SMITH: I am going to defer that to Mr. Witt.

MR. WITT: We did not have a meeting because the decision was made when
we published the Federal Register Notice last January asking for
nominations, and we thought the process would go fairly quickly in
getting selections made by the Secretary of Labor.

The process took longer than we had planned, and the decision was made
by the Assistant Secretary, because he also thought it would move more
quickly than it did, that the next meeting of the committee would be the
committee with the seven new members present, and the decision was made
not to have a meeting with a committee where almost 50 percent of the
members\' terms had expired.

MR. SMITH: Thank you.

MR. WITT: But it is his intention, as I said, he may say this earlier,
it is his intention to hold a meeting in the next several months. So we
will hopefully not have that type of delay again.

MR. SMITH: Thank you. We\'d like for the members of the committee to go
ahead and submit their schedules for the last of April and the first of
May. That is the tentative date that we will be having another meeting
at this point, and please submit that to Michael Buchet, if you would,
and we\'ll hopefully be able to have another committee meeting then.

Thank you, Frank. Any other questions?

(No response.)

MR. SMITH: If everyone would then, let\'s just kind of stand at ease
till Secretary Foulke gets here. Should be just a second. Please don\'t
leave the room. Hopefully he\'ll be coming in very shortly, but just
please feel free to stand up for a second and stretch your legs.

(Whereupon, the foregoing matter

went off the record at 8:55 a.m.

and went back on the record at

9:05 a.m.)

MR. SMITH: I\'m going to carry this gavel home with me. It works better
up here than it does at home. I need something to get people\'s
attention at home. Thank you for your attention.

At this time, it\'s my privilege to introduce to you Assistant Secretary
Edwin Foulke, and he will make a few comments, and I turn it over to
you, Mr. Foulke.

[Remarks - New Member Welcome]{.underline}

ASST. SEC. FOULKE: I\'m going to make comments? Okay. That\'s right.

Good morning. How are you all doing this morning? Hope that
everything\'s going well.

I just kind of wanted to start by welcoming \-- I think there\'s seven
new members to the committee, and also thank the members, the returning
members, for your service to our country.

I know that you all could be at other things. You have a lot of
responsibilities in your normal jobs, and I know it\'s difficult to be
able to be here and take your time away from your jobs, but I do
appreciate your service to the country, but I think you recognize, as I
do recognize, that this is important to not only your particular
companies but to your particular industry and that there are a lot of
critical issues that your industry faces, and so what you all do here is
going to be very important and help people.

I talk a lot in my speeches about the bottom line. I don\'t talk about
the bottom line being the financial bottom line, but what I see as the
true bottom line for any business and our bottom line for OSHA is making
sure that people go home safe and sound every night back to their
families and loved ones, and so I just want to say thank you for what
you all do and I thank you for it. I appreciate you all being involved
in this.

It is important, and over the years, I know that ACCSH has been involved
with a lot of recommendations to OSHA, and it\'s been extremely helpful
to OSHA in helping its recommendations for the reg agenda but also
recommendations for other things that we do, the guidance documents and
stuff like that.

So I just want to say thank you for all that and that you have a lot
more work to do because we still got a long way to go. Even though our
injuries and illnesses and fatality numbers are down, the rates are down
to the lowest that we\'ve had in a long time, we still can\'t stop there
because I know you believe and I believe \-- you believe the same that I
believe, that obviously one fatality is one fatality too many.

So we still have a lot of work to do, and I really do appreciate you
willing to be able to serve.

I also wanted to thank Chairman Linwood Smith for agreeing to chair the
committee again. Once again, you know, it\'s a difficult thing to have
to take time off of your jobs, but like I said, this is a significant
commitment that you all have made, and I do really appreciate that.

You really are helping us fulfill our mandate to ensure that we have
safe working conditions for all of our employees.

I also want to recognize Stew Burkhammer. Where is Stew? Stew, you know,
I really did want to say thank you to Stew. I\'ve already said thank you
to Stew, but I wanted to thank him for his contributions on his
impending retirement after a decade of service to ACCSH and the five
years he\'s been at the OSHA\'s Directorate of Construction as the
Director of OSHA Office of Construction Services.

Is he still outside? Okay. Well, I\'ll make sure we thank him properly.
So I did want to thank him.

I did want to kind of talk a little bit about what we\'ve been doing at
OSHA and \-- that is of interest and involved in the construction
industry and would be of interest to the committee.

We\'ve been involved in a lot of different things, and one of the things
that \-- an area that we\'ve been involved with much more in-depth than
probably we have over the last seven, ten years is emergency
preparedness.

We really have a lot more focus on that, and the most recent example of
our involvement in emergency preparedness or emergency response, I
guess, is more the case in this one, was the Minneapolis Interstate
Bridge Collapse back in September of last year and also the wildfires in
California this Fall.

Once again, what I really am \-- I guess what was very interesting to me
was the fact that we had a really good partnership with our state
partners, working with the states in both of those responses.

We worked hand in hand with our state partners and agencies, state
agencies to ensure that the response and recovery crews on the scene
could work safely, and because of that, I think we did prevent people
from being injured in both of those areas, and I\'m very excited about
how we responded and how quickly we were able to respond to it and how
thoroughly we responded to it.

I understand that Jeff Isakson, Director of the Minnesota OSHA State
Plan, will be here this afternoon, I believe, to discuss with you more
about what happened there.

But I would just say that we are aware that emergency response crews,
particularly construction people, need immediate information and advice
to stay safe while they\'re working in these type of situations, these
highly hazardous situations, and we\'re continuing to improve on our
abilities to respond quickly and to provide the information and provide
the assistance that those response crews need, and so we\'ll continue to
do that in the future.

Also, I understand later this morning, you\'re going to be hearing from
Ruth McCully, who\'s our Director of the Directorate of Science,
Technology, and Medicine, about the OSHA\'s Role in the National
Response Plan.

I was at a \-- on Tuesday, I was at a meeting at the National Press Club
where the Secretary of Homeland Security rolled out the National
Response Framework which is the overall document now that we\'re going
to be working under for all federal, state, local, tribes are going to
be \-- gives us a framework of how we\'re going to be responding to all
types of emergency situations.

I also understand that Mohammad Ayub, Director of OSHA\'s Office of
Engineering Services, will brief you about OSHA\'s Structural Response
Team in national emergencies, and I think you\'ll find that very
interesting. He had provided us a briefing during the Minneapolis bridge
collapse of what was going on there which he responded to personally,
and so I think that you will find that very informative.

Another area that we\'ve been working that I think \-- this kind of goes
across all industries, is the issue on pandemic flu guidelines and the
pandemic influenza generally.

We are looking at this. You know, there is no pandemic flu at this time,
but all the experts agree it\'s not a matter of if it will occur, it is
a question of when it will occur, and so it\'s difficult to predict when
it will occur or how severe it will be, but the most important thing is
that we\'re going to be prepared for that, and it\'s important that all
companies, all industries are making preparations now because it is
clear that if and \-- or when the pandemic flu hits, that we will not
\-- no industry, no company is going to be able to respond if they
haven\'t done any preparation in advance.

This is not something that you can just prepare for once it shows up.
You can\'t wait, say we=ll wait till it shows up, wherever it shows up,
and then we\'ll start planning, because this is going to take some
detailed response.

So, we\'re taking this issue, the federal government is taking this
issue seriously. OSHA is working to fulfill our role under the
President\'s National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza in that we\'re
charged to make sure that government employees are able to \-- that the
government runs, that employees are able to come to work, and our
response is also to make sure that the businesses run and companies run
and providing the information needed to allow that to occur.

So to meet this potential challenge of the pandemic, OSHA has developed
two major guidance documents on pan. flu, one for general industry which
outlines a whole tiered approach of how you would handle a pandemic, and
the other one, the other document, which is a much \-- is probably \-- a
fairly thick document dealing with pandemic response for health care
industry.

So we\'ve been working on that, and basically the guidance allows
information on how the influenza would spread, how employers can
maintain operations, how to protect their employees, steps for
identifying whether you\'re a low, medium, or high-risk workplace, and
tips for employees, to provide your employees to stay safe while
traveling and living abroad to work because that\'s one area that we
also focus on, even those American workers that are out working on the
\-- outside the country.

So we\'ve been \-- we\'ll be sharing that, and Ruth can actually \-- we
have a couple directors, but Ruth\'s been involved with that preparation
and so if you have any questions on that particularly, she can provide
that information.

On the regulatory agenda, you know, the Cranes and Derrick Negotiated
Rulemaking Advisory Committee had been working to complete the analysis
and review all the requirements to publish a Notice of Proposed
Rulemaking.

With respect to the cranes and derricks standard, we are in the latter
stages of development of the proposed rule, and if you had looked on the
Federal Register, we were looking to publish the Notice of Proposed
Rulemaking in January of \'08.

Unfortunately, we\'re just not going to be able to make that date
because this is a very detailed rule. It is going to be an extremely \--
it\'s a large document is what it comes out to be and so it is just
taking a lot \-- taking us longer to get things through, to get things
completed on this document, but our goal is to publish that NPRM this
year on cranes and derricks. So we\'ll be moving on that, and we\'re
committed to move on that project.

One of the things that we\'ve done \-- that we did complete in November
of last year was to publish a final rule on payment for personal
protective equipment, and under this rule, employers are required to
provide personal protective equipment or PPE at no cost to the
employees, except under certain circumstances.

The rule contains exceptions for clothing and gear and clarified OSHA\'s
requirement regarding payment of employee-owned PPE and replacement PPE.

We must have done something well because I think the time period for
appealing, filing an appeal on that, has passed, and we didn\'t, as far
as I know, we did not have anyone appeal that particular standard.

You know, I think we made a good \-- we did a real good job of balancing
all the issues that were involved in that. It was a complicated
standard. There were some really complicated issues, but I think that
foremost, it really kind of spelled out and clarified when employers are
required to pay for PPE which is, for the most cases, almost all cases,
but there are certain exceptions, and I like it because now we have, I
think, a clear and consistent policy on what employers have to pay for
and also the standard projects that we\'re going to provide \-- by
implementing this rule will result in 21,000 fewer occupational injuries
per year.

So you know, I think that\'s important. That demonstrates how this
standard is going to be useful in that respect.

But I think, you know, the whole main thing is that, you know \-- one
thing the rule did not change is what personal protective equipment was
required, and we\'ve had some questions on that from different groups.

But the standard only dealt with who was paying for it. What type of
personal protective equipment is necessary and when and how you
determine that, what hazard assessments that you have to do, has
actually been spelled out in previous personal protective equipment
standards.

So the new one did not impact at all as to what PPE was required. It\'s
just who was going to pay for it.

Also in November of 2007, we proposed a rule for confined space in
construction and general working conditions in shipyards.

Yesterday, in the January 23^rd^ Federal Register, we announced a 30-day
extension for the comment period, extending it to February 28^th^, on
the proposed rule for confined spaces in construction.

And I believe Noah Connell, the Deputy Director of the Construction
Directorate, is going to give you \-- talk more about this in the
Construction \-- his Construction Update.

Trenching. In 2008, OSHA will continue to \-- its trenching initiative
as part of its commitment to focus on enforcement efforts in one of the
most hazardous working conditions in your industry.

I do have some good news to report. In the last four years, in
collecting data, calendar years 2003 to 2006, we\'ve seen a marked
decrease in trenching fatalities in the industry, about 50 percent. So
we went from 59 fatalities in 2003 to 29 fatalities in 2006.

Clearly, we\'re making progress in this area. Once again, one fatality
is one fatality too many, and we\'re going to have to keep striving to
get that number to zero. That has to be our goal, and we\'re going to
continue to target outreach and ensure that that number in trenching
fatalities continues to drop until we achieve our goal of zero.

Another construction-related OSHA activity is our teen summer job
campaign involving construction jobs.

We have set up a five-year plan to target different industries dealing
with teen summer jobs, and we\'re looking at the next generation of
working men and women, and so three years ago we launched this
initiative to improve the health and safety of teenagers, thousands of
teenagers in the workforce each year, and we\'re going to be \-- this
year, it\'s going to focus on construction and probably residential
construction is where we\'re going to \-- will be the focus of this
campaign.

We\'re going to be kicking that off. We\'re hoping to do a high-profile
campaign kick-off, possibly in New York City, and at the same time,
kicking the whole program off, having a ten-city, one in each region,
ten-city kick-off this Spring.

So we\'re going to \-- the focus obviously is to raise national
awareness of the need for employees when they\'re hiring young people to
provide appropriate safety and health training and protective equipment.

I remember when \-- one of my first jobs when I was working in law
school in the summer time when I was in law school was in construction,
and I was doing road construction, and I was driving a \-- I did a
number of things, but one of the things I drove was a pan, which you
know is a fairly large piece of equipment, and my safety training
involved showing me what the seatbelt was.

So I understand the need for this, and I also understand that a lot of
teenagers, some of you all may have some teenagers, kind of feel like
they\'re bulletproof, so to speak, that they can\'t get injured, and
unfortunately accidents occur so easily and that\'s why we need to have
this campaign.

It\'s been very successful over the two years we\'ve done it already,
and this will be our third year. So once again, we\'re hoping to impress
upon the teens that there are hazards in the workplace that they need to
be aware of and at the same time encourage employers to make sure that
all teenagers, even though they are a summer job, that they\'re fully
trained before they get put on the job and they understand the hazards,
and so we\'ll be doing that.

Another area that we\'ve been moving in construction is our cooperative
programs for construction, and I believe Paula White is going to be
talking to you today. She heads up our Directorate of Cooperative State
Programs, and she\'s going to provide you details about our cooperative
programs in the construction industry.

We\'ve been very \-- obviously the last year, I guess it\'s been a
little over a year, we had our \-- we opened up our voluntary protection
program into the construction, started doing model program, and right
now we have 64 construction companies that have attained the recognition
for safety and health by attaining VPP status in the construction area.

This is more than any time in the program\'s 25-year history, and we\'re
opening the VPP to more general and specialty trade contractors, once
again, to demonstrate that for those companies that have great safety
and health programs, to recognize them for their great programs, and I
think we have a number of companies here that have facilities or sites
that are in VPP and we do appreciate that.

Our OSHA Challenge, which is our program to help employers reach \-- to
move forward in their safety and health program to attain a VPP, has had
tremendous results.

It\'s basically a three incremental stage program and after one year of
OSHA Challenge, construction companies report a rate reduction averaging
more than 30 percent, 30 percent reduction for those companies after one
year of being in the Challenge program.

And since we introduced our strategic partnership program in 1998, we
have partnered with more than 350 construction employers, and so once
again here we have labor, management, and the government working
together at the start of these large projects to go through the program
and basically say how we\'re going to look at safety and health on this
particular project, what are we going to anticipate are going to be the
hazards, and so we really do appreciate that.

And I am really excited about how we\'ve done on our outreach programs,
our partnerships in the construction area, and hopefully we\'re going to
continue to focus on that \-- well, we are going to focus on that more,
to try to get more and more companies working with OSHA, construction
companies working with OSHA to make sure that we have more safe and
healthy worksites and that we protect our employees.

And once again, it goes back again to what Mike had said. The true
bottom line of any company should be making sure that your employees go
home safe and sound.

So I just want to say, I\'ll end by just saying thank you for what you
all have been doing and your involvement in this program really is
important, and I do appreciate that, and looking forward to working with
you, and you have my commitment, personal commitment, that whatever I
can do to help to make this committee a success and that I\'m going to
be here to help you do that.

So thank you for your service to the country and to this committee. So,
Mr. Chairman?

MR. SMITH: Thank you, Assistant Secretary Foulke.

And Stew just walked back in the room if you\'d like to say a little
word about him. What can you say, right?

ASST. SEC. FOULKE: That\'s right. There he is. Stand up.

MR. BURKHAMMER: I\'m standing up. When you retire, you shrink.

ASST. SEC. FOULKE: I do personally want to thank you for your work in
the construction area. You\'ve been involved with the ACCSH Committee, I
understand, for over ten years, been with the Directorate for five, but
pretty much your whole life has been committed to safety and health in
the construction area, and so I really do appreciate the work that
you\'ve done with us and your service to that.

So thank you very much for that, and we\'ll definitely miss you, but
just because you=re retired doesn=t mean we=re not going to use you in
some other fashion. We\'ll still work you to death. Thank you.

(Applause.)

MR. SMITH: I think it also would be prudent for this committee to go on
record as thanking Stew for his service to this committee and also to
the Directorate of Construction Office.

Could I hear a motion to that effect?

MR. KRUL: So moved.

MR. SMITH: Second?

MR. MIGLIACCIO: Second.

MR. SMITH: All in favor, say aye.

(Chorus of ayes.)

MR. SMITH: Thank you very much, Stew. We really appreciate it.

At this time, are there any questions for Secretary Foulke?

MR. MIGLIACCIO: Sir, it\'s my understanding that the OSHA Training
Institute is trying to make some changes in the way it structures or
picks the trainers.

Can you give us a little background on that, please?

ASST. SEC. FOULKE: Well, I can give you a little background on what
we\'re trying to do with the whole program.

Last year, I took \-- the Training Institute had been part of another
directorate, and so I decided that \-- you know, when I first got
involved with safety and health, I started practicing law in \'78, and I
think it was about \'79 or \'80 is when I first started doing OSHA work,
and at that point in time, I remember that people used to talk about the
OSHA Training Institute.

It was like that is where you went to get trained and that was where you
really needed to be involved in \-- that\'s where we had \-- that was
\-- it was like kind of the gold standard for training for safety and
health, and so as a result of that, I decided it really needed to be its
own directorate.

So we established it as its own directorate, pulled it out of \-- it was
in State Plans, is where it was, under there, made its own directorate,
and I put Hank Payne, Dr. Hank Payne, in charge of that, and my charge
to him was to make sure that the OSHA Training Institute became the gold
standard again for training, safety and health training in the country.

So we\'re moving on that, and we\'ve been reviewing, as I understand,
all the different training programs. We\'re actually reviewing all the
\-- I know one area that we\'ve done is we\'re actually revamping all
the CSHO training to have much more detail, reviewing what training they
should have and to do that.

We\'re also expanding the training programs that are available, and I
know that they\'ve done some \-- they have talked about doing some
additional changes on the program on training the trainers and stuff
like that, expanding the requirements for the trainers, I believe, but I
can\'t say right offhand what that is, to tell you the truth.

MR. MIGLIACCIO: My understanding of what they were trying to do, and
somebody else can fill this in here a little bit, that they were looking
for the OSHA 500 instructors to be basically professionals from
colleges.

Now, you being a lawyer, I don\'t think you\'d want an ironworker out
there practicing law because we don\'t actually know what we\'re doing
there, and I personally feel as though \--

ASST. SEC. FOULKE: They may be better than some lawyers.

MR. MIGLIACCIO: Maybe. But there\'s some out there that \-- I mean, I
can only speak on behalf of my program, the OSHA 500 instructors where
we have six master instructors, I\'d pit them against any academic
person out there teaching safety and health, and the reason I say this
is because they work it every day. They\'re not full time. They work in
the field.

ASST. SEC. FOULKE: Right.

MR. MIGLIACCIO: And that academic person, they can do a lot of book
learning, and we found this out when we trained the compliance officers
under Subpart R, that we had the OSHA people in there training, and we
had different \-- we had ABC in there with us, we had contractors
training with us, and there was a variety of people, and it seemed like
\-- and, you know, here we can talk to some of the people who were
actually there.

The field personnel that were doing the training, your compliance
officers got a lot more out of those people than they did out of anybody
else, and I find it interesting that Dr. Payne or any of his people
under him would want to take that knowledge away from the instructors
that\'s going to be out there protecting these people.

So I\'m a little \--

ASST. SEC. FOULKE: I\'m glad you raised that. I will have to look into
that to see what \-- no, I\'ll look at it and see what we have because I
can understand what \--

MR. WITT: If I may, Frank, my understanding is Dr. Payne will be joining
us some time today, and if he does, I spoke to him the other day, I
think he\'s \--

ASST. SEC. FOULKE: Is he coming in or not? I thought he wasn\'t coming
in. But go ahead.

MR. WITT: Maybe there\'s a change. He had indicated to me the other day
he would be coming in, and he will be available, if he is coming in, to
respond to your comment. If not, I know he has prepared a summary of
what the activities that are going on related to the outreach or train
the trainer, and I will get those from him and distribute them to the
committee.

MR. MIGLIACCIO: Up until today, I mean I hope it still goes on, but the
subcommittee of the OTI, I chair it, and I found it interesting that
nobody even approached us about any of this information that they want
to change.

I would have thought they would at least come to the committee, said
something to us, and then we could have brought it as our subcommittee
to this full body, but we had no knowledge of it till, you know, till
after all the letters went out there, and it\'s real interesting how
they sort of circumvented \--

MR. WITT: I\'ve heard a little bit about this, but I\'m not exactly sure
\-- I\'m not fully informed what is all required or what they\'re
looking to make \-- change the requirements to. So I\'ll look at that.

I mean, all I can \-- I know what I\'ve charged Dr. Payne to do is to
bring this to \-- the OSHA Training Institute to be the gold standard
for safety and health training.

Now, you know, obviously practical experience always is very important,
and to me, at least it\'s my thought that practical experience is
important to be able to provide insight in how things are really done in
training, and so we\'ll just look at that and get back with you on that.

MR. MIGLIACCIO: I\'d appreciate that.

MR. WITT: Maybe today.

MR. SMITH: Other questions? Yes, Bob?

MR. KRUL: Thank you, Mr. Secretary, for coming in, and I heard your
remarks that you had no appeals on the PPE standard, but let me try to
shave the corpse one more time.

It\'s still problematic for those of us who deal in collective
bargaining agreements, especially when we do maintenance work in
industrial facilities, when an owner mandates that steel-toed boots
and/or metatarsal equipment has to be worn as to whose responsibility
that is.

I understand the exceptions, but it still seems that that\'s like a
nebulous area that isn\'t clear when it comes to \-- protective
footwear, exactly whose responsibility it is.

I know what the employers= side is because those of us on labor have
heard that argument a hundred times, and in fairness to the employers,
their argument is that ought to be equipment that a construction worker
should just purchase in the event that he or she has to go out on to a
site where this equipment is mandated.

And from the safety and health viewpoint, you can go to Walmart or Kmart
and get a pair of steel-toed shoes, but are they really what you\'re
looking for for protection, and our argument with our apprentices that
may come in in the first year and only be making 60 percent of what a
journey person makes, this becomes quite a financial outlay for them.

And we understand management\'s viewpoint on those quick turnaround jobs
where they may have hundreds of people and looking at a \$125 per boot,
but it gets a little jumbled when the owner mandates that in order to
come on his facility that you have to have this equipment in order to
perform maintenance work.

ASST. SEC. FOULKE: Well, I think with respect to metatarsals, we did say
that they could be required to pay for the \-- not the built-in ones but
the ones that go over top of the shoes or they could provide a credit
for that.

So it is a complicated issue, you know. One thing I try to do is I went
through all the testimony. There were a lot of different things we
looked at, you know. We get in this thing about the tools of the trade
and everything else. That was the kind of thing that we had opened or
reopened the record to look at those things.

So like I say, I think we tried very hard to make sure we had the right
type of balance and hopefully \-- you know, like I say, it\'s a
complicated issue, and that\'s why I guess it took the standard so long
to get around through there.

But I\'m glad that we finally finished the standard and got it out and,
you know, maybe we\'ll have to look and see down the road what other \--
if there\'s any changes, you know, that will be made.

And I suspect that we\'re going to have questions on requests for
letters of interpretations on the standard, too. As a matter of fact, I
know we will. We\'ve already had two groups that have asked us about
specific items dealing with certain PPE.

So thank you.

MR. KRUL: Thank you.

MR. SMITH: Other questions?

(No response.)

MR. SMITH: Any comments?

(No response.)

MR. SMITH: We\'d like to thank the Assistant Secretary Foulke for coming
in today and making these comments and also being available to respond
to questions and taking your time to work with this committee.

This is a dedicated group, as you alluded to, and we gladly give our
time to try to help our industry and appreciate your role in that
regard, also.

Thank you very much.

ASST. SEC. FOULKE: Thank you, and thank you again for your service. I
appreciate it.

(Applause.)

MR. SMITH: At this time, we want to take a 15-minute break, and I\'d
like to ask the committee to please stay present. I think there\'s going
to be some photographs that they want to take at this time.

(Whereupon, the foregoing matter

went off the record at 9:38 a.m.

and went back on the record at

9:56 a.m.)

MR. SMITH: Okay. Let me have your attention, please. We\'ll start back.

MR. KRUL: Mr. Chairman?

MR. SMITH: Mr. Krul has asked for one minute.

MR. KRUL: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. In light of the discussion with
Secretary Foulke on this whole issue of the proposed recommendations and
changes to the OSHA Training Institute, and for the benefit of the
committee, the four major recommendations that the OTI is proposing, \--

MR. SMITH: Sir, Mr. Krul, if I could, this afternoon, later on this
afternoon, they\'re going to arrange a conference call with Dr. Payne at
OTI.

Would it be appropriate to wait till then?

MR. KRUL: We could wait, but in light of Mr. Migliaccio\'s comments, I
think this motion is in order. The Chair could rule me out of order.

What I would like to do is make a motion that this committee recommend
to the Assistant Secretary that he direct the OTI that any proposed
recommendations come through the work group formed by the OTI for any
proposed recommendations and changes to that program.

MR. SMITH: Okay. I\'d like \-- the Chair would like to ask, if we could,
that we wait till we get Dr. Payne on the phone, let him explain it, and
then the motion would certainly be in order.

MR. KRUL: That\'s fine, Mr. Chairman.

MR. SMITH: Let\'s give him the opportunity to address us first.

MR. KRUL: That\'s fine.

MR. SMITH: If that\'s okay. Thank you very much.

Okay. Our next presenter, as soon as I put my glasses on, will be Amanda
Edens with the Directorate of Standards and Guidance, and she will be
discussing \-- giving us a general industry standards update. We thank
her for appearing before this committee.

MS. EDENS: Thank you.

MR. SMITH: And I need to move.

MS. EDENS: Yes, you do.

[DSG - General Industry Standards Update]{.underline}

MS. EDENS: I\'m going to cover the first 15 minutes, and then I\'m going
to turn it over to John Steelneck who\'s going to speak a little bit
about our new rulemaking with regards to a new fit testing alternative
for respiratory protection. We just did one on a new Bitrex method, and
then we have another one coming up, and I\'ll leave it to John to kind
of discuss after I get through.

What I want to do is to go quickly over some of the Directorate of
Standards and Guidance activities, primarily our regulatory projects,
and I\'ll talk a little bit about a few of the upcoming guidance
products we have.

Unless you don\'t know, the current regulatory agenda we just published
a little over a month ago in sort of a new method. It generally comes
out in paper but now through the magic of e-government, it\'s on the web
which is kind of hard to \-- you know, a lot of people kind of still
like paper, I think I\'m one of them, but now it\'s all electronic.

So if you actually get the Federal Register version, there\'s only like
two regulatory items, but those are the significant items we have, and
the other 26 items are in this website, reginfo.gov. So if you want to
go and look at all the different items we have, seventeen of which are
the responsibility of the directorate in which I\'m in, you can see the
details of those.

I\'m not going to go over all of those. I was going to pick out a few,
primarily the ones that have some impact or may impact on construction.
I will not cover the two construction ones, cranes and derricks or
confined spaces, because they\'re in our Construction Directorate, but
these are ones that we\'re working on in DSG that also have some
construction implications.

I heard some questions just when I came in a little bit about PPE
payment. This is one we\'ve had for a few years and finally finalized
this November where it doesn\'t really address anything in terms of what
PPE is required, but mainly the issue is the payment of PPE, and this
sets the requirement that employers pay for most types of PPE and there
are some exclusions that we have in this, and I think you discussed
these maybe a little bit earlier.

So I\'m not going to really get into a lot of detail about this, but
things like ordinary safety toe wear and things like that. They\'re not
covered by these things, but things that are required, especially under
the general PPE standard or the substance-specific standards that we
have, the employer\'s required to pay for those.

We also have another big project which we refer to as our consensus
standards project, and there\'s a lot of different little rulemakings
embedded in there.

One of the first ones we did was a direct final back in 2004, and so the
overall goal of this project is that, as many of you are probably aware,
a lot of the standards, in particular a lot of the safety standards, we
have used consensus standards as the basis in some form or another for
the existing OSHA standards, and over time, these consensus groups have
updated their standards, and OSHA has not been able to keep up pace.

So the point of this project is to try to look at the ones that we could
address in a short fashion, and some may take a little bit longer, but
to pick off as many as we can and in as quick a fashion as we can to
update some and make them more consistent with current consensus
standards.

The most recent one that we did was another issue with PPE, not with
payment but with the consensus standard on PPE, and this covers head,
foot, and eye protection, and we published this in the spring of last
year and completed hearings last month. So the rulemaking record on that
will close in a little while, and we\'ll evaluate that record and go on
and complete the final.

Another one that we published, it\'s almost a year ago now, was our
final standard on Subpart S. This is a general industry standard. So we
have a counter in the construction industry, but this one was geared to
look primarily at electrical installations in general industry. It was
published as a final in February of last year, became effective this
summer.

But there has been one issue with regards to temporary wiring and ground
fault circuit interrupters, and the reason I bring this is up, because
it does use some terminology which has created some confusion because
the terminology it uses is that it requires the use of GFCIs where
temporary wiring is used, and it gives these examples, and one of them
is construction-like activities.

What we\'re trying to get at is the standard covers general industry. So
first of all, you\'d have to make a cut about whether it\'s construction
or general industry, and once you\'ve made that determination, you come
into the general industry standard, but there are some activities that
we believe are sort of construction-like in nature and the hazard is the
same, and so we would require the same type of requirement.

But this particular phrase has sort of created a little bit of
confusion. So what we\'re going to plan to do is have a technical
amendment to explain what we mean here. It\'s not meant to try to draw
the line necessarily between construction and general industry but more
to try to explain to people what our impetus was behind this particular
provision. So really it\'s just for clarity\'s sake.

Another electrical standard we have is working on Subpart V. I mean,
typically, we sort of generically refer to it as Subpart V because most
of the work is going to cover the construction standard for electric
power generation, transmission, and distribution, but there is a small
part that\'s also general industry, dealing with maintenance under
1910.269.

We proposed this back in \'05, commenced hearings the next year, and
right now in our current reg. agenda, we\'re estimating final
publication some time spring of this year.

We had to do a little bit of adjusting because in order to complete our
PPE standard, we had to pull somebody off of that standard out of the
Maritime Office to work on PPE and subsequently had to pull somebody out
of our Electrical Office into Maritime to backfill that.

So we got a little bit, in terms of trying to cover all the different
work we had, we had a little bit of delay on that one. So we might not
quite make that, but we\'re still working hard to make that date.

The main things that this will cover are trying to address communication
issues between host employers and contract employers, things to protect
from electric arcs, both in terms of PPE as well as, you know, laying
out ways in which you would determine the energy in certain systems,
address minimum approach distances, fall protection for employees
working in aerial lifts, and also training to help them understand how
to determine the \-- energies of different power lines that they would
be working on or around.

Going to more sort of the health end, we have our work on hazard
communication where what we\'re trying to do now is \-- the United
States, in particular individuals in OSHA have been heavily involved in
getting the globally harmonized system of classification of labeling of
chemicals, and so right now, the United States is at the point of
adopting this system.

OSHA is one of those agencies, as well as EPA and CPSC have some work
there, too, but what we\'re working towards is a proposal that would
amend the current hazard communication standard to adopt this globally
harmonized system where we would be more in line with the way the rest
of the world classifies and labels chemicals.

We had an ANPR last year or actually over a year ago now, and that
period, comment period, closed at the end of last year, and we just
completed the peer review of our economic analysis. So we\'re moving
forward trying to get this done as quickly as possible.

There was an international goal of adopting the hazard communication,
the GHS, by 2008, but we, as well as a number of other countries, are
finding that rather challenging.

In particular, because, I mean, the hazard communication sounds very
ideal and it\'s a very simple concept in terms of, you know, trying to
get everybody to have the same sort of system to classify and label
chemicals so that everybody \-- if you\'re going to cross countries, you
have sort of a unified way of identifying hazards and recognizing them
so that, you know, employees would have less confusion if they\'re
seeing labels coming from different countries.

The complexity that\'s entered into it in OSHA is that, you know, we
have a number of different standards which use phrases like
\"flammable,\" \"explosive,\" and things like that. So we have to be
very careful about how we adopt these definitions because they can have
the unintended consequence of affecting another standard.

For example, something like the process safety management standard where
you have a certain definition for reactive or something like that. You
start changing the definition, you know, you might inadvertently change
the scope of, say, the PSM standard.

So we have to be very careful and go through all the different standards
that have these sorts of definitions to figure out ways in which it
might impact those standards and ways in which we might lessen that
impact.

Another standard that has some impacts in construction is our standard
on silica. It\'s been around for a long time like a number of other
substances under the air contaminant standard.

There\'s a fairly large amount of non-compliance with the existing PELs.
There\'s a lot of complexity of this in terms of sampling and whatnot.

We did the SBREFA process a couple years ago, and now we\'ve been in the
process of trying to pull together our health effects and risk
assessment to the point where we can get it peer reviewed.

We were fairly well along in that process, but then OMB passed some new
guidelines about peer review, and so we had to sort of take a step back
in order to be in compliance with those guidelines, and we also spent a
fair amount of effort getting our conflict of interest form out because
when you go out and seek peer reviewers, you have to get their conflict
of interest, and if you get more than nine people that you\'re
requesting it from, OMB considers that a survey.

So you have to actually have that form approved, and sort of the
approach we took on that, rather than just making it very specific to
silica, we thought it would be in our best interests to get this
conflict of interest form filled for any chemical that we might have
peer reviewed so that we wouldn\'t have to keep going back every time we
wanted to, you know, go and seek more than nine people to get their
input on a risk assessment. So that took a little bit of time to get
that figured out.

Beryllium, another substance that was adopted back in the early \'70s.
It had some earlier work in 2002, both in terms of an RFI and some
safety and health hazard information bulletins, and most recently, we
completed our SBREFA review.

We started that back in September, and the panel report was just
recently signed off by OMB. So I think that panel report will be, if not
already, sent to the Assistant Secretary, and probably we=ll be able to
make that publicly available on the website. Is that right, Sarah?

MS. SHORTALL: Yes, it was signed this week. The report went to the
Assistant Secretary this week, and it will be put into the record for
the beryllium rulemaking.

MS. EDENS: We have another project that is now in its third phase and it
may even have a fourth or fifth phase, it\'s called the Standards
Improvement Process, and basically this effort all along is to try to
look at things that are sort of outdated, that might be duplicative, so
that it could be simpler for employers to understand, and so now we\'re
in our third phase.

We published an ANPR in December of \'06, and the proposal now is under
development. It\'s going \-- departmental review right now.

Some of the issues that might be of concern in construction, (1)
there\'s an issue regarding posting of the requirements for the hazard
assessment that\'s required under the PPE standard.

We\'re looking at updating our definition of potable water. Also, we\'re
trying to clarify some of the triggers for medical surveillance and
exposure monitoring and making them more consistent for the lead
standard and also attempting to remove some redundant training
requirements under the comprehensive health standards.

As you may know, we have sort of a hazard communication standard that
has an overarching training requirement, and then in a lot of existing
health standards, there\'s lots of different ways in which that training
requirement is explained. So we\'re looking at some ways to sort of
harmonize those and make it simpler for employers who may have to comply
with a number of different standards.

Hearing and conservation. We did an ANPR a few years back, and then we
held a couple of different stakeholder meetings, and since that time,
we\'ve been putting a fair amount of effort into going out and doing
site visits and doing some analyses to collect different kinds of
programs and to evaluate sort of the current practices out there and how
effective they are so that we could do sort of the necessary technologic
and economic feasibility assessments that we would need to do in order
to move this standard forward.

And finally, just to mention this, I don\'t know how much it will have
in construction, but we did an RFI in September of last year regarding
emergency response and preparedness, and really this was sort of an
outgrowth of sort of 9/11, where we do have a lot of different sort of
emergency response requirements out there.

We have HAZWOPER. We have some requirements for emergency programs and
different standards and things of that nature, but now sort of the
nature of emergency response and preparedness has changed, and the way
people have to sort of respond to sort of the modern environment where
we have either things that are purposely done or sort of these things
like pan. flu and the nature that we really hadn\'t thought of in the
past, and so this effort is to sort of look at that in the new way
we\'re looking at emergency response and to get people\'s input on how
OSHA should best move forward dealing with these new sort of challenges
in the emergency response environment.

Just a couple quick things on guidance. I won\'t spend too much time
before I turn it over to John.

I guess guidance now has been a new mission in our directorate for a few
years now, and we\'ve been fairly productive. I\'m not going to go
through a lot of these right here, but we\'re finding it very
challenging and rewarding to get a different kind of spin on things, not
just doing regulations but doing some guidance projects, and we have a
lot of creative people at our directorate and have been fairly active in
putting some things out.

In particular, we have the OSHA pan. flu guidance which we did as a part
of a larger federal effort. This one right here is the general one, and
then our colleagues in the Directorate of Science, Technology, and
Medicine did a more specific one regarding healthcare.

This just lists a few of the guidance products we have in development,
and I\'ll highlight the one at the bottom which we have come to this
committee before with this issue which is working with Portland cement.

As you know, we did not include Portland cement under coverage of our
hexavalent chromium standard because we felt that there were existing
standards to address the particular hazard that comes with Portland
cement which is primarily from a dermal exposure.

So partly as a result of just our own need to make sure that people
understood those standards and also as an outgrowth of some of the
settlement work that we did with the Building Construction Trades
Department, we had this - I don\'t know if it was a pamphlet or a
document, whatever you want to call it, it\'s going to be Working Safely
with Portland Cement. This will address what the major hazards are as
well as clearly identify the standards that employers have, the
responsibilities they have under those existing standards with regards
to working safely with Portland cement.

The silicon exposure document, that is now in OSHA clearance process. So
hopefully that would not take too long and we could get it through the
department and have that out in not-too-distant future.

And the ergonomics and shipyards, we actually published that a few
months back and got comments, and I don\'t think we got a whole lot of
criticism on that one. So hopefully it shouldn\'t take too long to turn
around that document and get that out in a final.

And with that, I will turn it over to John to let him complete, and then
we\'ll take the last five minutes or so for questions.

MR. STEELNECK: All right. I am John Steelneck. I\'m the project officer
on OSHA\'s respirator standard.

When the OSHA published its respirator standard in 1998, it contains
OSHA-accepted qualitative and quantitative fit test protocols in
Appendix A, but it also contains in Part 2 a way to get new fit testing
protocols approved by OSHA, basically by going through what\'s called
Section 6(b)(7) rulemaking, notice and comment rulemaking.

Now the last time I was before the advisory committee here was to
present the abbreviated Bitrex NPRM. That was in October of 2006. Since
then, it has gone through the system, has been approved, and it was
finally published in December 26^th^ of 2007, and is out right now for
public comment. Public comments on that are due February 25^th^, 2008,
and then we\'ll go forward and look at the comments and hopefully
finalize that.

At the time I presented that before the advisory committee, I also told
them that we had just received the PortaCount. The PortaCount is the
most widely-used qualitative, quantitative fit testing machine out
there.

It\'s widely used for doing quantitative fit testing using the
PortaCount really, and I said that we would be coming to the next
advisory committee meeting to present that.

Well, I\'m now here. History of the TSI, Inc., the manufacturer, the one
who manufactures and distributes the PortaCount, submitted their
peer-reviewed article to start their review system for an abbreviated
set of fit test protocols, two new protocols for use with the
PortaCount.

This was published by Dr. Roy T. McKay, who\'s a researcher, works at
the University of Cincinnati, but he\'s also Chairman of the ANSI Z-8810
Fit Testing Subcommittee currently, and so he\'s very knowledgeable
about fit testing, and I think that\'s why they got him to do their
testing for them.

There are two protocols. Basically, one of them just does the exact same
protocol that OSHA has, but instead of using 60 seconds, a one minute
exercise, they cut the time in half to 30 seconds. Then they have a
second protocol which has five exercises. They eliminated two exercises,
deep breathing and the first normal breathing, which are both where you
don\'t really move your head a lot, and instead they did other things to
make it a tougher, more constrictive fit test.

Basically, they raised the pass/fail criteria for the second protocol
from 100 to 200 for half mask and from 500 to a thousand for full face
pieces. This is basically to eliminate the number of false-positives
that make it a more stricter fit test. It provides a more conservative
fit test by raising the pass/fail criteria and that worked pretty well.

That second fit test performed very well. It actually showed up when
compared to the ANSI Z-8810 standard has and their Appendix A-2 a set of
criteria for evaluating new fit tests and for all the criteria, it
turned out very well.

As you can see, basically here in the actual standard, proposed standard
that I distributed back here, there is \-- they are in the actual \--
Page 11 is the actual values and you see for both half masks and full
face pieces, the Protocol Number 2 exceeded all of the ANSI values.

The Protocol Number 1, which is where they just reduced it to 30
seconds, has a problem in that the sensitivity was only 91 percent when
they really needed 95 percent. That\'s a problem. Basically, they have a
false-positive in the test, meaning for the quick test, somebody would
pass. There\'s a chance that one person might pass that would fail with
the full 60-second OSHA test and that is a problem for us, but we\'re
proposing to put it out for public comment to see what comments we do
get on that from the general public.

Okay. We have invited comments basically on the accuracy and reliability
of the proposed protocols. We ask a number of questions on Page 15, as
you can see, describing how do they look at the peer-reviewed article,
how well is it controlled, do they see problems, what do they feel the
problem is, especially with the one issue we have, the 91 percent, and I
think that will probably be a problem.

The second protocol performed very well against the ANSI standard
criteria and that looks in much better shape, but we\'ll see what the
public comments are.

Finally, once we\'ve presented it here, this is a very short review, and
what will happen is after you folks have a chance to look at it and make
any comments, we will then proceed with the OSHA clearance process here
within OSHA before we send it to OMB, the same process we did with the
Bitrex fit test, after you saw that last time, and we will go through
and publish it in the Federal Register, hopefully some time later this
year, and that\'s what we\'re planning to do with the revised PortaCount
fit test method.

Thanks.

MS. EDENS: I think that\'s all we have, unless you have some questions.

MR. MURPHY: Amanda, Dan Murphy with Zurich.

Amanda, hearing conservation in construction. Have you begun to do any
research on what, if anything, is happening out there?

MS. EDENS: Well, yes. I mean that is the purpose of our site visits, is
we have a contractor who\'s going out, surveying some of the sites where
they have hearing conservation programs in place, trying to evaluate
what kinds of things they have, what kinds of things they don\'t have,
and trying to see, you know, are they being effective, and so we\'ll
look at, you know, basically what we can collect from the different
places that we go and see if they are effective, if they\'re not, and
also to kind of get a baseline of sort of what is out there, so that if
we were to have, you know, a standard, it would help us to assess, you
know, how much more would people have to implement and what would it
take to get them up to a place that we feel would be adequate in terms
of our hearing conservation program.

MR. MURPHY: Okay. Because it\'s a major issue in the construction
business. We\'ve had those discussions at this committee in the past,
and I guess if you need any assistance in trying to take a look at that,
please contact me because I have a great interest in trying to solve
that problem, but I\'m not sure how to solve that problem, especially
from a medical monitoring perspective.

MS. EDENS: Thank you for that offer.

MR. RUSSELL: Yes, on hearing conservation, do you have any time table or
goals or next steps really clearly outlined as to where it\'s kind of
heading?

MS. EDENS: No. Right now, the current step in the most current reg
agenda that just got published in December has it down as undetermined.
So, we don\'t have a next step plotted out at this point that\'s on our
agenda.

MR. RUSSELL: Could at least we, you know, think about some methods of
trying to define that, you know, so that it\'s not open, if you follow
what I\'m saying?

MS. EDENS: Well, I think, you know, every \-- at least twice a year, we
go through the different projects that we have on the reg agenda and try
to make some management choices about what the next steps are going to
be in terms of what we know, what resources we have and that.

So, you know, the new agenda will come out in like April or May,
depending on how quick OMB gets all the different requirements together,
but we\'ll be going through that next cycle and we go through each of
these items.

I mean, the best I can promise you is that we will look at that item
like we look at all the other items we have in trying to figure out what
our next step will be and that will be made, you know, in conjunction
with the Assistant Secretary and the department as well.

MR. RUSSELL: Thank you.

MR. BEAUREGARD: Amanda, Kevin Beauregard with the Department of Labor,
North Carolina.

Can you expand or explain what went into the decision on the pay for PPE
in regards to logging boots? I noticed that there is an exception for
logging boots.

MS. EDENS: Well, I\'ll make an attempt. I mean, the best person, Kevin,
you heard Jim Maddux was at OSPA last week, and really take this with me
not \-- I\'m not sort of the expert on PPE, but there were already some
issues under the logging standard where they address the issue about PPE
in the logging standards and this rule was not trying to get into that
particular one.

So, I think it really was a division of having two different rules and
trying to make them sort of consistent.

MS. SHORTALL: Kevin, in the 1994 Federal Register Notice announcing the
final rule for logging, there is a very large discussion for why logging
shoes were the one item that employers were not going to be required to
pay for. For all other items of PPE that were required under that
standard, employers were specifically required to pay and it was
specified in the standard.

So, if you want an exact cite, give me an e-mail and I\'ll send you the
explanation for it.

MR. BEAUREGARD: Okay. Great. Thank you.

MS. EDENS: Thanks, Sarah.

MR. MIGLIACCIO: Amanda, Frank Migliaccio with the Ironworkers. I have a
few things.

When you were talking about the Portland Cement, you said that there was
a Working Safe with Portland Cement. There\'s cards going to be out. Are
they out yet?

MS. EDENS: No, they\'re not. They are \-- we had them. They\'re pretty
much almost ready to be released. It\'s not really a card. It\'s going
to be \-- I don\'t know how to best describe it. I don\'t know if it\'s
a pamphlet is the best word. It\'s not going to be like a little quick
card, though.

It\'s cleared pretty much all of OSHA. I guess we\'re trying to clear up
some issues about whether or not it needs to go to our departmental
clearance folks, and I think they said that that wasn\'t necessary. So,
hopefully we can get that out pretty soon.

The only step that might be taken now is to give it to our
communications people to make it pretty, so we have all the right
information, but we do like it to look nice as well.

MR. MIGLIACCIO: It would just be interesting to get some of those cards
and reproduce them ourselves.

MS. EDENS: Sure.

MR. MIGLIACCIO: The other one is you talk about the consensus standard
on the PPE.

Is there any talk about taking the consensus standard with the
construction and general industry and maritime and putting it all
together as one?

MS. EDENS: I don\'t know. I\'d have to get back to you on that one. I
don\'t know the answer to that.

Sarah, do you?

MS. SHORTALL: That\'s another standard that I was working \-- I have
been working on.

This is sort of the first phase of a number of different things that
we\'re doing on some of the PPE standards. So, it was decided to take it
sort of a step at a time with the idea and notion that, you know, based
on what we got for comments during the December 4^th^ hearing, that
would give us the information we needed to also then thereafter address
construction, and we did have representatives from the construction
industry who did come to testify at that hearing.

MR. MIGLIACCIO: Thank you.

MR. SMITH: Yes, sir?

MR. RUSSELL: Emmett Russell. One last question.

As it relates to silica, I know that\'s kind of a construction industry
and we may have a presentation from construction, is it appropriate to
ask that then or is it appropriate to ask now, you know, what\'s the
status of silica?

MS. EDENS: That\'s really in our directorate. We\'re taking both of
those, unless Steve wants to answer.

MR. WITT: As the former director of Standards and Guidance, I think that
would be appropriate for Amanda to answer.

MR. St. AMOUR: Right now, the reg agenda has it down as the peer review
being completed in January. Since we haven\'t started it, I\'m fairly
certain that it won\'t be completed in the next five days.

So, I mean, what we\'re doing now is it\'s cleared some of our SOL
attorneys or not cleared but we\'re working out just some of the last
comments and hopefully we\'ll be taking it down to the Assistant
Secretary and he can decide sort of the timing on that one.

So, I don\'t know. What more specific did you want? That\'s the next
step, is in the reg agenda, just to complete the peer review of the
health effects and the risk assessment. So, we haven\'t really projected
the date beyond that particular step at this point.

MR. RUSSELL: But it\'s definitely still in the process of moving
forward?

MS. EDENS: Yes.

MR. RUSSELL: Thank you.

MR. SMITH: Other questions or comments? Yes, sir?

MR. ZARLETTI: Dan Zarletti from Kennett Construction. I wanted to just
ask a question on Subpart V.

Does April \'08 sound like a firm, still a firm date, and who will be
the key person to contact?

MS. EDENS: The key person working on that is Dave Wallace. He\'s the
office director in Office of Engineering Safety where that project
resides.

As I mentioned before, Dave has had to do some double duty because
we\'ve had to do a little bit of personnel shifting in order to meet the
deadline we had for the PPE standard. One of the experts on that was in
another office and Dave sort of had to do some double duty. So, he had
to do that.

The deadline on that probably might slip a couple months, but it
shouldn\'t be too far. We\'re fairly well down the road on that, unless
something unexpected, you know, were to come up because we did complete
the hearings and we have staff working on it, but I can never predict
when something will happen and, you know, you have to reopen the record
or something like that.

MR. ZARLETTI: Right. But is there anything in print now as a draft?

MS. EDENS: No. The only thing that\'s out there would be the proposal.

MR. ZARLETTI: Okay. Thank you.

MR. SMITH: Thank you. Other comments by anyone that hasn\'t spoken?

(No response.)

MR. SMITH: Amanda, we thank you very much for your presentation and for
your time here before the committee this morning.

MS. EDENS: You\'re welcome.

MR. SMITH: Is our next presenter here, the Directorate of Science,
Technology, and Medicine? Okay. If you would come forward and get your
presentation ready, we would appreciate it.

Okay. We thank Ruth for coming this morning, Ruth McCully, and look
forward to her presentation and she\'s going to be talking about the
OSHA National Response Plan, I believe.

MS. McCULLY: Right.

MR. SMITH: And we\'ll turn it over to you at this time and thank you so
much.

MS. McCULLY: Well, thank you. I have some handouts.

MR. SMITH: Do you have a PowerPoint?

MS. McCULLY: I do not have a PowerPoint.

MR. SMITH: Okay. Good. I can sit here then.

MS. McCULLY: You can.

[OSHA\'s Role in National Response Plan]{.underline}

MS. McCULLY: I\'m Ruth McCully, and I\'m Director of the Directorate of
Science, Technology, and Medicine in OSHA, and what I\'ve been asked to
go over with you all today is the National Response Plan, and actually
we don\'t have a national response plan anymore. It\'s called the
National Response Framework and what is being distributed is materials.

The National Response Framework was rolled out on Tuesday at the
National Press Club. The Secretary of Homeland Security, along with a
number of other secretaries and assistant secretaries, our Assistant
Secretary was there, rolled out this new National Response Framework and
so the materials that you have that are going around are the press
release. There\'s a Q&A document and then, you know, What\'s New in the
National Response Framework.

Then there is a \-- I have the color version, you all do not, but it\'s
another handout that is called Introducing the National Response
Framework, and this introduces you to a center which will be on the
Internet that you can go to. It will be updated periodically with
documents that are relevant to the National Response Framework.

So, my goal today is to really go over with you what is this new
document, the National Response Framework, how does it differ from the
National Response Plan, what does it mean to us, and in particular to go
over the revised Worker Safety and Health Support Annex because that has
gone through a number of revisions, and one of the handouts that has
gone around is the Worker Safety and Health Support Annex to the
National Response Framework.

All right. So that\'s the goal, and then after that, if there are any
other questions related to the directorate, I\'d be happy to take them.

This was a process that was a long time coming. Just to set the stage,
prior to 9/11, the country had four response plans, basically. It had
the Federal Response Plan which is probably what the states and locals
are most familiar with. It gets activated if there\'s a natural
disaster.

There was a Federal Radiological Emergency Response Plan for
radiological events. There was a Con Plan which was for terrorist
events, and there was a National Contingency Plan for major spills that
came out of basically the Oil Spill Act that was passed by Congress.

After 9/11, one of the lessons learned was the country needs one plan.
So, they did away with those plans and we came up with the National
Response Plan.

The National Response Plan was basically the country\'s largest MOU. It
was signed by every single secretary, including some private sector
organizations, the American Red Cross, for example, and this document
was signed in 2004, went into effect in April 2005.

We were rolling it out through the end of June of 2005 and then we had
Hurricane Katrina, the country\'s largest natural disaster, and we never
really had an opportunity to really exercise the National Response Plan,
but as a result of that, one of the reports that came out, really the
lessons learned from Katrina was the National Response Plan wasn\'t
working. It was too big. It was a very thick document. It was too much
to get through. It wasn\'t flexible enough, and as a result, the country
really needed a framework instead of a plan that was too dictatorial, I
guess might be the best word.

So, the idea to come up with a National Response Framework really came
out of the White House Lessons Learned Report on Katrina.

The process for this started a year ago. About a year ago, work groups
were established to say how can we redo this document in a way that will
be most useful to the users and that\'s not necessarily the Federal
Government.

All response is local. So, how do we come up with a framework that
includes the local entities, the states, but also talks about how the
Federal Government can assist in those types of situations?

There were a number of work groups that were established. There were
about 400 people who participated in work groups in the development of
the National Response Framework, and the Response Framework was sent out
for comment in September of 2007.

So, it\'s basically a document that focuses on response as compared to
the National Response Plan that focused on planning, preparedness,
prevention, response and recovery. It does have sections on planning, it
does have sections on recovery, but the main emphasis of the National
Response Framework is response.

What are the organizations, what are the coordinating structures at the
local level and the federal level that are going to be engaged in
response? It really lays out how the states will function, how the
locals will function, and then how the Federal Government will function.

It follow the incident command system. The incident command system is
the language of response and that was one of the items that was really
kind of lacking in the National Response Plan.

So, the National Response Plan makes sure that the incident command
system is integrated into this framework. It relies on another document
which is called the National Incident Management System which really
lays out the structures and how locals, states and Feds will respond in
an incident command structure type of organization.

It also says, for example, that the National Response Framework is in
effect always. In the past, the National Response Plan, for example, had
to be implemented by the Secretary of Homeland Security. This is saying
that the National Response Framework is always in effect. There\'s other
mechanisms for calling in different organizations, if needed.

So, it\'s a tool that is really geared for senior officials, federal
officials, and senior officials at the state and local levels. It also
addresses tribal entities as well.

It\'s a document that is geared to be scalable, depending upon the size
of the event that\'s being responded to, and it also includes \-- it\'s
a base document that\'s relatively short. It\'s about 60 pages, which is
nice compared to what the regular one was, and it is also supplemented
by emergency support function annexes, support annexes, and incident
annexes.

You will see, for example, that there are some things that have been
eliminated from the document. For example, it goes into more \-- let me
make sure \-- I want to make sure I\'ve got this right.

It really defines the whole notion of what a Principal Federal Official
is. There was a lot of concern about that. A Principal Federal Official
will be appointed by the Department of Homeland Security if you have a
large event, but for most events, it\'s really going to rely on a
federal coordinating official which is appointed by FEMA.

A little bit about the background in establishing this is that we
received a number of comments, which I\'m trying to find right now. Here
they are. Just bear with me a minute.

All right. We received a number of comments. A total of 5,700 comments
were received on the National Response Framework and on the annexes. The
National Response Framework was put out for comment in September, the
annexes were put out for comment in November.

So, we had over 300 entities that commented and over 5,700 comments that
had to be resolved, and it was a pretty aggressive schedule that we were
all put on to try to resolve those types of comments.

As I mentioned, there\'s an NRF Resource Center and that\'s in one of
the handouts that you have. I have been on it. I tested it. It\'s
user-friendly. It\'s intuitive. You can go to it pretty easily and get
to different documents, and I would suggest if you have an emergency
response person in your organization, you make them familiar with this
because this is going to be something that, as changes come up, they\'re
going to be reflected on that National Response Framework, on the
National Resource Center.

Why this is important is they make the point, particularly in the cases
of the annexes, is that these are living documents and they can be
changed at any time. There isn\'t going to be a type of \-- it makes it
appear that there won\'t be a situation where they\'re going to say,
okay, we want to now make changes to the National Response Framework.
This is the process. They can take any of these annexes at any time and
make changes to them. So, it really is going to be a dynamic type of
situation.

There will be an aggressive training program that is going to go along
with the National Response Framework. There is going to be awareness
training for emergency support functions that is scheduled for mid
March. Awareness training for support annexes is also scheduled for
March, and the incident annex training is scheduled for April.

They\'re also planning to have position-specific training, and why this
is relevant to us in particular is that in this framework, it specifies
a safety officer and a safety function. So, we want to make sure that
we\'re involved and for that position-specific training to make sure
that that safety function training addresses the issues that it needs to
address for emergency response and preparedness.

Some of the things that are new in the Response Framework. We\'ve done
away with some of our teams. We no longer have emergency response teams.
We now have incident management assist teams, basically the same thing,
a new name, a new acronym.

My experience in the emergency response world over the past seven years
is if you don\'t like that acronym, just wait awhile, it\'ll change.
Half of it is just trying to keep up with the acronyms.

The other changes that you\'ll see that are probably most relevant,
ESF-6 is no longer being taken care of by American Red Cross. The
American Red Cross is no longer the primary agency. That\'s been taken
over by DHS-FEMA. That\'s the one for mass care, emergency assistance
and housing and human services.

There\'s been a collapsing of some ESFs. After Hurricane Katrina and
with household pets and animals, there was a real concern about people
being separated from their pets. Pets are family members and for some
individuals, it may be really the only family that they have and it\'s
important that their pets and them stay together.

So, for ESF-11, for agriculture and natural resources, a primary
function of safety and well being of household pets has been added to
that function to make sure that pets are not separated from their family
members.

There\'s a new annex that has a support annex that has been implemented.
There\'s been considerable work going on over the past couple years over
at DHS on critical infrastructure and key resources, and these are
really private sector entities.

We\'re talking about utilities. We\'re talking about chemical
industries, so forth, and so there\'s a new support annex that details
processes to ensure the coordination and integration of these critical
infrastructure and key resources.

If there\'s a major disaster going on, we want to make sure that those
issues are addressed and that those critical infrastructures are
maintained and continues to function. So that\'s been elevated.

There is also an incident annex that has been added on mass evacuation
and clearly that\'s one of the lessons learned from Katrina, is how we
effectively do mass evacuations.

In the past two hurricane seasons since Katrina, there\'s been
considerable \-- there have been exercises that have been done and a lot
of focus on mass evacuations and so now with the National Response
Framework, there is an incident annex that deals specifically with mass
evacuations, so we don\'t end up with a situation like we had with
Katrina where, in the middle of a flood, you\'re trying to evacuate
hundreds of thousands of people.

Probably one of the issues that people are most concerned about in this
meeting is the worker safety and health support annex.

As you know, the Department of Labor put forward a recommendation that
the worker safety and health support annex be elevated to an emergency
support function rather than a support annex, and this got \-- and
Assistant Secretary Ed Foulke presented the case for elevating it to an
emergency support function.

However, when it was heard, the decision was made by the Interagency
Community that it remain as a support annex rather than an emergency
support function.

This process was overseen by both the Department of Homeland Security
and an interagency work group called basically the Domestic Readiness
Group which is made up of assistant secretaries across the Federal
Government, so it\'s an interagency group, and they viewed the worker
safety and health support annex as an annex that should be called up
basically whenever there\'s any type of disaster.

There are workers who are involved, health and safety of those workers
needs to be ensured, and so it\'s an annex that plays a role in any of
those entities.

Now, in the process of doing that, we have redrafted the worker safety
and health support annex, and this is based on our lessons learned from
Hurricane Katrina as well as input that we received from the GAO and
their findings in the GAO report, and what I\'d like to do is go over
what some of them are here, kind of walk you through just some high
points of this document.

First thing that you can see is in the Scope, the second bullet there,
is that it\'s very clear that this annex is structured to provide
technical assistance and support for response and recovery worker safety
and health and this really lays out the types of activities that you can
find as a result of this support annex.

For example, the activities within the scope of this support annex will
include the development of health and safety plans, identifying and
doing assessment of health and safety hazards, conducting exposure
monitoring, collecting and managing data, providing technical assistance
and support for PPE programs, incident-specific response and recovery
worker training, medical surveillance, providing exposure and risk
management information, and providing technical assistance in the form
of assistance relative to industrial hygiene, occupational safety and
health, engineering and occupational medicine.

So, the scope kind of lays out what are the specific types of
activities, resources, that will be provided by this annex.

The annex clearly lays out, for example, under the Organization on Page
2, that the annex operates under the direction and leadership of the
Assistant Secretary for Occupational Safety and Health. So, DOL-OSHA is
the coordinating agency for this and the Assistant Secretary basically
leads the direction of this annex.

At the local field level, the OSHA Regional Administrator is the
regional leader for the annex.

One of the questions that came up, for example, is what is the breakdown
between what the worker safety and health annex would be responsible for
and what FEMA would be responsible for, and on Page 3, you\'ll find that
that is covered, and on the top of Page 3, it talks about within the
joint field office, FEMA is responsible for the safety and health of its
own employees as well as the safety and health of staff in FEMA-managed
facilities.

This annex is responsible for the safety and health of all other
workers, if it\'s implemented, and so the coordinator, the
representative of the coordinating agency of this annex, would report
directly to the FCO, the federal coordinating official, and would report
on safety and health issues relative to response and recovery workers
beyond the FEMA jurisdiction.

In the initial actions at the bottom of Page 3, this is new to annexes,
it will talk about, for example, that within two hours of notification,
the OSHA Assistant Secretary will ensure that all DOL-OSHA parties are
fully informed, that it will alert cooperating agencies, and that we
will send representatives over to the National Response Coordinating
Center, which is housed over at FEMA Headquarters.

At the local level, the regional administrator will assume control for
operations of this annex in the field and will staff the regional
response coordination center.

So, we didn\'t have this in the past. We now have seats at the two major
coordinating centers, both at the national and at the regional level, to
address worker safety and health issues during a response and that is
new. That didn\'t exist before.

In incident-related actions, within two hours of being notified as the
coordinating agency, we will convene, probably through a conference
call, a meeting of the appropriate agency representatives of our
cooperating agencies, and on the front page of the document, it lists
the cooperating agencies.

These include the Department of Defense, specifically the Coast Guard,
the Department of Energy, Department of Health and Human Services, which
includes NIOSH and Federal Occupational Health. We will also include the
Department of Homeland Security and that specifically is FEMA as well as
the other cooperating agencies, EPA.

So, we will look to all of our cooperating agencies for assistance. I
left one out. Department of Health and Human Services, this is a key
player for us, is the National Institute for Environmental Health
Sciences. They are a key player for us, particularly in the demands that
come for training of workers.

All right. Under the Incident-Related Actions, rather than having a menu
like we did last time, we tried to group that and you\'ll see that the
incident-related actions that we have include worker safety and health
needs assessment, which will include monitoring as well as observation
of safety hazards, the development of health and safety plans, safety
and health assessment ongoing monitoring, personal protective equipment,
depending upon the event.

We will assist in the monitoring and/or providing information and
technical assistance for PPE programs, including the selection, use and
decon of PPE, and in coordination with FEMA and ESF-7, we will work with
them on the logistics to make sure that if PPE is needed, it\'s being
purchased and it\'s being delivered to where it needs to be delivered.

We\'ll also focus on data management which, as you know, in an event can
be its own type of difficult situation to deal with to get that type of
injury and illness data from federal agencies and from private sector
entities.

Training and communication is always key and we will start work \-- and
we usually rely on NIEHS. They have the master trainers and we use them
to put basically just-in-time training together for those response and
recovery workers.

We will work with ESF-8, which is HHS is the lead agency for that, on
worker health and medical surveillance and we have our staff of
occupational physicians who have worked with HHS in the past in doing
those types of situations, doing that type of work.

And then in the area of psychological resiliency, we will continue to
work with HHS, Federal Occupational Health, in the Substance Abuse
Mental Health Services Administration, to address psychological
resiliency during emergency response.

So, as the last few pages of this document then list the
responsibilities of the coordinating agency, that being DOL-OSHA, as
well as the cooperating agencies and for each cooperating agency, it
gives a summary of what the functions of that organization would be
during emergency response.

The other change that comes about in this is that established at the
joint field office is an Interagency Safety and Health Committee that\'s
made up of representatives of the federal agencies that are representing
the emergency support functions in the joint field office and we would
chair that Interagency Safety and Health Committee.

What we found in Katrina, for example, that committee met daily in the
early days. It continued to meet during that 12-month response recovery
period, although it ended up at the end meeting once a week, but we
would basically be involved and that\'s where you really get to share
the information of what hazards are being seen, getting information out
there as far as changing requirements for PPE or changing requirements
for controls. So that Interagency Safety and Health Committee is an
important communication tool during response activities.

So that is a summary of the new National Response Framework. I really do
urge you to take a look at the website and you can download the
information and have your own personal copy.

This has not been published in the Federal Register yet. Once it\'s
published in the Federal Register, it will become effective 60 days
after publication in the Federal Register.

MR. SMITH: Thank you very much, Ruth.

Are there any questions or comments for Ruth while our next presenter\'s
coming forward and getting ready? Yes, sir?

MR. ZARLETTI: Yes, Ruth. This is Dan Zarletti from Kennett Construction.

You mentioned training that\'s coming up in March and April. Is that on
the website, information about where and when?

MS. McCULLY: I don\'t know. I mean, this is just information that I just
received yesterday. So, as we get information on training, I\'d be happy
to send that over to Steve Witt and he can send it out to you all.

MR. ZARLETTI: Thank you.

MR. SMITH: Thomas?

MR. KAVICKY: Thanks, Mr. Chairman.

Ruth, Tom Kavicky, Carpenters Union out of Chicago.

As we all know, Ruth, OSHA was heavily criticized during the World Trade
Center and Katrina for not enforcing standards.

Does the annex account for that? How is OSHA going to enforce those
standards or are they in the future responses?

MS. McCULLY: That\'s really covered under a directive that we have for
the agency, and the directive is \-- basically, it\'s our National
Emergency Management Plan, and during \-- although it does away with \--
although the National Response Framework does away with the term
\"incident of national significance,\" if there\'s a large-scale
incident and, for example, the annex is implemented, initially that
response will be a technical assistance response rather than an
enforcement response.

And the decision to go \-- to return to enforcement will be made in
consultation between the regional administrator and the Assistant
Secretary, and we have looked at the different types of approaches that
we can take to work out those issues as far as enforcement versus
technical assistance.

But in the early days, when we\'re in a response and we\'re talking
about a large-scale disaster response and recovery, we would be
operating in a technical assistance mode.

Now, as things change during that event, as things start to return to
normal, if there are situations where you have basically a resistance to
putting in the corrections that we are asking to be put in, then the
agency can look at the use of the enforcement tool in those particular
situations.

So, it\'s not a black and white answer at this point. It\'s really on a
case by case basis.

MR. BEAUREGARD: Just real briefly. Can you go over the interaction with
specifically state plan, OSHA states, when you implement or when the
annex is implemented?

Particularly, this kind of follows on the question that was just asked,
is that in state plans, if enforcement is necessary, the state plan
states actually have jurisdiction over local and state emergency
responders, fire departments, paramedics.

In OSHA-regulated states, there\'s no enforcement ability over those.
So, how do you plan on interacting with the states and coordinating
within state plan states?

MS. McCULLY: Well, the regional administrators have been given direction
by the Assistant Secretary and past assistant secretaries to coordinate
with the state plan states and what we have found in both real world,
whether it be the Minnesota bridge collapse or in exercises, for
example, we just completed a top-up exercise in Oregon, is that we\'ve
been able to basically put forth to the world one OSHA and, you know,
when we go into those situations, the state plan does have jurisdiction
in those areas and we\'re there and we pretty much provide assistance to
that state plan who often doesn\'t have the same depth and volume of
resources that we have.

What we have experienced is we haven\'t found that to be a problem and
that in both exercises and in the real world, when you\'re working
within this command structure, certainly at the local level, the fire
tends to be the incident commander. So, you\'re working with them and
they\'re paying attention to what you\'re requiring and I think you\'ll
hear with the Minnesota bridge collapse, for example, they used a very
innovative technique on daily checking on what the requirements were,
and I think you\'ll hear a story as to how that worked very effectively.

But it is all working together. I mean that\'s the thing with an
emergency, is making sure that we\'re all working together.

MR. SMITH: Okay. Thank you very much, Ruth, for your time. Appreciate
that.

We\'re ready for our next presenter. It will be our last presentation
before lunch.

OSHA\'s Structural Response Team, Mohammad Ayub, I think. Mohammad, are
you ready?

MR. AYUB: Yes, I think we need to turn on the computer.

MR. BUCHET: If there\'s anything wrong, it\'s my fault.

[OSHA\'s Structural Response Team]{.underline}

MR. AYUB: I think for the next one half hour, I\'m going to walk you
through some of the actual construction collapses that we have gone out
to help in the enforcement mode.

From 1 to 2 o\'clock today in the afternoon, you are going to hear about
the Minnesota bridge collapse. So, I\'m not going to deal with that
collapse now and I\'m not going to steal the show. So, they will be here
at 1 o\'clock and they are going to talk about that.

Before I proceed, I just wanted you to know as to who are the members of
the National Structural Collapse Team. It\'s now coming up, I believe.
Okay.

This team right now comprises six people and they have been drawn from
National Office and here you are. We are going to add at least two more
members soon in the team and this team in theory, it is only in action
when the Assistant Secretary activates the National Emergency Plan, but
in the case of a normal construction collapse, we can also draw some
assistance from the team.

I\'m just now waiting for the slide to show up there.

MR. THIBODEAUX: Keep going.

MR. AYUB: Okay. This team, while the National Emergency Plan has not
been activated, it goes through training, one week of training goes
through in classroom environment and one week of training goes out in
the field, and the third week of the training is kind of a cross
training between the full team that we have because in the case of a
collapse of a nuclear power plant, you might imagine that there will be
radiation, there will be some chemical.

So, there is a need for the full team to act together. That\'s why we
have a cross training between the full teams.

Next slide, please. Okay. These are the members of our Structural
Response Team, and as I said earlier, we are going to add two more
members soon.

Number 1 and Number 2 are by training, education and experience as
chemical engineers and from 3 to 6, they are construction safety
specialists and they have varied training in the disasters in the
cranes, in all sorts of activities there.

Now, if you go to the Slide Number 3, this is what is one of the primary
functions that you\'ll see, is to provide engineering assistance to the
field in case of the major collapses.

This slide should not be confused with the earlier slide because this
slide is active all the time 24/7. Any time there is a collapse, in
Jacksonville, Atlanta, New York, the RA is going to call the director of
the DOC and they will come to some agreement that yes, there is need for
some engineering help and we will provide that help.

In this slide, we are into the enforcement mode. In Slide Number 2, we
were only in the technical assistance mode. So, in this slide, we will
provide them engineering assistance. We will write a report to tell what
was the cause of the collapse and we will also discuss whether or not
there was violations of the OSHA standards or violation of the industry
standards.

When we go out there, we have three objectives in our mind. The first
objective is that the part of the structure that has already collapsed,
it remains stable, there are no further collapses, and the part of the
structure that has not collapsed, it is braced, it is shored, such that
there are no unplanned collapses.

Number 2. We have an objective to find out whether or not any of the
OSHA standards or any of the industry standards have been violated, and
the third objective is to find the cause of the collapse.

Can we go to the next slide, please? I\'m going to walk you through some
of the recent collapses that we have gone out in the field to help the
RA here and area office.

One thing I would like to share with you, that based upon our 65
investigations that we have conducted so far of the immediate collapses,
15 to 20 percent of them are caused by the structural design flaw. It\'s
not the fault of the contractor. It was the manner in which it was
designed.

For example, Tropicana Garage collapse in Atlantic City. You will also
know about the Jacksonville, Florida, garage collapse. Light Tower in
Atlanta, a major sign in Georgia, which you see if you are driving I-95,
there\'s a huge sign, that sign collapsed and killed three employees.

There was a steel chimney in Austin, Texas, and that failed. Just to
give you a few examples, that about 15 to 20 percent of the collapses
take place because the structural engineer did not design the structure
properly as per the described codes.

The first major incident I\'d like to run by you is the Jacksonville,
Florida, garage collapse. It was a five-story poured-in-place garage and
on December 6^th^ in the morning at about 6 o\'clock, they were pouring
the roof slab. That was the last to be poured and \-- can you activate
that?

This is a five-story poured-in-place garage. It is a one-bay
post-tension slab with slopes in the roof and also one-bay post-tension
beams and that green area is the area that was being poured on December
6^th^.

As they had started pouring concrete at about 12:30 a.m. in the morning
and they worked four hours, except the two bays on the south, the entire
garage collapsed.

The contractor was from Atlanta, Georgia, and we are finding \-- we are
not there yet. We have not yet concluded our findings, but it seems that
there are some major structural design flaws and also the fact that the
amount of reshoring was not enough. He had only shored one level and two
levels of reshoring, even though the shop drawings said the shoring
calls for the reshores be placed up to the ground floor.

Now, the next slide is going to show you the manner in which it was
collapsed. The last two bays that you see on the south did not fail but
all the other five bays failed and as I said earlier, one of our prime
functions is to make sure that the area of the building which has not
collapsed, it remains stable, and we determined at the site that even
though it had not collapsed, it is in danger of collapse, and the basis
of that was that it is a one-bay post-tension slab and all the cables
have lost their inner strength. It had become loose, therefore those
slabs had no strength in them, and we asked the contractor that no one
should be allowed to go underneath those two bays that have not failed.
The contractor might have decided that he is going to demolish that,
too.

So, one more thing I would like to share with you, that by statute, we
have only six months time in which we have to conclude everything. So,
from the date of the incident, we have \-- I mean the DOC has about four
months in order to write a report, in order to conclude the findings, in
order to write the basis and to find out as to what was the cause of the
collapse.

In four months, you will find that some of the evidence are not out
there yet. For example, in this case here, until today, the debris have
not even been removed. So, we don\'t know where the shores, where were
the reshores. We have no benefit of any test data on the strength of the
concrete.

So, we work under a big constraint here, but our citations are not based
upon the cause of the collapse. Our citations are based upon whether or
not any standards have been violated, but some of the information comes
out way later, like eight months or one year after the collapse.

The next incident which was a major incident of the Tropicana Garage
Collapse that killed four garage employees and until last night that was
the largest construction settlement, \$101 million, but last night in
Boston, due to the Big Dig at the airport, the settlement, I heard, was
about \$450 million. So now it is no longer the largest construction
settlement here.

This is a very interesting case here and as I said earlier, part of the
reason that the garage collapsed was the structural design flaw.

It was a very unique system that they had here. I don\'t know how many
of you have heard the word \"filigree.\" There was a filigree panel
here. It is a two-inch thick precast concrete slab that acts as a form
work for the poured-in-place concrete and it also becomes a part of the
permanent slab.

That is the system that was used here. It\'s not very popular in all
parts of the country, but at least in New Jersey, New York,
Pennsylvania, it is fairly popular here.

So, this is a garage here. It was an eight-story garage and on October
30^th^, while the seventh floor was being poured here, we can see the
filigree slab and the filigree beam and the shores here and while the
sixth \-- I\'m not sure whether it was the sixth floor or the seventh
floor.

It was being poured and the exterior bay, which was about 60 feet wide,
it collapsed from the seventh floor up to the fourth floor here.

Here you see the duration of the deflection of the slabs and those are
the shores and those are the reshores and there was a big contention of
the contractor that he was not required to extend the reshoring up to
the first floor.

We\'ll see in this kind of animation that the reshoring and the shoring
was only for three levels and the problem was essentially in the beam
column joint in the exterior. The beam was much wider and the column was
very narrow.

For example, the column was only 12 inches wide and on that narrow
column, a 48-inch beam was going to rest on. Loading that column in a
very eccentric manner here. Outside is the collapsed here area.

Can you go to the end? Okay. You\'ll see here that was the floor at the
top. That was in whole and ACI, which is the Concrete Institute that
says that you have to take a 50 pound per square foot as the load of the
construction load that will account for the people that are standing on
that floor and some of the equipment, and as you can see, there was only
one level of shore and two level of reshore and why that was being
poured, the slabs, exterior beams, and the columns failed.

One of our primary functions was to ensure that those bays which have
not failed remain stable. So, we worked with the contractor and we came
up with a plan as to shore them and guide those columns and brace those
columns so that there\'s no other failures.

There was also a shear wall here that was freely standing about 80 feet
without any support of floors. Even though it did appear to be in
danger, but when we ran the computations, we found that it is in no
danger. It can take a wind speed of up to 110 miles an hour.

So, when we go out there, we have to keep in mind that those parts of
the structures which have not failed, there\'s no unplanned collapse of
those structures.

One of the recent incidents that we had was in U.S. 90 in Mississippi.
The old bridge was destroyed by the Katrina storm and they were building
a new bridge about 20-40 feet east of the old bridge, and one of the big
bridge piers, it is 12 feet wide, six feet long, 39 feet high, it was
being pulled.

Can you go to the next slide? And while it was being pulled, the form
work that you see in the bay, it\'s now 12 X 6 and the thing that you
are seeing are the rebar which went into the foundation and as they were
coming up pouring the concrete into the form work, they had almost gone
up to the required height and the entire form work collapsed and it
killed two of the employees.

When we did the investigation, we found that the reason was two reasons.
One, that the rate of pouring was too high. They were pouring nine feet
per hour. You can imagine at what speed it was being poured because the
area of the bridge pier is 12 feet by six feet.

We also found that the concrete had superelasticizer and it also had a
retarder. When you have a retarder in the concrete, the setting time is
quite increased. Instead of having an initial setting time in about one
half hour, it is going to set in three hours, in four hours.

So, all this much concrete coming up into the form work, it applied a
lot of direct pressure on the form work and the form work was not
designed for the pressure of the fluid concrete.

Next slide. This is Peachtree in Atlanta, Georgia. It was an elevator
shaft being poured and the form work being built and the reason was that
they had made the elevator door opening taller. When they made the
elevator door opening taller, the beam which was embedded in the
concrete did not have enough meat below the insert and because it
didn\'t have enough concrete below the insert, the entire concrete
dropped off and it failed and it killed a couple of people.

In Virgin Islands, \-- oh, by the way, we also exchange engineering
assistance to State OSHA plan, if they need it. They need to ask us and
if we believe that, yes, there is a need to exchange the engineering
assistance to them, we will do that. We have helped in Virginia,
Portland, Oregon, Minnesota, and some other places here.

This was a very huge manmade landslide. They were trying to build a
parking lot and they compacted the slope too steep and when we conducted
a stability analysis, we found that the angle of repose was too great.

Can you show that? This is the area of the manmade landslide. Any time
when you are told about the landslide, we are always reminded of the
nature of landslides. It\'s usually caused by nature, but this was a
manmade landslide.

Next one, please. Oh, this is a major area of concern for us. Can you
show? These are the roof trusses and we are finding more and more that
the roof trusses are collapsing when you build a church, when you build
an auditorium or when you build a large span structure.

This is a restaurant which was being built. I think it was a restaurant
or perhaps an office building. Any time you have a span of the roof
trusses greater than 90 feet, there is a problem.

According to the Truss Plate Institute, you have to have a professional
engineer design for you a bracing plan as to how these trusses will be
braced. They need to be braced at the top core, the bottom core, and the
diagonal.

But most truss erectors of these projects are very small-size erectors.
They are like, I mean, son and father or like three people and four
people and they just are confident that if they can do an erection of a
12-feet truss, why can\'t they do the erection of a 90-feet long truss?

These we are finding almost everywhere in Atlanta, in New Jersey, in
Philadelphia, in New York. So, what we are going to do right now is that
we are right now working with the Truss Plate Institute and some of the
leading designers of the trusses, like Mitek, and we are going to hold a
seminar at certain places. It\'s not yet final, but we are still working
on it.

But the main problem is how to bring these contractors in the hall
because they are so small in size that there\'s not a good record of
them. So, we are working with the Carpenter\'s Union and we will also
work with some other unions in the Eastern United States so that OSHA,
along with the Truss Plate Institute and also along with the major
designers of the trusses, we can at least hold some seminars so that we
can focus on the need that if you have the long wooden trusses, there
should be a flag. You need to brace them properly.

In this case, not only were the trusses not braced properly, they also
placed on the top of the truss 2 X 4 and 2 X 6 and 2 X 8 bundles on them
and that load was such that it failed the trusses.

These trusses are very light trusses and they will only gain the
strength if you have the plywood on the top because those members are
the compression members and they will only gain the strength if you have
the plywood at the top. If there\'s no sheathing at the top, it has very
little strength.

It is in our backyard here. It was an office building and one day, we
held a big promotion and a big roof collapse took place there. The whole
roof of a 22-story building and the entire floor shoring collapsed on
the floor and when we did the analysis, we found that the shores were
not done properly and also there was space shoring that was placed on
this floor that was not meant to be placed on the floor.

This was for the floors below and there has never been any design for
the shoring for that ever. Why? Because there was an upset beam there. I
mean, it was like a 12-feet wide 18-inch deep upset beam and for that
heavy load, the contractor never ever asked the shoring supplier to come
up with a shoring plan, and even though there was an inspector there
hired by the owner, there was an inspector by the county and when we
talked to them, they said that this floor had the same shoring plan that
was meant for the floors below can also be used here at the roof, even
though on the plan, it says that this drawing is meant only for floors
and not for roof.

So, the inspector was there and in spite of the fact that at times, you
have the inspector hired by the owner, you have inspector by some other
people and still the problems come up here.

Okay. So, because of the time frame, I had only presented to you a few
of the major incidents that we had gone out in the field to help.

This is primarily a DOC activity and as I said earlier, one of the
primary functions of the DOC is to provide engineering assistance to the
field, to go out to the field and help the area office.

If you have any questions to ask on any of the incidents or if you have
a general question, I will be glad to answer them.

MR. SMITH: Okay.

MR. GILLEN: Thanks. That was a terrific presentation. Enjoyed it.

I just wanted to say that from NIOSH\'s perspective, we would be
interested in hearing from your investigations if you uncover what you
think is a good research topic, an engineering-related research topic.
We\'d be interested in hearing that.

I was wondering, also, it might be something for the DOC to think about,
is in cases where you find that perhaps a new type of construction
method perhaps isn\'t really adequately addressed by current regulation,
is there something where there might be a need for thinking about how to
address these types of problems in the future, it would be useful to
hear more about that or get your recommendations in those regards as
well.

MR. AYUB: Okay. Most of our investigation reports are on the OSHA
Intranet, not on Internet. They are on the OSHA Intranet. So, you have
access to that. NIOSH? No?

MR. GILLEN: No.

MR. AYUB: Okay. We will be glad to provide you with copies of our
reports here, but based upon my experience here, 99 percent of the
collapses take place not because of very big mistakes done by the
contractor but from very simple blunders, simple blunders, and when
there\'s a need to get engineering assistance, the contractors shy out.

They are quite shy to call the structural engineer in the field and get
help from them. If they will do that, I think most of the incidents will
not take place.

There are some shortcuts that have been used and thank God that there is
so much factor of safety in the design of the bridges and the buildings
that they don\'t fail, but if you do a very simple blunder, very, if I
may, stupid mistake, it\'s going to fail the building or the bridge or
the tower or the tunnels.

They need to concentrate and they need to realize that if there\'s a
need for engineering assistance, ask for it, get it. You are not
qualified enough to solve the engineering problem. Get help from the
right source.

MR. SMITH: Okay. Thank you. Yes, Tom?

MR. KAVICKY: Just a quick comment, Mr. Chairman.

Couldn\'t OSHA develop specifically for the truss collapses, we\'ve had
the same issues out in Chicago, a safety and health information bulletin
regarding that?

MR. AYUB: There is one.  It is not by us, but it\'s by the Truss Plate
Institute and that is a very good document. It shows in color, it shows
in three dimensions where should the bracings be. It shows at the top,
at the diagonal, at the bottom. It gives you in three colors all the
bracing that needs to be there.

But if the span of the bridge is more than 90 feet, then the TPI will
not take the responsibility. They say that professional engineer must be
contacted and he or she be asked to, you know, design the bracings.

It is just a matter of communicating with the small contractors. That\'s
my problem all the time. When I go out in the field, I find that he has
never done a large truss and he doesn\'t even understand that it needs
to be braced.

So, I think it is more a matter of education, but we have the slides.
They have the color brochures. They have a large-scale depiction of how
the trusses need to be braced.

MR. SMITH: Okay. A couple of housekeeping duties and we\'ll adjourn for
lunch.

First, anyone from the public that would like to sign up to speak this
afternoon, the list is in the back of the room. This is the last time
that we will ask right as we come back from lunch, but please sign that
during lunch.

And second, anyone that\'s arrived late that would like to attend
Stewart Burkhammer\'s retirement party tonight, please see someone at
OSHA and they\'ll get you signed up.

Mohammad, if you would \-- Mohammad, could you provide us a copy of your
PowerPoint presentation for the record, please?

MR. AYUB: Yes, I can.

MR. SMITH: Okay. Thank you. We\'d like to have that today, if possible.
Okay. Thank you very much.

With that, please be back at 1 o\'clock for the presentation on the
Minnesota Bridge Collapse.

(Whereupon, the meeting was in lunch recess from 11:41 a.m. until 1:04
p.m.)

MR. SMITH: Okay. Appreciate your promptness and we\'ll get started.

Last time I\'m going to mention this but the sign-up sheet for the
Public Comment\'s in the back of the room. That will be later on this
afternoon and if you\'re going to sign up, now\'s the time to do it.
It\'s the last opportunity. We\'ll take it off the table after we start
back. So, please, if you\'re going to wait to sign up, now\'s your
chance.

Okay. And any latecomers, hopefully you know about the retirement party
for Mr. Burkhammer tonight. Please see any OSHA reps in the room if
you\'d like to attend. That will be right after work today. So, we
can\'t run late today because we\'ve got a big retirement party to go
to.

So, appreciate your promptness. I know everybody\'s excited about
hearing our next presentation regarding the Minnesota Bridge Collapse
and OSHA\'s Role in that, and I\'m going to turn it over to Jeff Isakson
\-- how do you pronounce that?

MR. ISAKSON: Isakson.

MR. SMITH: Isakson. I\'m sorry. My Southern accent catches me again.

Appreciate you coming. He flew in this morning just for this and we
appreciate it and he\'s got someone he\'ll be introducing that\'s going
to help him with the presentation.

[MN I-35 Bridge Collapse and OSHA\'s Role]{.underline}

MR. ISAKSON: Thanks, Linwood.

Again, my name is Jeff Isakson. I\'m the Director for Minnesota OSHA,
and I\'m going to be doing this presentation along with Mark Hysell,
who\'s the Area Director and covers our area for Region 5.

Both of us worked very, very closely on the whole removal/recovery
process of the 35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis, and when I left
Minneapolis this morning, it was 24 degrees below zero. So, thank you
for the heat wave. I appreciate it. I forgot my suit jacket, but when I
was on the plane walking back toward the facilities, I was stopped
twice, people asked me if I could give them a refill on the beverages.
So, I told them I was the pilot.

Anyway, to start things off, Mark\'s going to start us off, we have a
short video that we\'re going to share with you on different events or
different videos that were taken during the bridge collapse and then
we\'ll move forward from there.

So, Mark?

MR. HYSELL: Thank you. Thank you, Jeff.

Again, my name\'s Mark Hysell. I\'m the Area Director in Eau Claire,
Wisconsin, and part of my job is to assist Jeff with monitoring the
State of Minnesota OSHA Program for the Federal Government.

What we\'d like to cover today is again, as Jeff explained, the video
that we\'re going to show you and we wanted to show you this video so
that you could actually see the magnitude of the event and some of the
hazards that were associated with it that we had to deal with.

You know, the media and the television coverage really didn\'t do it
justice. So, I think that you\'ll really be surprised at this video.

In addition to that, we want to cover our initial response, just a
summary of our thoughts and how we came together cooperatively to try to
incorporate safety and health into the removal, recovery and removal
process, and then, in addition to that, we transitioned from what we
called controlled chaos to getting control of the site through safety
and health and ultimately the State of Minnesota and Minnesota OSHA
entered into a cooperative agreement with the removal contractor and now
the rebuild contractor. So, there\'s actually partnerships that have
been developed as a result of this entire process.

And then we\'re going to cover a little bit of a lessons learned and
hopefully we\'ll have time for a few questions. So, with that, I did
want to give you a little bit of a summary of the event.

If you weren\'t aware of it, it happened on August 1^st^, about 6 p.m.,
Interstate 35W, the bridge crossing the river. It\'s in downtown
Minneapolis. Actually, it\'s real close to the Metrodome. If you\'re not
aware of exactly where it is, a quarter of a mile from the ramp going to
the actual Metrodome and the State of Minnesota or Minnesota \--
University of Minnesota is right on the other side of the river. So,
it\'s a very congested area.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Could you sit down, please, so we can see the screen?

MR. HYSELL: Oh, that\'s fine. Thank you for that.

So again, it\'s a very congested area and actually it\'s the most
traveled bridge in the entire state of Minnesota. It was rush hour.
There was a Minnesota Twins game getting ready to kick off at 7 p.m.

Just so you\'re aware, there were 13 fatalities associated with this
collapse ultimately and one fatality had OSHA jurisdiction, where the
State of Minnesota had jurisdiction for the investigation of that
fatality. 98 total injured.

The emergency response, the fire department had 40 pieces of equipment,
as you can see. 40 to 50 mutual aid fire departments also responded
initially. The police department had 850 officers onsite for the initial
rescue and initial recovery. 64 law enforcement agencies and then we had
40 units respond, EMS response and the hospitals in the area. Everybody
really went into action right after the collapse.

So, with that, Jeff\'s going to walk you through the video presentation.

MR. ISAKSON: What you\'re going to see is you\'re going to see a couple
of surveillance camera shots that were taken from Mn/DOT. One was down
in the river area and the other one was up above the approach to the
bridge itself.

You\'re also going to see some cell phone video that was taken by a
bystander and then some home video taken by another person, and then
there\'s a piece that was put out by the American Red Cross that kind of
gives you a perspective of what really occurred.

This is from the surveillance camera from down below in the dam area.
Some of you probably have seen this on TV. This next piece was from up
above. The camera basically followed what was going on at the time of
the bridge collapse.

This is right after it occurred. As you can see that there\'s cars that
just stopped and turned around and people trying to get out of the area.

This was taken by an individual cell phone up on the 10^th^ Street
Bridge, which was right next door to the 35W Bridge, and this was
shortly after. You can see the bus up on the upper right-hand side. All
the kids that were \-- that was a full school bus. All the kids were
taken out and nobody was injured there.

The fire\'s from a truck. The bridge actually came down over top of the
cab of a bread truck and that person was \-- he was killed.

This is some home video that was taken by a bystander that was down in
the \-- this is the road that actually takes them to the bottom portion
of the bridge and this is the initial response by the different
emergency response vehicles.

This piece here was what was put together by the American Red Cross. It
kind of puts into perspective what the bridge looked like and after the
collapse what quite a number of people really had to go through as far
as the recovery and removal process of that bridge.

When they removed the bridge, and you\'ll see some of the structure
there, a lot of the metal portion of the bridge was better than an inch
thick and they brought in a crane with some shears and to cut the bridge
up, but I would say about 85 percent of the bridge was actually cut
apart in pieces by the cutting torches just simply because they wanted
to reassemble it. NTSB wanted to reassemble it so they could kind of
reconstruct it to help determine what actually caused the bridge
collapse.

You see a lot of the people \-- that\'s the 10^th^ Street Bridge there
where the previous cell phone video was taken.

The number of people that were on there those initial days, it was kind
of like going to a state fair. I mean, it was just a sea of people
walking around and the Minneapolis Police Department did a very good job
with securing that site. As quickly as they could, they put a barrier
fence up to keep people out of that area. It was shortly after that they
did close that 10^th^ Street Bridge as they were doing the recovery of
the deceased. So, it was really restricted as far as what people could
see.

Mark?

MR. HYSELL: So, as you can see, there was quite a mess and that evening,
shortly after the collapse, communication between the State of
Minnesota, Minnesota OSHA, and Federal OSHA started.

I was in contact with my boss, Mike Connors, the regional administrator
out of Region 5, and Jeff was in contact with his managers, and I was in
contact with Jeff and we started our initial brainstorming on how we
would respond in a cooperative assistance mode and ultimately the next
morning, we had a meeting via conference call, Department of Labor and
Industry, Commissioner of Department of Labor and Industry, Jeff and
myself, and we discussed our initial response and how we were going to
try to get into the site.

So, what Jeff did is he contacted the Minneapolis Police Department and
attempted to gain access to the site and actually went and toured the
site that morning and he was escorted by the fire chief.

In the meantime, my boss was telling me to saddle up and head that
direction, also. Federal OSHA, of course, wanted to assist Minnesota
OSHA with anything that we could bring to the table, but, in addition to
that, we had jurisdiction over the navigable waterways of the
Mississippi River and all the work activity that would occur in the
river itself.

And so I headed that direction, myself and my assistant area director,
and we arrived that afternoon and Jeff briefed me on just the overall
condition of the site. We went over our PPE requirements again and so on
and then we traveled to the site together that afternoon.

And when we got there, for lack of a better term, and I kind of opened
with this, but it really was controlled chaos. There were a lot of folks
there doing a lot of different things and we really didn\'t find at the
time \-- and keep in mind, this is only, you know, 20 hours, 18 hours
after this has occurred, and we really didn\'t find a real incident
command structure like you would normally find or at least what you\'re
trained to find when you go through the incident command trainings.

At that time, it\'s just, I guess, ironic, one of the first folks that
we did come in contact with was Mn/DOT Safety and ultimately they became
\-- they were the agency that was in control of the bridge and they were
actually made the incident commander a couple of days later.

We conducted our first site survey of the bridge, and as Jeff explained,
basically there were \-- outside of the controlled areas and the
controlled areas got more significant and more significant and the
Minneapolis Police Department again did a great job, but outside of
that, just getting from one side of the river to the other, it was like
a carnival.

There were so many boats down there, that you\'d sit at a stoplight and
it would take three changes of a light to even get to the light and so
we were dealing with that.

We surveyed the entire site and then at the same time, Minnesota OSHA
was starting to gear up back at the Department of Labor and Industry
with training folks to respond in cooperative assistance mode and they
identified compliance assistance specialists and folks that actually
responded to Katrina and 9/11. So, we used that pool of staff members
originally.

About that same time, Mr. Connors was activating Federal OSHA for just
some expertise to give me some assistance. Mohammad was the presenter
right before lunch. He traveled to the site and immediately he was on a
plane.

We also had a civil engineer from the regional office, a diving expert
from Cleveland, and a crane expert from Aurora, and I had my office set
up a logistics for those folks and originally we were out in St. Paul at
a hotel out there.

That evening, about 10:30 p.m., Jeff and I returned to the Department of
Labor and Industry and that was when the rubber really met the road.

We had one goal and that was to develop a plan for OSHA\'s unified
response. Here it is going on midnight and we knew that we were going to
have to brief our bosses at 8 o\'clock in the morning on what we thought
of the site, our overall assessment, and what we could do to assist the
responders and ultimate removal throughout the entire process and so I
want to go over a little bit of thought process that we went through
that night as we went ahead.

The first thing that we did is we started with the site itself, okay,
and as any true blue safety and health professional, the first thing we
want to start with is what are the hazards?

Okay. We had a white board. We put up there all the different hazards
that we saw going on, different activities, and also we were looking
ahead at what type of engineering practices and work practices that were
going to be incorporated at the site, all the way through to the end,
and so we wanted to try to address that, personal protective equipment
requirements, how we were going to offer our assistance, overall
training needs for the site, and Jeff\'s going to get into exactly what
we established for that.

We also at the time had identified some key players that we knew were at
the site working and so we listed them and then we knew, in addition to
that, we would also need to identify when all the daily meetings were
going to occur and how we were going to plug into those meetings.

We wanted to ultimately focus our activities in site hazards and
developing a JHA system for any work activities that occurred.

Now, when we first arrived, when we first traveled to the site, there
was really no control of the hazards and there was no identified red
zone where it\'s extremely dangerous to be and where it\'s not, and
Mohammad helped me out a lot with that when he arrived, and MnOSHA and
Federal OSHA actually established the red zone or the hot zone for the
site.

We discussed safety and health plans for the site. In addition to that,
we wanted to look at what health hazards there were going to be and what
we envisioned for the future and lead, hex chrome and silica were what
we started to focus our attentions on.

Now, for OSHA, now we knew that we were going to have our folks on the
site and we wanted, first and foremost, to make sure that we were
protected. I mean at this time, we didn\'t have a hot zone. We didn\'t
have control of anything. So, we had to come up with a plan of how we
were going to get there, what we were going to do when we get there and
how we were going to make sure none of our folks got hurt in doing what
we were doing.

This is what we came up with. Four-person teams, two Minnesota OSHA and
two Federal OSHA, seven days, three shifts, and a buddy system where we
would pair up a Minnesota OSHA staff member and a Federal OSHA staff
member and they would always stay together. We thought that that was
paramount.

Each team was comprised of an industrial hygienist, safety specialist,
and at least a diving expert during diving operations. We always had a
crane expert in the mix of the four and so on.

In addition to that, we knew that we had to train our personnel as they
arrived in Minneapolis, the Federal OSHA personnel and, in addition to
that, the Minnesota OSHA personnel that were going to be involved in
this project.

So, we started the initial brainstorming of exactly what that would
entail. Personal protective equipment, of course, communication of span
and control, that was very important, and ensuring our folks were safe.

The projected logistics requirements, you know. We needed to get people
from the airport to the site. We needed to get a hotel close to the
site. We needed to get people from the hotel to the site. We had shift
rotations and so on.

Also, the estimated commitment in time. I needed to tell my boss how
long I thought it was going to take to get this bridge out of the water
and from my initial survey, I wanted to do that when I briefed Mike in
the morning, and it\'s kind of funny. I don\'t know, just dumb luck, I
guess, I said nine weeks, and it took eight, a little over eight. So, we
were pretty pleased with that.

That next morning, Mohammad and the other three experts arrived in St.
Paul and I met them at the hotel first thing in the morning, I think it
was 6:30-7 o\'clock, and then we traveled to the Department of Labor and
Industry, and I briefed Mike on the plan over the phone and at the same
time, Jeff was briefing the commissioner, and ultimately the plan was
approved pretty much exactly how we had planned it throughout the night.
So that worked out very well.

When we went back to the site after that to start identifying the hot
zone, you know, incorporate Federal OSHA into every aspect of this
entire project and Minnesota OSHA, OSHA in general, I\'m sorry, into
this entire process, it really was chaotic.

There were a lot of turf wars that were going on and, you know, in my
wildest dreams, I, you know, think about this a lot since 9/11, but I
never envisioned the turf wars and I guess I was just naive because it
stands to reason that there is going to be some turf wars.

We had the NTSB onsite and they were in charge of the collapse
investigation and they wanted to find out as quickly as possible what
had happened so that they could prevent it from happening again
somewhere else and that\'s in direct conflict with body removal and
other types of operations that are going on because the NTSB is saying
you can\'t touch that. Okay? Well, we\'ve got to touch that and so on.

In addition to that, there was a criminal investigation going on. The
FBI was there and the ATF was there. They had dogs going over the
bridge. They had other types of explosive-sensing equipment that they
were using.

Hennepin County Sheriff\'s Department actually set up shop on the river
and took over control of the river and the body recovery operations in
the river and, as we mentioned earlier, the City of Minneapolis had
overall security of the entire site, and most of us are aware there\'s
usually some sort of friction between city police and county police and
state police and jurisdictional issues and that really did come to light
a lot during this event.

We also had, after President Bush came to the site, he sent in the Navy
Dive Team. They landed in Minneapolis about midnight that Saturday night
and they were there for one purpose and that was to assist the Hennepin
County Sheriff\'s Department with finding those bodies and getting those
bodies out of there. So, there was a lot of friction between them and
the NTSB.

FEMA was onsite. At about that same time, a contract was let for a
contractor for the bridge removal and that was Bolander and Sons out of
St. Paul, and they did an outstanding job and they were wonderful,
ultimately wonderful to work with, and again MnDOT was in charge of the
overall site and so we, as OSHA, worked intimately with MnDOT and MnDOT
Safety to make this chaos something that could be controlled and
ultimately try to meet our goal that nobody else was injured or killed
as a result of this catastrophe.

And this picture, I think, best depicts the hazards that we were
observing initially when we got back to the site after getting the
approval for our plan.

So, we had to transition from this to getting control of the site
through Safety and Health and Jeff\'s going to explain how we did that.

MR. ISAKSON: As Mark had just explained that MnDOT was actually in
control of the site, but the previous slide before where it says MnDOT
had control of the site, there should be a whole bunch of question marks
after that because of all of the turf wars that were going on at that
time, they did have safety professionals with 24/7 coverage, but one of
the things that I think that they were really struggling with is their
staff was not really field staff.

So, they came to the site kind of blind, really not quite sure what to
do, and all of our folks that were onsite were really field people. They
were field staff, and they knew really pretty much what needed to be
done.

The unfortunate thing was those first few days that we were out there,
we kind of looked at ourselves, you know, we stood back, looked at
ourselves and we realized that we were really being kind of glorified
babysitters because of all that was going on and one of the biggest
difficulties you encounter when you have something like this happen is
initially you\'ve got rescue operations that are going on.

Then it goes into recovery operations and getting people to transition
from rescue to recovery is extremely difficult, to get the people to
realizing that, you know, there\'s no more people that you\'re going to
be rescuing, unfortunately the people that you\'re going to take out of
the river now are no longer alive, you know, and that\'s the unfortunate
fact of what occurred.

But people still think that they have the right or the ability to be
crawling all over that collapsed structure.

So, with that, there\'s a lot of the babysitting that was going on,
pulling people out of areas, sitting down, talking to them, letting them
know that they can\'t do this, can\'t do that, and it was a few days
later, we had a meeting and in the meeting, it was myself, Mark, and the
deputy regional administrator, Sandy Taylor from Federal OSHA.

We sat down till the wee hours of the evening and we discussed, okay,
what are site leadership\'s roles and responsibilities and we really
mapped out what are the clear expectations that we\'re going to give the
people that are working on that site to make sure nobody else gets hurt,
you know.

We didn\'t want to have any more fatalities or any other injuries that
could occur out at that site because we knew that there\'s going to \--
when you think of a demolition site, especially a collapsed structure, I
don\'t think you\'re going to find a more hazardous site than something
like this, and you could see that by some of my earlier pictures.

So, what occurred then was Federal OSHA, which was Mark and Sandy, met
with the federal agencies to sit down and explain to them what our
expectations were, basically told them we are compliance assistance,
we\'re not enforcement, and there are options.

I mean, if there\'s not going to be cooperation and people think that
they can be all over the bridge doing what they really feel that they
should do, there\'s nothing that says that we can\'t go into enforcement
mode.

We didn\'t want to do that. We wanted to focus on the compliance
assistance, but the federal agencies were extremely, extremely
cooperative with that, once we sat down and talked to them and explained
the meanings that we were looking at.

And then Minnesota OSHA met with MnDOT, who were the folks that
supposedly were in control of the site, and they kind of led them down
the path on what our expectations were for them, also.

The first thing that we did was we put together a uniform site
orientation and the little 35W, that\'s actually a sticker that we
required anybody that entered that bridge site had to have on their hard
hat before they were allowed into that bridge site and we expedited
getting those out there available for people.

It was required for all workers onsite, including police, fire, NTSB,
contractors, subcontractors, et. cetera.

One of the interesting situations that we would encounter from time to
time is we\'d have a utility company that maybe had to go into that area
to do some utility work and when they were approached saying, you know,
you really can\'t come in there and do work unless you\'ve got the
orientation behind you and you\'re following the site safety plan and
the response, initial response was no, we\'re not part of this removal
operation, so we really don\'t have to do those things.

So, our response back to them was, well, true, you don\'t have to, but
this is a cooperative agreement that we\'re working on. We\'re working
on a partnership right now with all the groups that are working out
there. If you don\'t want to participate in that, then you\'ll be under
enforcement. I kind of stood back and they said, no, I think that we\'ll
go through your orientation. That\'s not a problem.

So, you know, it took a couple of times before people really understood
that this was really meant to be best for all of them.

We developed a grid system map and you probably really can\'t see it,
but it\'s basically a map of the entire site. There\'s grid lines on
there. The grid lines are actually different colors.

Over the river, they\'re blue. That means that if you enter any of that
area that\'s blue, you had to have personal flotation devices as part of
your PPE, and as our folks went out and did their hazard assessments and
interventions, we entered those into an access database and we looked at
trends of different things that were happening out there on that bridge
site over that period and we used this grid map to really identify the
locations where those things were happening.

This is the intervention access database that we put together and this
was actually as the documentation was entered, we would pull this up on
a daily basis and take a look at what type of interventions were going
on, what types of hazards were being identified, and looked at trends
and then we would have our leadership meetings every day and we would
meet with the groups and we would talk about those trends and these are
the things that they really need to look closely at and to address on a
day by day basis.

We also put together activity sheets. These are daily activity sheets
and it\'s basically a job hazard analysis permitting system. If you
think of like a confined space permit or hot work permit, it was kind of
the same concept, and what it was was every job that took place out on
that site, they had to fill out one of these permits and they had to
have a copy with them as the work was being performed and a copy would
stay with our safety trailer.

This was something that really kind of evolved throughout that initial
time period when the collapse first occurred, but how it would work is
this would be filled out, would identify the hazards that were
associated with the work that they\'re going to be doing, basically who
was going to be doing the work, why they were doing the work, the area
that they\'re going to be entering, and then it had to have signed-off
approval by MnDOT Safety and then Federal OSHA and Minnesota OSHA would
also look at it.

If there was work that was being performed in certain parts of the
structure, such as if they had to actually enter the structure
themselves, they had to have sign-on from a structural engineer saying
that it was safe for them to enter that area.

I mean, this is even the NTSB that would enter that site, taking the
measurements and that type of stuff. On a daily basis, they had to fill
out one of these things.

If the work changed throughout that day, they had to fill out a new one
of these. So, sometimes they would fill out two or three of them in one
day for the work that they were doing.

Federal OSHA jurisdiction included the boats, the barges and floating
platforms that were on the site, the diving maritime experience
presence, the transition from the Navy Dive Team to the commercial
contractor, and Federal OSHA did a comprehensive review of the
contractor\'s operation, and then they ensure that those diving
operations met the requirements and this evaluation was really critical
in determining Federal OSHA\'s departure from the site.

So, I\'ll kind of summarize the response. We had a total of 24 Federal
OSHA and 30 Minnesota OSHA personnel that reported to the site, and we
experienced no injuries from any of our staff.

The regional administrator and deputy regional administrator were
present at the site within the first 24 hours \-- or the first week of
the catastrophe and they were included in the 24 from Federal OSHA.

We established a hot zone. A safety office trailer was established and
that was housed by both MnDOT Safety, Minnesota OSHA and Federal OSHA
and that\'s actually where we had our orientations there in that
trailer, also, and it was a place where people could come, ask
questions. We were the resource there and we typically had all of our
people out in the field the majority of the time just working with
folks.

The work permitting process was complete and it was required to be
approved prior to the start of any work. All personnel onsite were
required to attend the site safety training and companies performing
work in the area of Federal OSHA jurisdiction received a comprehensive
evaluation from Federal OSHA and then Federal OSHA\'s goal of assisting
Minnesota OSHA was accomplished and to make sure that the responders
were safe that were working at that job site.

A memo of understanding was signed between the commissioner and Mike
Connors, the regional administrator, to turn the entire site over to
Minnesota OSHA and then Federal OSHA stood down at 3 p.m. on Friday,
August 24^th^. So, they were there for, well, almost

\--

MR. HYSELL: Three and a half weeks.

MR. ISAKSON: About three and a half weeks.

I\'ve got some pictures here I\'ll just kind of show you quickly. This
is on the north side of the bridge. You can see that they\'ve already
started to knock out some of the structure over the top of the skeleton
of the bridge itself.

This picture was taken, you can see the individual that\'s standing down
kind of toward the center right side of the picture, that\'s how massive
this building was \-- this structure was that we\'re working with.

Here, you\'ve got the surface taken off prior to the demolition or the
cutting of the structure. You can see some of the structure off to the
back there and the bridge was hauled off to an area upstream, what we
call The Flats, and that\'s where they were kind of reassembling the
bridge at that time.

This was a \-- they hauled in I can\'t remember how many tons of gravel,
but it was quite a bit, so they could bring this 50-ton crane out there
to lift the pieces out of the water and that roadway that they made out
of the river is still there as they\'re building the new bridge.

Partnerships. We had a couple of partnerships that we actually signed
with the companies or the contractors that were doing the work out
there.

The first partnership was with MnDOT and Bolander and Sons who was the
removal contractor, and the most difficult part of this whole
partnership, to be honest with you, especially coming from Minnesota,
was actually admitting that we modeled this after the stadium that the
Green Bay Packers play in. So, we really, really struggled with that.

We had full-time compliance assistance during that partnership. We did
industrial hygiene monitoring and employees were able to utilize us as a
resource, of course, and we performed unannounced inspections as part of
that.

We currently have a partnership with MnDOT and Flatiron. Flatiron is the
rebuild contractor and they\'re onsite right now. Basically the same
thing. They\'re part of the design. They\'re responsible to design and
build, full-time compliance assistance coverage, and then employees will
be able to use us as a resource through the duration of the project.

Right now, there\'s \-- I think by the end of this month, we\'ll have
about 300 contractors, 300 employees working out there on the bridge.
Flatiron has been phenomenal to work with. Bolander and Sons was
phenomenal to work with.

Flatiron. Right now, they have five full-time safety people that are
working out on that bridge site. I was notified yesterday that they\'re
bringing in three more. A lot of the work is just \-- they\'re doing a
lot of the concrete pouring, that type of work.

They\'ve had to shut down the project three times because of the cold
weather and I\'m sure it\'s probably shut down again today because the
concrete pouring that\'s \-- the weather gets too cold for them to pour
the concrete.

So, summary of the recovery and removal process. Approximately 85
percent of the contractor laborers or workforce received the OSHA
10-hour course which is huge. Going through that 10-hour course takes
some time and fortunately we set up a class and put many of them through
that.

624 employees received orientation training. The site-specific activity
plans, that=s those job hazard analysis, we had 962 of those submitted
during that nine-week period. So, as you can see, there was a lot of
those forms that were filled out and approved.

We had over 4,800 employees trained per each of those plans. So each
time one of those plans was filled out, they had to cover that with a
crew or they had to cover that with the folks that were going to be
going out doing that work.

We identified over 4,500 hazards. Total removal took approximately nine
weeks, a little less than nine weeks. We logged approximately a 100,000
hours during that time period, and the best part of that is nobody got
hurt. There was some near-misses that occurred, but there was no serious
injuries that resulted in lost time or reportable injury.

This is what the location looked like once the bridge was removed. I
didn\'t add slides of what it looks like now, but this is what the new
bridge will look like when it\'s complete.

Key observations. When you go on to a site like this, OSHA is typically
viewed as a site safety officer and that\'s one of the things that we
kind of battle through to make sure that, you know, folks understood we
were there as a resource. We were there to provide compliance
assistance. We weren\'t the site safety officer. That was really the
responsibility of the incident commander to assign that person and
that\'s typically the folks that are in charge of that site and in this
point, it was MnDOT.

Incident command on paper versus reality are really two different
things. We really learned that. I mean, you can put down whatever you
want on paper, but when you start dealing with personalities, you start
dealing with, you know, really people, you find some pretty big
challenges.

One of the things that we realized was OSHA\'s mindset when we had our
investigators on that site doing the compliance assistance, they came on
that site with that mindset that was really no different than the other
fatalities that they routinely inspect or catastrophes that they
routinely inspect.

So, they had that mindset already which kind of brought about kind of a
common effect because they knew how to approach and talk to people and
that, I know, made both Mark and I extremely proud with the way that
they really handled themselves, our investigators handled themselves on
the site.

Transitioning from rescue to recovery to removal mindset. I talked about
that a little bit. Huge challenge. Flexibility. That\'s one of the key
things we learned, is you\'ve got to be flexible.

Compliance assistance versus enforcement. I did talk about that a little
bit. For example, when we had the issues with some of the utility
companies and just let them know, you know, we\'re OSHA and we\'re here
to help. They kind of look at you funny to begin with, but then when
they work with you a little bit, they tend to really appreciate the work
that you do.

And then establish an OSHA command post immediately was one of the
things that we found that we probably should have done because at the
incident command site, people had tents. We kind of showed up without a
home and that\'s one of the learnings that we took back with us, is
that, if anything, you need to set up a tent that says OSHA across the
top of it so people know that, hey, there\'s a safety resource here that
we can go to.

And then, you know, one of the hassles we had to go through is, from
time to time, people would come up and want to take their picture with
us and we were polite. We said, yes, okay, we\'ll take our picture with
you, that\'s okay. It was an honor to be able to meet the president and
that\'s that.

MR. HYSELL: So, we would like to open it up for any questions that you
might have concerning any aspects of what we dealt with and how we got
to where we ultimately got in achieving our goals.

Please.

MS. ARIOTO: Elizabeth Arioto, Safety and Health Consultant Services. I
would like to ask you a couple of questions, really.

How long did it take you to start the orientation of personnel onsite?

MR. ISAKSON: The orientation actually started taking place, it was about
a couple days after, but it was kind of segmented.

I mean, we had the construction company that was conducting the
orientation. MnDOT, they were doing an orientation for their own people.
But it actually took us, I believe it was, probably about four or five
days before we pulled it all together and we had one orientation that we
really had everybody going through.

MS. ARIOTO: Since you said that, is there anything that you would do to
improve that time period or that time frame?

MR. ISAKSON: I would \-- you know, I guess the learning that we took
from it is when you have something like this that occurs, there\'s a lot
of emotions that you\'re really dealing with and it\'s all part of that
transition period from rescue to recovery that I talked about and really
getting people to understand that.

You know that there\'s a lot going on here and we have to have, you
know, \-- we\'ve got to really start thinking about the folks that are
doing the work out there and pulling them in to start going through some
sort of an orientation.

Pulling the orientation together took a little bit of time because we
really had to really assess what the hazards were that people were going
to be facing out there and the work that they were going to be doing.

So, I guess could we have done it sooner than that? If we could have, I
think that maybe a day sooner. It would have been tough.

MR. HYSELL: You know, one of the real challenges that we had is
establishing a site at the site for the training and just so you know,
we had a trailer on its way through the City of Minneapolis on that
Friday, just a day and a half or so after the collapse, and the Secret
Service came up to us and said you can\'t bring that trailer here,
you\'re going to be putting it right where the president\'s helicopters
are going to land tomorrow morning.

So, we had to stop that and we weren\'t able to get the trailer there
because of that until Monday and so all of that went into that and then,
you know, there were other issues, too.

We had, for instance, when you tell the NTSB, look, you know, before you
go back out there, you\'ve got to go through this training, well, you
can imagine the resistance that we were starting to get, you know, and
the looks and everything else, but we stood our ground and we made them
go through it, even though they\'d been onsite from the beginning.

In addition to that, we had law enforcement officers that were at
security posts all around the site that couldn\'t leave their posts to
go to security training. So, we actually took the dog and pony show on
the road and we went to them and provided them with the site orientation
briefing at each one of the security posts.

MS. ARIOTO: And I have one other question with the contractor that you
worked with.

Are there any plans in the state where you would have companies already
like preapproved, where they had training for their employees for
disasters and stuff like that?

MR. ISAKSON: Are you talking about contractors?

MS. ARIOTO: Yes.

MR. ISAKSON: No, there wasn\'t. There haven\'t been really any plans to
do that because \-- and I think that would be somewhat difficult to do
because each disaster is different, you know.

It was shortly after the bridge collapsed, we had floods down in the
southern part of the state and when you face a structure collapse versus
something like that, the training is going to be significantly
different.

I know that, you know, through some of the training that the trades go
through, you know, they do learn the basics, such as doing hazard
assessments, those types of things, but to really capture a potential
event that could occur and train people on that would be difficult.

They may not face that kind of a situation for \-- you know, hopefully
never, but it\'s really hard to pinpoint exactly what it is that they
would need.

MS. ARIOTO: And the only reason I say that is because the state I\'m
from, California, they\'re trying to develop with different companies,
in case there\'s an emergency, they can call on certain companies that
have planning with them already, whether if you need ironworkers or if
you need laborers, operators, whatever.

So that\'s just something maybe to think of in the future.

MR. ISAKSON: Sure.

MR. SMITH: Okay. Frank?

MR. MIGLIACCIO: Frank Migliaccio with the Ironworkers International.

Did any of the \-- you said you put quite a few people through the OSHA
10-hour training. Did anybody come to the site with the training already
that you didn\'t require to go through it?

MR. ISAKSON: Yes, there was quite a few that already had the 10-hour
course. That\'s one of the great things that \-- you know, with the
relationship that we have with a lot of the trade unions in the state,
is our consultation group will actually go and provide them the 10-hour
course and I know that there\'s some of them that they do require all of
their folks to go through the 10-hour training, such as I think the
labor union requires that and the carpenter\'s union.

There may be others, too, but that was one of the benefits that we had
in Minnesota, is quite a number of them already had the 10-hour course.

MR. MIGLIACCIO: Thank you.

MR. SMITH: Other questions or comments? Tom? I\'d like to welcome Tom
Broderick who\'s on our committee who was unable to make it this
morning. We\'re glad you\'re here this afternoon.

MR. BRODERICK: Thank you. This is kind of a follow-up on the questions
that Liz and Frank asked.

After September 11^th^, the OSHA Training Institute put together a group
of people who were both involved in the rescue and recovery and other
subject matter experts and developed two courses.

One was the 5600 course and the other is the 7600 course, and the 5600
course is an instructor course. The 7600 is a course for disaster site
workers and that was disseminated to all of the OSHA Training Institute
education centers, and it seems like it really has not gotten any
traction and after Katrina happened, we went back and revamped the 5600
and the 7600 to address many of the different types of hazards that
would come with a hurricane, including floods and some of the exposures
that I\'m sure that you were faced with.

I guess a question for the agency, for the OSHA Training Institute, is
did you learn anything or do you have any insight on how we could get
those courses, which really do cover a lot more than the OSHA 10-hour in
terms of some of the specific hazards you were talking about there, how
we can get traction behind that course so that there would be a cadre of
workers in the Twin Cities or any other metropolitan area that would be
prepared when they hit the site?

MR. HYSELL: Well, one thing that we found is that it\'s critical that
anybody that responds to this, especially in a management capacity,
understands how the incident command system is supposed to work. Okay.
Regardless of how it\'s going to be when you get there, you need to know
how it is actually supposed to be and then you know that you can work
within that system that\'s there at that time and you can also use that
training and how it\'s supposed to be for your own folks and your own
command structure until the entire site can come up to speed.

Let\'s face it. A catastrophe like this is significantly large and, you
know, it took a little while for things to get under control and
there\'s probability that there\'d be quite larger and we\'re aware of
that.

To answer your question, Federal OSHA, in Region 5, part of our regional
emergency planning committee, we\'re working on identifying what levels
of training folks are going to need.

Incident commanders. Just so you know, the 3600 course is going to be
taking place at OTI, the incident commander. That\'s in July. The
incident commander people that are going to be identified that Mike
Connors could use would attend that.

In addition to that, all area directors have to at least be ICS trained
through the 300 course and all personnel that would respond would have
to be trained to the ICS 200 course.

I think part of our cooperative assistance and our compliance assistance
specialists and our own speeches, we can explain a lot of that
information and the need for that to the general public and, of course,
get the information out that OTI has these courses available for
contractors to be able \-- but I think the communication does need to
get out there because I think that everybody that goes to the site needs
to be aware of what to expect as far as what the structure\'s going to
be like and so I think that that \-- you know, we can certainly work on
that and I think it would be something we should look into.

MR. BRODERICK: Yes, and just a follow-up to your point.

After the bridge collapse, you did have serious flooding situations
going on. So, I mean, there is a small cluster where people that have
had the workers who are skilled support staff who had that 7600 course
would have been able to respond to both of those and have had training
not only in the incident command structure but what to do if you find a
body or what to do if you incur certain things that are unique to a
disaster site.

MR. ISAKSON: Tom, I think you really bring up a great point because I
know shortly after Katrina, Federal OSHA had also put together some
pages on their website that really covers, you know, some of the
approaches to the different types of situations that you can encounter
and myself and quite a few of our folks use those pages all the time
because, I mean, you can relate them to just about everything that you
can encounter, even if there\'s not, you know, a catastrophe that
occurs.

Just for general knowledge purposes, if you\'re out doing any kind of an
inspection or any compliance assistance or even a consultation. So,
those have been a super resource for us, and one of the things that
Minnesota OSHA does is we\'re constantly reviewing our core training
that we require our investigators to go through and I know that we\'ve
looked at some of those courses to really determine, unfortunately after
the fact, who we need to have go through some of those courses.

But, you know, it\'s kind of like anything else. We want to have some
experts on staff that have that knowledge that whenever we do have a
situation like that occur, we can turn to them as our subject matter
experts and utilize that knowledge that they\'ve got.

MR. BRODERICK: Thank you.

MR. MURPHY: My name is Dan Murphy with Zurich. I live in the Twin Cities
and I just wanted to take a moment to thank you gentlemen for the great
job that you did and the fact that you made it through that time period
and we didn\'t have any more serious loss or injury was phenomenal.

When you went down and look at that site, it\'s unbelievable people
weren\'t falling and dying all over the place. So, I wanted to just
thank you very much for what you did for that time period.

MR. ISAKSON: Thank you.

MR. HYSELL: Thank you.

MR. SHANAHAN: I\'m Tom Shanahan with the National Roofing Contractors.

Jeff, I was struck a number of times. You had mentioned about the
difficulty of getting everybody kind of on the same page with the
territorial issues and things like that.

I\'m always interested in that and clearly we\'re not getting these kind
of situations, but that you got over that hump, I\'m just wondering if
there\'s something \-- you kind of mentioned the reality versus what\'s
on paper in terms of when you went in there.

I was just kind of wondering what lessons or kernels that you got from
that that maybe we could include for others.

MR. ISAKSON: Well, I think the key learning there is just to remember
that you\'re dealing with people and dealing with people versus dealing
with paper are really two different things and when you deal with
people, you sometimes deal with some fairly strong personalities.

You know, the reason that, you know, a certain person maybe that is
leading a certain organization that\'s responding to a catastrophe like
that, they\'re reasoning for having that strong personality \-- the
reason that they have the position that they\'re in is typically because
they have a fairly strong personality and they can lead in a way that
they need to in order to get things done.

You know, some of the jobs that they had out there were extremely
difficult. I mean, you look at the Hennepin County Sheriff. I mean, his
responsibility was getting those bodies out of the river and to make
sure \-- I mean, and not only just to get the bodies out of the river
but also to deal with those families of the victims and on a daily
basis.

So, I\'m sure that he was facing a heck of a lot of challenges during
that time, also, along with really trying to cooperate, you know, with
those that had really site responsibility for making sure that people
were really safe.

You had the Navy Dive Team out there that, you know, I know I was
talking to a couple of them and I asked them, I says, you know, geez,
the water\'s pretty murky, you can only see maybe a foot in front of you
and there\'s constant current. This has got to be one of the most
difficult recoveries I\'ve ever faced. The guy looked at me and says,
\"Actually, this is one of the easier ones because nobody\'s shooting at
you.\"

So, I mean, you\'re dealing with a lot of that kind of stuff and to
really pull those people together and say, okay, bottom line is we\'re
not going to hurt anybody else, you know. We\'re not going to have any
more injuries. That\'s really the bottom line and to get everybody to
kind of step back, think about it and come to the table and say, yes, we
agree, we have \-- I have five people, 10 people, 20 people here, I want
them going home the same way that I brought them here, to get them to
realize that, it takes a little bit of talking, you know, a little bit
of really, you know, coaching and, you know, how you do that approach is
different, regardless of who it is that you talk to.

So, it\'s a challenge and that\'s really what it is that you face and
that\'s the difference between the paper and reality piece of it.

MR. SHANAHAN: Thank you.

MR. SMITH: I would like to think, too, that anywhere we go in the
country, we would have this type of partnership, but I\'m not positive
we would.

I thank you for your efforts in working together. Outstanding job you
did and on behalf of the committee, we commend you guys and appreciate
you taking time to share this with us. It\'s been of tremendous value
and, you know, thank God nobody else got hurt. That\'s the main thing.

Thank you very much.

MR. HYSELL: Thank you, Linwood.

MR. ISAKSON: Thank you.

(Applause.)

MR. SMITH: Okay. Noah Connell, Deputy Director of Construction, Report
on Standards.

Okay. Let\'s get started, please. Let me have your attention. Let\'s
devote our attention to Noah.

[DOC - Standards Update]{.underline}

MR. CONNELL: Thank you. My name is Noah Connell. I\'ve two roles in the
Directorate of Construction. I\'m the Deputy Director and I\'m also the
Director of the Office of Construction Standards and Guidance, one of
the three offices within the directorate, and our Office of Standards
and Guidance has two principal responsibilities.

One is that, of course, we develop new construction standards, but we
also issue the interpretations of the standards.

Before I go on, I just first want to say a personal thanks to Stew
Burkhammer. It\'s been my pleasure to work with Stew for the last five
years in the directorate and it\'s really been a pleasure to work with
him. It\'s been a tremendous asset for us in Standards and Guidance, in
particular to have someone of Stew\'s experience and also he\'s such an
easy person to work with that we have made maximum use of him being on
the staff and have badgered him with many, many hundreds of questions
every year. So, just a personal thanks to Stew.

On the standards front, we are currently doing two major rulemakings.
One is confined space in construction, the other is cranes and derricks
in construction.

In confined space, first I\'ll just note, as I imagine you\'re all
already aware, the comment period for the proposed rule \-- we issued
the proposed rule in November. The comment period was to close this
month on the 28^th^, but it\'s been extended for 30 days, to February
28^th^.

After the comment period closes, then we will begin the process of \--
well, if someone requests a hearing, there would be a hearing and then
after, we would, of course, begin the process of analyzing the comments.
We take a close look at the comments, make assessments.

We would then at the staff level make presentations to our bosses in
terms of what has come in from the public and whether we think there
should be changes made for purposes of the final rule and then
ultimately we issue the final rule. A simple straightforward process.

The general philosophy of the confined space proposed rule, I think you
will find in looking at the published rule and the explanation in the
preamble, is we\'ve tried to make this as user-friendly for the \--
particularly for the small businesses who do not have separate safety
people on staff.

We tried to design it for them so that it would be something that they
could understand and that they could really use, and we tried to walk
the employer step by step from the moment they get on the site all the
way through the process for protecting their workers from the hazards of
confined spaces.

One of the points we make in the preamble is that, and I think, I hope
you would agree with me on this, that substantively, probably about 90
percent of what is in our proposed rule is also in the general industry
standards, substantively.

There are some differences. We have some other requirements that are
designed specifically for construction to deal with circumstances that
are unique to construction. So, there are some additional things in
there in that regard.

The way it is presented is different and that\'s because, you know, we
made this special effort to try to make what is intrinsically an
extraordinarily complex set of concepts to try to make them as
straightforward and understandable as possible.

So, the way it\'s presented is very different than what\'s in general
industry, but I think, by and large, substantively, it\'s very similar.

Any questions about confined space?

(No response.)

MR. CONNELL: The other major rulemaking, of course, is our cranes and
derricks standard. This is a standard that we are using negotiated
rulemaking to develop. A negotiated rulemaking committee was formed and
convened 11 times in about a one-year time period and in the Summer of
2004 completed a consensus document which is the basis for what\'s going
to be our proposed rule.

It\'s early 2008 and I know you\'re thinking he just said 2004, what\'s
the deal there? I\'ll say a little bit about that.

The standard itself, if you look at the CDAC document, in terms of its
length and compare it to the existing Subpart N requirements \-- now the
existing Subpart N requirements are found both in the Code of Federal
Regulations, which is only a few pages, it\'s about seven and a half
pages long in the Code of Federal Regulations, but it incorporates by
reference numerous consensus standards, numerous consensus standards,
which in some cases incorporate by reference other consensus standards.
So, you have layers of incorporation.

If you calculate the number of words on all of those documents and you
make an estimate of how many pages in the CFR that would take to print,
which we\'ve estimated this, it comes out to about \-- the current rule
comes out to about 99 CFR pages. That\'s the current rule.

The CDAC document, which also has some incorporations by reference but
not nearly as many as the current rule, it comes out to about 65 CFR
pages.

So, it\'s not that the CDAC document is really longer, it\'s not longer,
it\'s shorter, but in the rulemaking process, after we have the
negotiated rulemaking committee finish its work, we then had to write a
complete history, explanation and justification for pretty much every
single provision that\'s in the standard and that is, quite simply, an
enormous undertaking.

We had to do the same thing with the confined space. OSHA does this with
all of its standards and it is that process, probably more than anything
else, that just takes an unbelievable effort and amount of time. That\'s
what we\'ve been doing all these years. We\'ve been writing this
encyclopedic description, explanation, analysis.

Fortunately, we are near the end of this process. Now, once we finish
and we\'re close to finishing the drafting of it, and we\'ve been
working with the Office of the Solicitor on it and we\'re near the end
of that process, then there will be some internal Department of Labor
reviews and then the Office of Management and Budget will have 90 days
to review the document. So that will give you some idea of where we are
and what we have ahead of us. That\'s to publish the proposed rule.

Of course, after that, a hearing, analysis and comments, changes as
appropriate, and publication of a final rule.

Any question about cranes and derricks?

MR. SMITH: I\'m surprised, Frank. Go right ahead.

MR. MIGLIACCIO: Frank Migliaccio with the Ironworkers.

Noah, what you\'re saying then is this will probably, if it does go in
effect and I say if and I\'m not sure about that even, this won\'t
happen till next administration comes in, most likely.

MR. CONNELL: Well, our target for the past several years, our target has
been to try to get the final rule out by the end of 2008 and I know that
the Assistant Secretary Foulke has made that point in the past and if
you tally up where we are right now, you really can\'t get there from
here at this point.

So, we are, of course, disappointed at that, but we certainly aren\'t
slowing down and, you know, we\'ve been going flat out and we will
continue to go flat out.

This is the Number 1 priority in our Office of Construction Standards
and Guidance. We all, you know, are devoting the big chunk of our time
to it and, you know, that\'s where we are. So, we\'re plowing ahead,
but, you know, I will say this.

It\'s a legitimate complaint that we often hear about the complexity of
federal rules and it\'s certainly our obligation to make these things as
easily understood and as simple as possible, but we\'re dealing with a
very complex industry.

The process of building a building, and I\'m not from the construction
industry, but I\'ve certainly been working with folks from the
construction industry for some time now, and it doesn\'t take long to
realize that the process of building structures and the process of
building structures with cranes is extraordinarily complex and when you
try to figure out and say, well, how do you do that complex process
safely is also an extraordinarily complex undertaking and so, you know,
when viewed from that perspective, it\'s not that surprising that this
has \-- this is a huge project.

It is unfortunate that the preamble has evolved to the point where, you
know, it now is in all these rulemakings the biggest part of the
rulemaking process, but that\'s what we have and that\'s what we\'re
dealing with.

MR. MIGLIACCIO: In the beginning, though, it just seems like the date
\-- like every meeting we\'ve had with ACCSH, the date always changes.
It was 2006, then it was going to be early 2007, and now it\'s going to
be late 2008, and for the complexity of building a building, I think
construction builds buildings a \-- I\'m not going to say it \-- a lot
faster than what OSHA does when it comes to rulemaking.

Now, it can\'t be that complex. I just \-- I don\'t understand the
complexity of this. I mean, there probably is and like you said, you\'re
not from the construction industry. I\'m not sure how many people in
your office are from the construction industry, but it just seems like
it\'s not working.

The amount of time it takes, there\'s people out there working with
cranes every day. I mean, there\'s a lot of organizations. There were 23
people on the committee. There are two of the people on the committee
are in the room right here sitting on this committee here.

A lot of time was put into it, and I think you say you\'re disappointed.
I think we\'re a lot more disappointed than you are. We just expected it
to be a lot faster.

MR. CONNELL: Well, yes, I think it\'s a real tribute to the committee
that the committee was able to develop the draft proposed rule in 11
months\' time. I mean that was an extraordinary accomplishment.

Our job since then has been to explain each and every provision in that
document and that\'s, you know, a 95+ page double-spaced document and
also the agency has had to do an economic analysis of the implications
of everything that\'s in there and that is another document.

So, yes, I\'m just saying it\'s an enormous undertaking not just to
develop the provisions themselves but to explain them, and we take great
pains to try to make sure that we\'re explaining them correctly.

Now, in terms of, you know, construction experience, the way the
Directorate of Construction has been set up, we have our Office of
Construction Services where we have people with extensive experience in
the construction industry and we spend a lot of time with them.

We also have our Office of Engineering Services where we have engineers
and we spend time with them, but also, fortunately, one of the great
benefits of negotiated rulemaking is that we come to know the members of
the committee and those members also are a source of technical
information.

So, we do not do our work in a vacuum. Whenever we come across, which we
do constantly, issues and questions of a technical nature regarding the
construction process, we go to construction people for that information
and, you know, that takes time, too, but that\'s time well worth
spending.

So, we do take that very seriously. So, we\'re not doing this in a
vacuum. We weren\'t doing it in a vacuum when we negotiated it and
we\'re not doing this part of it in a vacuum either.

You know, the timelines, it\'s very difficult to predict these dates.
You know, we don\'t work independently. We work with a number of
different agencies within OSHA. Those different parts of OSHA have
projects other than our project and so inevitably there is some
competition of resources and, you know, the agency as a whole has been
working on many, many projects concurrently.

So, as I\'m sure everyone in this room knows, when you have a situation
like that, there are windows that open and close when it comes to the
availability of other resources within your organization and if things
don\'t wind up being coordinated perfectly, especially when unforeseen
events come in from the outside, you know, that window might be closed
when you need it to be open.

So, I think that\'s in large measure why the dates you refer to, you
know, keep slipping. It\'s very difficult to predict how it\'s all going
to play out in the end.

The only thing I can assure you all of is that we have never for a day
slowed down in what we are doing to get this thing finished. I mean,
this has been and continues to be our Number 1 priority and, you know,
that\'s all we can do.

MR. SMITH: Okay. Thank you very much, Noah.

Is there any other questions for Noah involving any questions, other
than the timeline? I think he\'s sufficiently answered that for us. Any
other questions?

(No response.)

MR. SMITH: Okay. Thank you very much.

MR. CONNELL: Thank you.

MR. SMITH: I know you didn\'t look forward to giving that report to us.
Thank you a lot.

(Applause.)

MR. SMITH: Okay. We\'ll take a break in just a second here.

Anything we need to cover before we take a break? Okay. Just a minute,
please.

MR. WITT: If you would review \-- I understand Sarah Shortall passed out
some materials this morning.

MS. SHORTALL: Yes. This morning, the members of the committee were given
copies of the PortaCount Draft Notice of Proposed Rulemaking and a copy
of a memorandum to ACCSH from Dorothy Dougherty, Director of the
Directorate of Standards and Guidance on the PortaCount Proposed Rule,
and it is my understanding that Mr. Witt would like to have the members
of the committee review these materials this evening so that they can be
discussed tomorrow and members of that rulemaking team will also be
available tomorrow to answer your questions.

Steve, did you want to \--

MR. WITT: We would like to get your reaction to that document. Any
recommendations or suggestions you may have, a sense of the members of
the committee.

This issue was raised at the last committee. I know we have seven new
members since October of 2006. We\'d like to get a sense of the
committee as relates to that document. So, if you have the opportunity,
if you would look at it tonight or late this afternoon, we would
appreciate it.

MS. SHORTALL: So, before we go off the record, so that tomorrow will be
considered your opportunity to provide recommendations on this proposed
rule.

MR. SMITH: Okay. Is everybody familiar with the document now?

MR. SHANAHAN: The other one was what?

MR. SMITH: Okay. Be back at 2:45. Paula White will be here.

(Whereupon, the foregoing matter

went off the record at 2:27 p.m.

and went back on the record at

2:48 p.m.)

MR. SMITH: Okay. Thank you. Okay. At this point, we\'ll hear from the
Director of Cooperative and State Programs, Paula White. Thank you.
Appreciate you being with us.

[Construction Cooperative Programs]{.underline}

MS. WHITE: Thank you so much. It\'s a pleasure to be here with you this
afternoon.

I wanted to give you a brief update of where we are and what we\'re
doing in the Cooperative and State Programs. It may be somewhat
repetitious of information you already know and if it is, I apologize. I
really know that you are all OSHA hands, but sometimes a reminder is
good for everyone.

So, the programs I want to talk to you about today include where we are
with our primary cooperative programs, including the Alliance Program,
our Consultation Program, including the SHARP Recognition Program, the
Voluntary Protection Programs, our Partnership Program, and then a word
or two on OSHA State Plans.

So, first of all, in terms of the Alliance Program, I think doubtless
you all are familiar with it and I\'m thinking you\'re familiar with it
because we do in fact have considerable participation \-- oh, thank you
so much. That does make a difference, doesn\'t it?

We do have considerable participation by the construction industry and
not just participation but successful participation in this program.

The Alliance Program is our newest cooperative program. It does offer an
opportunity for us and I actually think for our Alliance Program
partners as well to find ways for us to work together and maximize
resources.

We focus primarily on very specific activities around training, outreach
and education, certainly on very specific kinds of product development.

Through the Alliance Program, we have been very successful in developing
jointly an array of products, ranging, as you can see, from publications
to having the private sector participate with us on our Ed Boards, for
our safety and health topic pages.

We\'ve developed joint training. We\'ve provided joint training. More
importantly, I think one of the most important things that\'s happened
through this program is an opportunity for people in the private sector
and for our Alliance partners to offer training to OSHA staff and that
certainly is a rich resource that is made available to us through the
program.

Another thing that\'s been very important to us is development of
success stories, business case studies and that\'s something I think,
especially in the construction industry, we would like to see if we can
find a willing partner to work with us on.

I mean, in general industry, we have worked closely with Abbott,
formerly known as Abbott Labs, over about the last four years. We\'ve
developed a number of business case studies. We\'ve developed some
business case studies with Dow and with some other partners and actually
most recently, with the Washington Group, but I think business case
studies are something that are important for all of us in developing
compelling evidence about the importance of safety and health to any
successful workplace.

So, these are just web page cutouts of many of the products that are up
on our Web with the construction focus and as you can see, they range
everywhere from topics pages to tip sheets to a boxtop, fact sheets.

One of the wonderful things I think about the Alliance Program is the
ready availability of information on the Web. Every one of our alliance
\-- each of our alliances at the national level has its own website. All
of the information that is developed is readily available through that
website. We have linkages to the websites of those that we are in
partnership with.

We currently have 13 national construction alliances and as you can see,
I don\'t need to read to you the topics that we are working on, but we
have \-- I actually believe, and I\'m not just saying this because you
are the Construction Advisory Committee.

I do think that the construction community has been probably our very
best partner as a community group in terms of the work that we have done
together in the Alliance Program and certainly one of the most \-- some
of the most important accomplishments have come out of the Construction
Roundtable effort.

In July of \'04, really from the \-- it was an impetus of the partners,
we were working with so many national construction groups, the thought
was why don\'t we all get together in the same room and figure out, you
know, where our interests overlap and what are the things we could do
together to have more impact, and as a result of a very enthusiastic
meeting, this group formed themselves into two subgroups, one focusing
on fall protection and the other focusing on design for safety, and they
have really been going full tilt at this since the Summer of 2004.

The group is about to meet again as a whole, I guess next week, to
relook at where they are, to talk about, you know, where we want \-- how
we want to move forward, and what the next steps are.

Certainly the design for safety group has just, I think, been
outstanding in terms of, you know, we\'ve done any number of
presentations at national events. We participated at the NIOSH event
last summer together. I think they\'re doing some groundbreaking work,
and I would urge you, if you\'ve not looked at the website and looked at
some of the products and looked at the information, to do so, and again
the leadership really for this effort is coming from the groups in the
Construction Alliance.

But we have, for example, with the fall protection group developed a
series of toolbox talks which address ladder safety, some tip sheets for
both employers and employees. We have a design for safety web page that
is up, a slide presentation that can be used by anyone with interest in
this field to do presentations, and one of the things that we\'re doing
now that we are very excited about is developing a 10-hour course
that\'s focused on engineers who are doing the designing of buildings.

So, you know, it\'s really beginning, I think. It\'s capitalizing on an
issue that\'s of national importance and I think we\'re in on the ground
floor and we\'re just extremely pleased with what these groups have
done.

Just to give you a couple of specific examples, again in case you\'re
not familiar with some of our alliances, we have had for a number of
years an alliance with NAHB.

One of the things that has been, I think, particularly successful in
this alliance is the training that has been developed in how to build a
house series. This is something that OSHA people have been able to
participate in, including our Assistant Secretary. I think not many
months ago, Steve accompanied one of my staff to a local how to build a
house seminar.

But in addition to that, a number of training resources with a focus on
non-English-speaking employees have been developed. We\'re very pleased
that NAHB representatives help us on the Ed Board for our topics page,
on residential construction. So again, a number of opportunities to work
together.

One of the things, as I mentioned to you, that I think is of particular
note in terms of the success of the Alliance Program are training
opportunities that have been developed. Sometimes these training
opportunities are opportunities in which the alliance partner offers
training to OSHA and our state plan partners. Sometimes it is training
that they have developed and offer not only to their own members or
employees but to others.

But just so you are aware, in this last fiscal year, through the
Alliance Program, there were 25 training events that reached over 4,500
employees and that obviously includes OSHA employees and this has been a
steadily increasing outcome of the Alliance Program, and as you can see
from some of the examples that are on the slide, the training addresses
any number of topics, from, as you can see, safe take entry to small
businesses.

We\'ve had training on pyrotechnics. We\'ve had training on process
safety management and really just an array of subjects.

So, you are aware of what\'s new and/or up and coming. We actually have
just posted this last week a new cleaning industry topics page that is a
product of our alliance with that group. We have updated and is posted
on our small business page our safety page advisor, which I think, if
you look at, you will see is a much improved tool and perhaps something
that would be useful for you in this industry to use, especially with
small subcontractors.

We are working with a number of alliance groups on a new eTool for
powered industrial trucks, and we are updating our hospital eTool.

So, changing topics to another one of our cooperative programs, I often
say and at the same time, I think, am embarrassed to say, you know, we
often feel that our consultation program remains a secret and it is
something we want those who work with us, including our advisory
committees as well as our cooperative program partners, to help us get
more information out into your communities and your states and your
organizations about the OSHA Consultation Program.

OSHA funds in every state a free service, run by state agencies, an
agency designated by the governor of each state. This consultation
program that provides assistance to small employers. The target audience
is employers with 250 or fewer employees at a site. Generally speaking,
the focus is on employers with no more than 500 corporatewide with some
exceptions.

Consultation projects are more and more getting into the construction
business and we are looking to work with them, talking about developing
a pilot program for recognition through the Safety and Health
Recognition Program, the SHARP Program, which I will talk about in a
minute.

This is a good program in terms of offering both training assistance as
well as assistance in recognition and abatement of hazards and, more
importantly, the implementation of effective safety and health
management systems.

The recognition program that exists that is part of the Consultation
Program is a program called SHARP. As I said before, it\'s the Safety
and Health Achievement Recognition Program. Isn\'t that a great
government acronym? You can see why we call it SHARP.

SHARP is a program that looks a lot like the VPP Program in terms of the
program requirements. Certainly the intention is an effective safety and
health management system, as I said.

There are criteria for the program in terms of safety and health
performance, but this is a program that recognizes that small employers
may need assistance in achieving safety and health excellence and so in
this case, unlike our Voluntary Protection Programs, the assistance that
helps the small employer is assistance offered by the state consultation
projects.

Anthony Forest Products is but one of many, many examples of the success
of this program. This is a family-owned business that operates in four
states. Their experience with our Consultation Program started in Texas.
They have sites in Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana and Georgia and now all
six of their businesses are in the SHARP Program.

Linda Anthony, who actually was in the building today, is an outspoken
supporter of this Consultation Program and the SHARP Program, and they
very willingly share their experience of having invested \$50,000 and
they believe they\'ve had something over a million dollar return on that
investment.

The most important thing obviously is the improved safety and health
environment for their employees.

One of the things we have just completed, albeit completed in that this
is now posted but it is an ongoing project for us, is a new look and
feel to our small business web page. I would urge you to go look at it.

We designed it, redesigned it in a tab format because we think it is
easier to use. It provides a clearer focus for the page.

One of the things that is up and coming that will be of importance to
you will be the development and a focus on the development of material
that can be easily downloaded that is focus material on training for
especially Hispanic employees.

So, we\'re going to have a series of training tools. There will be
things you can download, like a poster and information that will allow
you to do training for it. We\'re going to have information that will
have a family focus, so that these will be things that can be downloaded
and printed for employees that they\'ll be able to take home.

Certainly one of the things we know that, you know, if you get the kids
involved, you know, with coloring books, with, you know, cartoon-like
characters the kids can focus on, that we think this will have a real
impact.

We\'re very lucky. We\'ve hired recently some folks with really good
expertise and experience in this area and so I think this is going to be
something very, very powerful with a focus on small employers. Again,
it\'s something that our state plan partners in California have had a
lot of success with, especially in residential fall protection \-- I\'m
sorry \-- residential home building and so I think this is something
that downstream is going to have a big pay-off for all of us.

I mentioned before our new safety SafetyPay Tool. This product has just
gone up. SafetyPay Tool is something that OSHA\'s had for a number of
years, but it was pretty awkward to use. It was not really accessible.
You had to download it to your computer. You had to use it offline and
it was a bit cumbersome.

This is now set up with dropdown menus. It\'s the kind of thing that you
can, you know, plug in amputation and you can plug in the cost, you
know, what you know it\'s going to cost you in terms of insurance costs
and you can immediately start seeing what it costs, what you have to
generate in profit to make up for the cost of that accident.

So again, I think, especially for small contractors, folks that are
operating on the margin in terms of profit, clearly this safety and
health is not something they should do because it is profitable, but
this might be what you need to push them to understand the consequences
of behavior and perhaps change behavior.

So, a few minutes now, kind of transitioning once again to talk a bit
about the Voluntary Protection Programs, a program that we\'re having
more and more interest and more and more opportunities for the
construction industry.

So, I want to talk briefly about our Corporate Program, our Mobile
Workforce Program, because you are all taxpayers and because I think
it\'s very, very important, and I want to talk about what we\'re doing
in federal agencies and then finally to talk a bit about OSHA Challenge.

One of the things I would just mention at the onset because it\'s
something I would like you to all think about where you work is that we
see the Voluntary Protection Program really offers an opportunity for
leveraging safety beyond individual sites.

This is but an example, not a construction example but I think a good
example. Valero Refineries, Valero has actually been a very committed
VPP partner in terms of focusing on bringing all of their refineries
into the program, but one of the things they did at this particular site
in Corpus Christi is make a commitment to get all of their contractors
in.

So, in this site, you can see the array of VPP flags, I think there
should be seven there, and they represent flags not just for Valero but
for them insisting on contractor safety and health at an exemplary
performance point so that all of their contractors are recognized by VPP
as well as the Valero site and certainly I think downstream, as all of
you look to improving safety and health wherever you work, you are all
dealing with contractors on some level or another, and I think this
simply illustrates quite graphically that you can successfully improve
safety and health not for just for your own employees but for your
contractors as well.

One of the things, a pilot that we started about \-- I always think
things happened yesterday and now I don\'t know. Probably four or five
years ago. We began a corporate pilot which is an opportunity for us to
look at ways to leverage our resources and to save resources, both on
the part of OSHA and on our partners\' part so that we\'ve got a
corporate process that allows us to look at and approve those corporate
safety and health programs that are applicable to all the corporate
entities\' sites, so that then when individual sites apply, we can have
an abbreviated application and a more abbreviated onsite because we\'re
not continuing to review paper programs we\'ve reviewed. We\'re looking
at the effect of programs onsite.

So, our initial experience was with the six groups listed there. Our
initial experience tells us that this is working, that we are seeing a
resource savings both on our part and on the part of our partners.

The Postal Service is certainly our most prolific partner. Prior to
beginning in the corporate pilot in 2005, the Postal Service had 17
sites in VPP. They now have a 104.

The Washington Group is, in this initial group, our only partner that
has construction experience. As you will see from this slide, we are now
expanding participation in the corporate pilot. We\'re kind of moving
into Phase 2.

These are the groups that we are working with currently. We\'ve already
received an application from four. I am very intrigued about what the
expansion of this pilot is going to give us an opportunity to explore.

As you can see, we now are going to have not just the Washington Group
but also Fluor, Jacobs, and Parsons in this program and so it\'s not
just \-- so, it\'s going to really give us an opportunity to figure out
in a very real world way, you know, how does the concept of corporate
VPP work for construction entities.

More interestingly, you know, we\'ve had sidebar conversations with
folks from all of these corporate entities and clearly there are times
that they work together in a joint venture. What\'s that going to look
like and how does it work? How is this going to work with our state plan
partners?

Steve and Kevin are folks that we need to talk to about that because
often, you know, as they are making these kinds of commitments and their
work is often in state plan states, I think we need to try to pave the
way and find a way to make this work on a national basis.

So, it\'s one of the nicest things I think about VPP is it offers us an
opportunity to do pilots, to have demonstration projects and to figure
out what works.

So, we\'re very excited about the commitment that everyone is making,
all of the groups on this slide, because it really is giving us a good
opportunity to look \-- to not just expand the VPP Program but to do it
in a sensible way and to do it in a way that\'s effective and makes
sense in terms of safety and health.

The OSHA Challenge Program is another program I know you guys have heard
about and you\'ve heard from me about. Again a program that we\'re very,
very excited about and is working very well for us.

We designed this program really as a roadmap to VPP. In point of fact,
this program has success whether you go to VPP or not. It really is a
roadmap to improving safety and health performance, to improving \-- to
helping any entity, be it the general industry or construction, leading
them to the implementation of effective safety and health management
systems, whether or not they ever decide to go into VPP.

We do have two tracks, as I said, for general industry and construction.
The last bullet is the most important bullet on this page. I truly
believe there is no other program we can find and the wonderful part
about this program is it is almost resource neutral for OSHA, but it
allows us to collect data from the program administrators about the
participating sites from the moment the sites come in the program and
that\'s really what we\'re doing, is looking at the data.

So, the data is telling us that the average participant in this program
is improving their total case incident rate and the days away rate close
to 40 percent a year. Now I just don\'t think you\'re going to find
another program which is minimizing government resources, is maximizing
your reliance on essentially a mentoring and support system of
volunteers and have that kind of improvement in safety and health.

So, it is certainly something we are interested in expanding. It is
something that I think has a pay-off for all of us. This is simply a
list and these are on our website, but you now have a copy of my slides.
These are our current VPP Challenge program administrators in the
construction industry. Again construction performance has been better
than the performance in general industry. We\'ve really had a lot more
participation on the construction side. So, we are always looking for
new challenge administrators. We are happy, if anyone is interested,
both to encourage you to speak to other people who\'ve already done it,
also to do a webinar, to share information with you.

But again a very, very exciting program and one that the data suggests
is very, very good.

Just one slide to talk about one of our many successes, North American
Energy Services. They reduced their total case incident rate from 11.3
to 4.9. They reduced their EMR from 1.09 to .7.

One of the things that most of the construction data is going to tell us
is that participation in this program has improved their competitiveness
and I think, you know, if you just think about the data about the
improvement in an EMR rate, you can appreciate why in fact it would
improve their competitiveness.

So again, we\'re happy to talk more about this. We\'re looking for
everybody to sign up. I have a slide that I use sometimes at
presentations that\'s got Uncle Sam, you know, kind of we want you to be
a challenge administrator, but we do.

I talked to you before. You know, we launched nationally about a year
and a half ago our VPP demo for construction. It is a program that in
some ways has surprised me because it is a program that has not taken
off as much as we thought it would.

Those who are in it are very, very excited about it and again have very
successful programs and are very happy with the program.

What we did, the 17 VPP demo construction participants represent new
demo folks. We actually overall in terms of construction participation
in VPP, when you wrap them all up, we\'ve got about a hundred different
sites participating in the program.

Again, a good VPP example from Quadrant Homes, a couple of things
obviously leap out at you, I think, from this slide; that is, a 57
percent decrease in reportables and a \$2.4 million savings for direct
cost, direct and indirect costs associated with safety and health for
Quadrant Homes.

Just a word now. Again, as I said before, you are all taxpayers and you
are all safety and health professionals, and I think, you know, a
longstanding issue for those of us who are federal employees has been as
safety and health has improved generally in the country, that oftentimes
I think federal employees have been a bit left behind.

We are very excited about the growing interest in the Federal Government
in VPP as a solution to many of the very serious safety and health
issues that exist in a number of federal agencies. So, as you can see,
we now have a 150 VPP sites in eight agencies.

A couple of very exciting things for us. First, it is that OSHA is
walking the walk, as the expression goes, as well as talking the talk.
We now have five area offices that are in the program. Probably more
importantly, we do have an agencywide initiative on VPP that is very
strong, very focused and is ongoing.

Along with Mike Connors, our regional administrator from Chicago, I\'m
chairing the group of executives. We\'ve got a number of teams. We are
developing an agency policy and programs so that we\'ve got a consistent
safety and health management system. We\'re looking at what the issues
are. We\'re working with our unions, and it certainly has been Ed\'s
expectation that all of the regions are moving toward VPP in some of
their area offices.

Clearly, you know, Mike\'s well ahead of the rest of the agency with
five sites in, and he actually told me in a conference call earlier this
week he has three other area offices he thinks will come in in about the
next year.

So, this is something I think that is very important for us. Certainly
the experience of the folks in those area offices, they think it helps
them tremendously now when they are out in the field and they are
talking to employers about some of the obstacles they face. They can
say, yes, you know, we went through that, too.

Often, I think safety and health professionals are probably the hardest
sell because they think, you know, OSHA people, we think we know it all
and we\'re the best and we don\'t need to improve and in point of fact,
we do and we have, and there\'s a strong commitment here on the part of
the agency.

The other really major piece for us has been the commitment of the
Department of Defense, originally going back to Secretary Rumsfeld,
continuing with the new Secretary. They have an extremely active
program. They\'ve invested really considerable money in terms of
contractors that are helping them with hazard assessment and GAAP
analyses.

We have a newly-signed partnership with the Air Force, another
partnership with the Army. We\'re negotiating a partnership with the
Navy as well.

As you can see, the total number of sites now is fairly small, but
we\'ve got a very structured plan for bringing in considerable more
sites, Army bases, Air Force bases, and the like.

Certainly in terms of readiness, in terms of the cost to the taxpayer,
more importantly the cost to working men and women, improving safety and
health in the Defense Department is of importance, I think, to all of us
and there is a great deal of enthusiasm in the services for this
program.

Then just briefly, a bit on our Strategic Partnership Program. This is a
program that has remained at a fairly steady size over the years. We
usually have about 55 new partnerships a year. Again, it is a program
that has had its best success in the construction and our most active
participation has been in the construction industry and you can sort of
compare the numbers there when you look at, you know, out of a current
169 active, a 139 are construction partnerships. So, you can pretty much
see this is a construction program.

Great successes, especially in big construction projects. I think all of
the major new sports stadiums have been built under construction.

A successful partnership, though, that is not in construction but one
that is of great interest and the information on this is available on
our website is our partnership with the Postal Service.

This is a partnership that has focused on the implementation of a new
ergonomic risk reduction strategy by the Postal Service. The focus for
this partnership is in their major mail distribution sites.

As you can see again the numbers, they\'ve had considerable success,
both in reductions in MSD recordable rates as reductions having to do
with lifting.

The Postal Service, as I mentioned before, is also a VPP partner. These
two obviously complement one another, but a very good success, and then
just one more success, which is again a bit more typical.

Fox Energy Center. This was a building of a new power plant. I don\'t
need to read the data to you. You can see it. The data is very, very
impressive in terms of both the illness and injury reductions as well as
the importance of 1.45 million hours worked with no fatalities, three
days away cases, and this is pretty typical, I think, for these major
construction partnerships.

Again Busch Stadium. This is a partnership that\'s been closed obviously
for a couple of years since the stadium opened in 2006, but it is a
process that has been replicated in most of these major stadiums,
showing you the success of these partnerships.

Just leaving you with this word before I have just a couple words on
State Programs. We were very excited a couple of months ago to find from
Australia a recent report by Goldman Sachs, JB Were, in which they have
done a pretty intense study to advise their investors and one of the
things that they have noted is that they are essentially telling their
investors that there are relationships between workplace safety and
health and investment performance and they are really telling their
investors, you know, if you want to make money, you want to look to
invest in a place that is focused and cognizant of their workplace
safety and health corporate responsibilities and they are very clear
about a return on investment.

Certainly something that was music to our ears because it is something
we believe as an agency. We\'re very pleased to have Goldman Sachs
confirm it, but certainly in terms of corporate social responsibility, I
think it\'s something that is important for all of us to keep in mind.

Then one brief word because I know many of you either live or work or
may work in state plan states. Certainly our state plan partners are
very important to the overall OSHA programs and our state plan partners
are responsible for 40 percent of the OSH coverage in this country.

In our 22 states, we have 22 states with full state plans, four more
states that cover only public employees, one of the things that we have
been working on and are about to launch are new pages describing each of
our state plans.

These pages will be parallel one to another. They will provide you with
consistent descriptive information and, most importantly, they\'re going
to provide you with either a link in terms of a hyperlink or a phone
number to call to get information about all of the important issues that
are described on these pages.

Something we\'re all pretty excited about, both our state plan partners
and us. You know, I know people go often to the OSHA website to get
information about our directives, information about our new standards,
you know, but when you get it, you know that you\'re generally getting
information about what Federal OSHA is doing.

So, we have developed these new pages, and I know this \-- I\'m certain
it\'s even worse on the tiny ones you have. You can\'t really read this
handout, but we will now be attaching every time there is a new OSHA
standard or a new OSHA directive, we will attach after the six-month
period that states have to respond a chart that will indicate to you
whether the state addressed this issue, if they addressed it, did they
adopt an identical standard or policy to the federal policy.

If they adopted something different, it\'s going to tell you that and
it\'s going to give you information on how to get \-- you know, where to
find out what the state is doing.

So, this really will be a good solid one-stop place to get information
about what\'s going on nationally because you\'ll have a complete chart,
you know, as we develop new items. So, I think it will be very helpful
to anyone who, you know, is working in any area besides one federal
state.

So that is a brief update for us. We\'re very excited about all of the
opportunities that we have to work on this exciting array of programs,
certainly appreciate your input and your help with any of these.

Steve and Kevin are very strong state plan partners. We work regularly
with them as well. I\'m very pleased that they are included in this
committee because it\'s certainly a viewpoint that\'s important to us as
well as to you.

So, I\'d be happy to answer any questions or allow the agenda to move on
so we can all move toward party time.

MR. SMITH: We\'ve got time for a few questions, but we\'ll have time for
the other, also.

MR. KRUL: Bob Krul with the Roofers.

Mr. Chairman, thank you. One quick question, Paula.

Your VPP Challenge Program construction administrators list. Some of
them had an asterisk next to them.

MS. WHITE: Oh, yes, thank you. I\'m sorry I didn\'t say that. The
asterisk simply means they were \-- those with the asterisk were in our
original group. So, they are just original partners.

MR. KRUL: Okay. Secondly, the statistics on individual sites speak for
themselves with injury rates and the data you provided, but these bigger
companies with multiple construction sites and OSHA only has human and
financial resources to do job site visits in roughly 10 percent of them,
how do you assure that all those sites are in compliance with safety
standards?

MS. WHITE: Well, I\'m assuming that the context of the question would be
with VPP.

MR. KRUL: Yes.

MS. WHITE: Okay. As you know, our approach to construction and VPP is
different than it is in general industry.

Right now, the way we have set the program up for our VPP demo program
is if you apply \-- now I\'m not talking about corporate because, as I
said, corporate, we\'ve got to figure out, but our current VPP demo,
applications are accepted in a defined geographic area and the applier
has to negotiate that geographic area with the regional administrator.
It can be limited to an area office. It could be a state. It could be
the entire region.

I will be quite honest with you. I don\'t think we have any regional
administrator right now who\'s willing to go into our region. You know,
we\'re often more turtle-like than hare-like and so we\'re moving slowly
and I think that\'s good. That\'s the reason you have pilots. It lets us
know what we\'re doing.

So, I know, for example, Mike has had, you know, companies that have
applied in the demo that first have been an area office and he\'s had
some expansions statewide and I think we do this based on our
experience.

The program is written very clearly that, you know, if you apply, you
know, we aren\'t going to all your sites. We\'re going to go to select
ones of your sites.

The important part about this demonstration project, and it\'s the same
in the Corporate Program, is that (1) the key thing \-- a key thing we
are reviewing is not just a corporate commitment but a demonstration
that the corporation can assure us of their oversight capacity, so that
we look not just at paper but we interview and clearly if we have
indications that there is a failure in that corporate oversight, then
we\'re going to go back.

I think the other fail safe in this is \-- there are a couple things.
You know, I know my friend Mr. Swanson is in the audience today.

One of the things that we\'ve always thought about and looked at in OSHA
is that we do have limited resources and ultimately we cannot go every
place and so we do want to be strategic about where we enforce and we
want to encourage people who are doing the right thing to do the right
thing even better and to be responsible and so I think one of the things
this program offers us is an opportunity to encourage people to do what
they are supposed to be doing, which is ensuring safety and health, and
we do monitor that corporate oversight.

We never relinquish responding to employee complaints, responding to a
disaster. If something goes awry, we are there. So, I think there are
sufficient fail safes, and I think \-- but I think the opportunity for
improvement by encouraging \-- you know, VPP is a striking program in
that OSHA\'s not giving anybody a whole lot beyond recognition and the
fact that people are willing to do as much as they\'re willing to do
just for that recognition is really inspirational, inspirational to me
on a personal level, but I think it\'s that that we need to encourage.

MR. KRUL: Thank you, Paula. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

MR. SMITH: Thank you. Other comments?

MR. HAWKINS: Mr. Chairman?

MR. SMITH: Yes, sir?

MR. HAWKINS: I\'d like to recognize Steve Hawkins from Tennessee Plan.

At our OCOSH meeting, Ms. Paula announced her intent to retire and be
sure that our OCOSH group acknowledges that and thanks her for her
service and didn\'t know if you were aware of that.

MR. SMITH: Thank you very much.

MS. WHITE: Thank you, Steve. He wants to make me cry. Thank you.

MR. HAWKINS: We thought she was crying the last time but she just had a
bad cold.

MS. WHITE: I was crying.

MR. HAWKINS: She came in with her handkerchief, but she has been of
service to this group, I know.

MR. SMITH: She sure has.

MR. HAWKINS: I just want to make that motion.

MS. WHITE: Thank you so much. Thank you.

MR. SMITH: And thank you for \-- and that\'s a good way to end.

MS. WHITE: Thank you.

MR. SMITH: Thank you so much for coming in.

MS. WHITE: Thank you, Linwood. Thank you. I will be around this evening,
so I\'m happy to answer any more questions or provide any information
that you guys need.

MR. SMITH: And as the committee, we would like to thank you for your
service very much.

MS. WHITE: Thank you so much.

MR. SMITH: We really appreciate it.

MS. WHITE: I appreciate it. Thank you.

(Applause.)

MR. SMITH: Thank you.

MS. WHITE: Thank you so much.

MR. SMITH: Thank you. Okay. Mr. Buchet, you want to get Mr. Butler, Hank
Payne on the phone?

MR. BUCHET: I understood he was going to be standing by at 3:45.

MR. SMITH: 3:45. Okay. We can move right on then. It\'s 3:30 now. We
will keep meeting. We\'ve got work groups. We\'ve got two work groups
that met yesterday and I think they\'re both ready to make their
reports. So, let\'s start with Tom Kavicky on Residential Fall
Protection and we\'ll keep moving right along and then at 3:45, we\'ll
stop and talk to Dr. Payne.

MR. KAVICKY: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Co-Chair Mike Thibodeaux is going to give the presentation.

MR. SMITH: How did you talk him into that?

[ACCSH Governance/Work Group Reports]{.underline}

MR. THIBODEAUX: We began our meeting at 9 yesterday on Residential Fall
Protection and we started out, Tom and I, summarizing the prior
presentations on residential fall protection at the other work group
meetings we had, to include roof and truss operations, use of scaffolds
and ladders in truss operations.

MR. SMITH: Would you forgive me? Let me interrupt.

I\'m going to back up a minute. I don\'t put my glasses on often enough.
Hold your report.

MR. THIBODEAUX: Okay.

MR. SMITH: We\'ve got two gentlemen that have signed up for Public
Comments and just in case they have other obligations or other places
they need to be, they were supposed to go at 3:45 and we\'re going to be
tied up with Dr. Payne at 3:45.

So, at this time, Scott Schneider and Mike McCann, and we\'ll let them
\-- Scott go first, if that\'s okay, and Scott, if you take about five
minutes, we\'d really appreciate it.

[Public Comment]{.underline}

MR. SCHNEIDER: Scott Schneider with the Laborers Health and Safety Fund
of North America, and thank you very much for letting me make a short
announcement.

I wanted to make two announcements, really. One of them is just to make
you aware, next month, at the National Hearing Conservation Association
in Portland, we\'ll be announcing \-- we\'re working with NIOSH, between
NIOSH and the National Hearing Conservation Association, to develop a
special award to be given to the construction company that has an
excellent hearing conservation, hearing loss prevention program.

So, we\'re going to be hopefully working with all of you to help promote
this and encourage people to apply, and the first award will be given at
the National Hearing Conservation Association meeting a year from
February, in February of \'09, but we\'ll be promoting it at the
Construction Safety Conference in Chicago and hopefully we\'ll get a lot
of people that have really good programs, so we can give an award out.
So that\'s just one thing I wanted to mention to you, some minor
progress.

The other progress I wanted to mention to you is while I was on the
committee a couple of years ago, I kept harping on trying to make the
work group reports a lot more accessible because the work groups do
tremendous amount of work and really productive and very good work, but
the reports from the work groups are unfortunately buried in the OSHA
docket. It\'s very difficult to find them.

So, last month or maybe it was two months ago, I worked with CPWR to put
all the work group reports that we could find up on the LCOSH website.
So, if you go to the Electronic Library for Construction Safety and
Health, there is a page where you can access very easily the ACCSH Work
Group Reports and I believe that link is now on the OSHA/ACCSH web page.
So, you can go directly from there to the LCOSH.

So, anyway, minor progress but progress nonetheless.

Okay. Thank you very much.

MR. SMITH: Thank you. Thank you very much. I knew you had been sitting
here all day and wanted to make sure we got your comments. I appreciate
that.

Mike McCann. Thank you very much, also, for being with us and we\'d like
for you to take five minutes or less, if you would.

MR. McCANN: Thank you.

MR. SMITH: Thank you.

MR. McCANN: Mike McCann, Director of Safety Research at CPWR, the Center
for Construction Research and Training, a new name.

In the past, in meeting notices and everything that we have put out on
ACCSH, it\'s talked about for ACCSH members, employee representatives
and employer representatives. However, and a number of people have
brought this up to me, in this meeting, last meeting notice of December
17^th^, it talked about representatives of employee viewpoints and
representatives of employer viewpoints.

I know that was an issue that some of the non-union construction
contractors had been saying that, oh, we represent employee viewpoints
and so I\'m just wondering what is the reason for this change. Does
anyone know, and does it \--

MR. SMITH: Well, I certainly don\'t know. Is anyone here capable of
commenting on that or qualified to comment on that?

MR. SHANAHAN: I just want to get a clarifying question. So, are you
asking that like non \-- are non-union employees being represented?

MR. McCANN: No. Is this a change in position on OSHA that would
ultimately may be allowed non-union employees to be represented by
employers or something like that?

MR. SHANAHAN: I see.

MS. SHORTALL: Want me to deal with it?

MR. SMITH: Go right ahead.

MS. SHORTALL: Okay. In the Construction Safety Act, it does specifically
say identify what type of membership has to be represented here. Three
members shall be individuals, representative employees, primarily in the
building trades and construction industry, engaged in carrying out
contracts to which the section applies.

In the regulations that OSHA developed or promulgated to carry over the
Construction Safety Act, it does specifically say in here that there are
to be five members who are qualified by experience, affiliation to
present the viewpoint of employees involved.

So, I think what they were just trying to do was track the exact
language that you would find in Section 1912.3 of OSHA regulations. It
was not representing any type of change in OSHA\'s position but, rather,
just trying to stick as closely as possible to the exact language in the
regulations.

MR. McCANN: It was a change in that people had noticed it and wondered
about the significance of it.

MR. WITT: It wasn\'t meant to suggest a change in philosophy, policy or
practice, just to better reflect the language in the regulations.

As Sarah said, the language \-- the regulation implements the
Construction Safety Act which was carried over and that\'s \-- as many
of you know, this committee was formed under the Construction Safety
Act.

This was the means we used to bring this committee under the
Occupational Safety and Health Act.

MR. McCANN: Okay. Thank you.

MR. SMITH: Thank you. Thank you very much.

Okay. We\'ll go back to our report on Residential Fall Protection.

MR. THIBODEAUX: All right. As I stated, we summarized the prior
presentations that were made to the Residential Fall Protection Group,
scaffolds, ladders, fall rest systems, use of the wall walker system,
and we\'ve got copies of the prior minutes of the work group meetings
that we will submit along with this report.

Discussions opened concerning definition of residential construction and
how residential construction is characterized and obviously it\'s
characterized by wood framing, wooden floor joists and roof structures,
and after discussion with the group, the consensus was urging OSHA to
redefine residential construction and supports the inclusion of concrete
block or cinder block construction as well as metal stud framing when
used in residential construction as part of that definition.

There was a presentation by LeBlanc Building, Weyerhaeuser Real Estate,
and Maracay, not MaryKay but Maracay, Homes, and they gave us a
presentation on fall protection in residential construction and it
included the use of all conventional fall protection methods with
showing us concrete basement walls by using rails and the installation
of floor joists and floor trusses and subfloor leading edge work,
installation of roof trusses where they used conventional fall
protection before the trusses were sheathed and also in roof sheathing
and also during roofing operations.

The discussion following this presentation, a number of questions were
asked concerning will these roof trusses support the fall protection
anchors without being fully sheathed, and, of course, they tested it and
showed us in their presentation that they had them attached to four
trusses rather than one truss.

And the amount of training that was required to train people to be able
to utilize this fall protection system and they stated that it was about
eight hours of training where they felt comfortable that their workers
could operate this very safely.

So, also, a question was asked concerning increased costs for
implementing this in residential homebuilding and the cost of this truss
bar, which I said encompasses three or four trusses, is anywhere from
\$1,200 to \$1,500. The cost of the self-retracting lifelines cost
anywhere from \$500 to \$800, and they had also roof and window anchors
that they use for painters, siders, et. cetera, that were \$20 to \$30
apiece.

Of course, the truss bar and the self-retracting lifelines are reusable
for quite a long time, until you have a fall, and then the
self-retracting lifeline has to be replaced, but they estimated the cost
to implement this kind of program was approximately \$250 per home.

Now, one thing that they didn\'t have was engineering, scientific data
on the fall protection program as well as data from their truss
manufacturer stating that they were okay with the way they set this up
because what they\'ve done has contradicted what the National Truss
Manufacturers Association has stated concerning trusses that are not
sheathed, you know. They\'re not designed to handle that type of fall
protection without being even partially sheathed.

So, they\'re going to furnish that to us and to the folks that were
there who requested it and we\'ll look at that and it may be that this
is, you know, an appropriate presentation to be made to the full ACCSH
Committee at our next meeting in either April or May.

A couple other things. One commenter expressed concern about the smaller
contractors may find the initial cost prohibitive to implement these
systems and the presentation also showed the use of a crane in putting
the trusses on the home itself and I don\'t believe that they did it
like some \-- in some areas of the country where they build the roof
trusses onsite and put them up one at a time and how is that going to
work and whether that is feasible for the particular system. That was
from that presentation.

We had another one from the National Frame Building Association.
Although they\'re primarily used in the agricultural and commercial
industry, this was presented to be similar in design and resembling
residential construction, built on grade, no basements.

There\'s supposed to be a more detailed presentation to the committee
tomorrow and the bottom line is the National Frame Building Association
would like to be \-- they would like their industry to be included under
the residential fall protection compliance guidelines and so that
you\'ll hear that tomorrow, a more detailed report. So that\'s why I
didn\'t go into much detail on it.

There was a big discussion concerning the interim standard and I don\'t
know what the number is now, but it was called STD-3.01(a) that was
promulgated, I think, in \'94.

The question was asked, you know, hey, let\'s talk about either
retaining this, modifying it, or eliminating it, and a number of the
comments were, from a number of folks, that the interim standards
creates confusion and it authorizes alternative fall protection
measures, but it doesn\'t have the limitation that Subpart M does.

It doesn\'t have to be a written fall protection plan. You don\'t have
to show infeasibility or greater hazard. You can just implement it and I
think that is \-- what\'s the best way I can put this? That allows some
folks to not follow Subpart M, even though it could be feasible and
there\'s not a greater hazard and I think that was the consensus.

There was a concern for the lack of written fall protection plans and
the majority of state plan states think that this interim standard
should be rescinded because most of them don\'t use it. I think there
were only four that do use it throughout the states.

NAHB talked about their training programs and they distributed a copy of
their training manual for fall protection as well as a copy of their
video that they\'re using in their training program and it was noted in
their comments that there\'s no reference to the interim standard in
their training documents which was, I think back in \'94, NAHB was one
of the promulgators of the interim standard and I think they feel with
the things that have come about over the last 14 years that allow folks
to be able to use more standardized fall protection measures to protect
the workers, especially in roof and truss operations and framing
operations.

A number of attendees voiced their support of the NAHB\'s direction
towards following Subpart M, and National Roofing Contractors actually
said that they opposed the elimination of the standard because it allows
them \-- and that was just strictly for roof operations, not for truss
operations or anything else. It allows them some flexibility.

And comments were also made that OSHA should train their compliance
officers so that there\'s more uniform enforcement of the standards
under Subpart M.

MR. SMITH: Okay. We need to call Dr. Payne. I think \-- I know I heard
one recommendation in that report and possibly another one. If you\'d
like to make those as recommendations to the full committee, then we can
vote on it after we do this, we\'ll be glad to do that.

MR. THIBODEAUX: Sure.

MR. SMITH: Thank you for your understanding.

DR. PAYNE: Hey.

MR. SMITH: Dr. Payne, can you hear us?

DR. PAYNE: Barely.

MR. SMITH: Okay. This is Linwood Smith, Chairman of ACCSH.

DR. PAYNE: How you doing?

MR. SMITH: Doing good. Appreciate you standing by for us. Can you hear
us better now?

DR. PAYNE: Yes.

MR. SMITH: Would you like to update us on any changes in OTI? Then I\'m
sure some of our members will have some questions.

DR. PAYNE: I\'m not sure how many of you know, I don\'t remember the
last time I was at ACCSH, but we\'ve hired \-- we\'ve had a number of
changes in the management structure out here.

Sean Zin Yin is now the head of the Construction Branch out here. He\'s
a structural engineer who used to be with Region 5.

Charlie Shields is the new Director of the OSHA Training Institute who
replaced Sig Sedaucus who retired about two years ago now.

We have a new admin director out here, Sam Lombardo, and a new Director
of Programs. His name is Jim Barnes. A new Deputy Director who is Ernest
Thompson, who used to be the head of the Programs Office out here. So,
we\'ve had a number of personnel changes out here.

We also \-- I think maybe you knew we went through \-- our office went
through competitive sourcing which is the A-76 process whereby the
instructor positions, the developer positions and a lot of the staff
positions went through a competition and to see if it would be cheaper
to outsource the work or keep it in the house with federal employees,
and it was cheaper to keep it inhouse with federal employees.

So, we were very happy about that, although we are working under a most
efficient organizational structure right now which does cause us some
constraints in terms of personnel assignments and who can do what, but
we\'re working around those.

Those are probably the two big things that \-- two major things that
have gone on out here, I think, since ACCSH last met. It\'s been all in
the personnel changes and getting through this competition.

MR. SMITH: Thank you. Could you talk to us briefly \-- I\'ve heard some
comments from the members of the committee \-- about the OSHA 500
instructors and maybe some changes that are going to take place there or
being contemplated?

DR. PAYNE: Yes, I can. The Outreach Training Program is basically the
program, I guess it\'s probably known as the 10- and 30-hour card
program, but officially it\'s the OSHA Outreach Training Program, where
OSHA authorizes instructors who complete a training program to go out
and do 10- and 30-hour courses in either construction or in general
industry.

Periodically, we take a look at the program and we update it and make
changes. The last time any changes were made to the program was in 2003.
We\'re currently looking at the program right now to see what changes
that might need to be made. We\'re still in the process of discussing a
lot of those, but basically they\'re kind of \-- they really come under
two areas.

The first area would be topic changes. Right now, there are specific
areas. Under each program, there are required topics and then there are,
for lack of a better term, topic areas that you can choose from to fill
in the 10 or remaining 30 hours.

Then the second set of changes basically deal with an ongoing issue that
a number, a large number of the OSHA Training Institute education
centers have been reporting to us dealing around the prerequisites for
becoming an authorized instructor and then primarily it being that a
number of the people now enrolling in the trainer courses which are the
500 and the 501 courses are really struggling with not having a
sufficient background and many of them switch and go through the
standards course.

Now that sounds more ominous than it is. It is a course that is an
overview of construction standards, policies and procedures. It\'s not a
blow by blow here are all the standards in construction and here\'s
everything you need to know.

It really is an overview of standards to help give them a feel for what
kind of standards cover the construction industry and the kinds of
things they need to help them be better instructors.

In the past, we have allowed the OSHA 30-hour to substitute for the
standards course and what the ed centers have been reporting to us is
that those students are more and more having problems in the trainer
course and a number of them are backing out of the trainer course and
are going into taking the standards course.

So, we are at this point exploring whether we\'re going to eliminate the
30-hour and basically require the standards course, in the construction
case it would be the 510 course, or what we would call an equivalent and
there are a number of areas that we\'re considering as equivalent areas.

For example, an associate\'s, bachelor\'s or master\'s degree in the
safety and health field. If the person is a certified safety
professional or a certified \-- an occupational health and safety
technologist or a construction safety and health technician or a
professional engineer who\'s had course work in OSHA standards, things
along those lines are what we are currently considering as would
substitute as an equivalent for that 510 course.

MR. SMITH: Okay. Thank you very much.

At this point, Hank, I\'m going to ask the committee if they have any
questions, and I\'m going to ask them to identify themselves before they
ask the question so you know you\'re responding to.

DR. PAYNE: Okay. Thanks.

MR. SMITH: Yes, sir, Frank?

MR. MIGLIACCIO: Frank Migliaccio with the Ironworkers, Hank.

DR. PAYNE: Hi, Frank. How you doing?

MR. MIGLIACCIO: Good. How you doing?

DR. PAYNE: Okay.

MR. MIGLIACCIO: It\'s my understanding some of the prerequisites you
were looking at here and you basically spelled them out right there were
college degrees, engineering degrees, so forth like that, and you\'ve
worked with our people for, God, I don\'t know how many years.

We have six master instructors. I think all the trades, building trades
have the same. We\'re allowed six master instructors and our master
instructors have gone through the training that was required before.
They\'ve been evaluated. They\'ve taught courses for the OTI themselves
and come back with excellent evaluations.

And this morning when Assistant Secretary Foulke was here, it was
brought up and I actually said that if it comes down to somebody
teaching a class to construction personnel, I can\'t find anybody better
than a person that works in the construction field, not somebody who\'s
got book learning.

There\'s a lot of people in the world got book learning but they don\'t
have a drop of common sense, and in construction, it takes common sense
to put something together and it works safe.

Now, if there\'s going to be changes made here, I was surprised that the
OTI didn\'t even come to or even think about coming to the subcommittee
through ACCSH, the OTI subcommittee, which I chair.

I felt as though we were like, you know, just circumvented here. I\'m
not sure what the reason for this is and the only thing I can see
motivationwise is the colleges and so forth that have come forward and
said that some people are having this trouble, is it\'s a money issue,
and when you start putting money issues ahead of safety and the correct
way of training, I\'m totally against this.

I think most of the people on this committee would feel the same way.

The other thing I want to talk about was \-- he\'s not going to answer,
I don\'t think.

Excuse me. Would you like to answer that question? I didn\'t give it as
a question, but go ahead.

DR. PAYNE: I didn\'t really hear a question, but I don\'t really see it
\-- we don\'t really see it as a money issue. We see it as a program
integrity issue, and Frank, we have been struggling with the issue and
on how to deal with the master trainers in the building trades and we
haven\'t really come to a resolution.

MR. MIGLIACCIO: Okay. When you come up with a resolution or when you
come up with an idea, would you be willing to bring this in front of the
subcommittee that I chair?

DR. PAYNE: Sure.

MR. MIGLIACCIO: All right. That answered that question.

Now, the other thing I had here was one of the other things I guess OSHA
was looking at was an expiration date on a 10-to-30-hour card, and this
has come in front of the committee several times.

If a person comes out and takes the OSHA 10, they do it on their own
time. It\'s voluntary because OSHA doesn\'t require an OSHA 10-hour card
to get on any job. The contractors in turn do. Contractors can require
the card and they can require every two-three years somebody go back
through a refresher class, so to speak.

But for OSHA to come out and OTI to come out and say that they feel as
though there should be an expiration date on a card that\'s not
mandatory in the first place, how can you punish somebody for taking the
class on their own time, putting their own time and money and effort
into it, and then punish them by making them come back through something
that maybe a contractor doesn\'t require? That is a question.

DR. PAYNE: I don\'t know where this expiration date is coming from. We
hear it a number of times. We\'re not proposing an expiration date be
put on the construction or the general industry 10-hour or 30-hour
cards.

MR. SMITH: The only expiration, I think, is on the OSHA 500 instructors.

DR. PAYNE: The trainer cards have an expiration date and have had for a
long time but not the worker cards.

MR. SMITH: Okay. Thank you. Someone else have a question for Hank?
Anyone else?

(No response.)

MR. SMITH: Well, we sure appreciate you dropping in today.

DR. PAYNE: Okay. Hey, Frank, I\'ll be in touch with you.

MR. MIGLIACCIO: You\'ve got my number.

DR. PAYNE: Yes.

MR. SMITH: How\'s the weather?

DR. PAYNE: It\'s cold.

MR. SMITH: Okay. Thanks a lot.

DR. PAYNE: Okay.

MR. SMITH: Thank you. Okay. Thank you very much. Do you still have a
motion?

MR. KRUL: Yes, sir, Mr. Chairman. Thank you.

I still would like to propose the motion that I made earlier and that\'s
that we make a recommendation to the Assistant Secretary that any
proposed changes to the OSHA Training Institute current parameters be
brought before the subcommittee that\'s been charged with the OSHA
Training Institute matters and that any of those recommendations then be
brought back to this full committee and again for recommendations back
to the Assistant Secretary and I make that in the form of a motion.

MR. SMITH: Okay. We have a motion on the floor. Is there a second?

MR. MIGLIACCIO: Second.

MR. SMITH: Okay. Any discussion? Any discussion?

MR. BEAUREGARD: I just have a question. This is Kevin Beauregard from
North Carolina.

I have no problem with the motion, but you might want to limit it to in
the area of construction because NCI does a lot of other things outside
of the construction arena, and I don\'t know if you want everything
going through this committee.

MR. KRUL: Well, \-- go ahead, Frank.

MR. MIGLIACCIO: This is only construction. He can only relate to
construction to us.

MR. KRUL: I would amend my motion to limit it to construction.

MR. BEAUREGARD: Very good.

MR. SHANAHAN: This is Tom Shanahan.

I guess just a discussion question. What is the \-- does anybody know
what the OTI\'s chain of command is in terms of when they want to make
changes? Is it \-- I mean, are we receiving this because we have to have
a work group or \--

MR. SMITH: Let\'s vote on this motion and then we\'ll entertain your
question. It concerns a different thing really.

Let\'s vote on this motion. Any other questions on this motion?

(No response.)

MR. SMITH: Okay. All in favor, say aye.

(Chorus of ayes.)

MR. SMITH: All opposed, likewise.

(No response.)

MR. SMITH: Motion carries. Now your question is about when they might
make a change?

MR. SHANAHAN: Well, I just wondered what the process was in general for
OTI\'s \--

MR. MIGLIACCIO: I can speak to the internal process, specifically that
the Director Hank Payne uses to consider changes to either existing
policy or existing procedures to the Training Institute, but for the
most part, those changes would come to Washington for presenting to the
Assistant Secretary and those decisions made by the Assistant Secretary.

I\'m sure there\'s some minor procedural changes there that don\'t rise
to the level of the Assistant Secretary, but any change that would have
a significant effect on those who either take courses directly at the
Training Institute or through the ed centers or through the train the
trainer would come to Washington, but Hank Payne, the Director of the
Training and Education until recently was an office within the
Directorate of the Cooperative and State Programs, it\'s now a
freestanding directorate that answers directly to the Assistant
Secretary\'s Office.

MR. SMITH: And the chair appreciates Mike\'s consideration in stopping
his report. Would you like to finish your report, Mike, and/or make a
recommendation to the committee?

MR. THIBODEAUX: Yes, I did have a few other things to say.

MR. SMITH: Please go right ahead. Thank you.

MR. THIBODEAUX: The NAHB representative presented just a short summary
of a residential fall protection study they had done by a third party
and I understand that\'s going to be published within the next month or
so and will be available for us, and the study revealed that the leading
causes of deaths due to falls in residential construction were first
from roofs, second from ladders, third from scaffolding, falls from
other areas which weren\'t delineated, and then the fifth one was falls
from a floor, a dock, or ground level.

This fatality data was collected from the Bureau of Labor Statistics
Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries. So, it\'s from a very reliable
source.

We did have a motion to make and even before that, also NAHB said they
still had some more handbooks on fall protection as well as video to
give out to anyone who didn\'t get any yesterday and they\'ll be here
after the meeting.

I have a motion that the full committee recommend to OSHA to include
concrete block, cinder block and metal stud framing in trusses in the
definition of residential construction but only for residential
homebuilding.

MR. SMITH: Okay. You\'ve heard a motion. Is there a second?

MR. SHANAHAN: Second.

MR. SMITH: Okay. We have a motion and a second. Discussion?

MR. MIGLIACCIO: Can you say that again?

MR. THIBODEAUX: The motion itself is basically right now, under the
interpretation by OSHA, concrete block, cinder block, and metal stud
framing in trusses are not included as part of residential construction,
as part of the definition of residential construction and so they have
to go to other means to do their fall protection, et. cetera, and it is
confusing because cinder block and concrete block and metal studs are
used in homebuilding a lot more than they were many years ago and the
consensus of the work group yesterday was that it should all be included
as part of the residential construction, so long as it fits within the
home, you know, residential homebuilding definition of the type and
means of \-- type of materials used, because right now it\'s just wood
framing and there is metal framing in metal trusses and there\'s also
concrete block that\'s used on the waffles and once they\'re braced,
they\'re, you know, the same strength as wood truss.

And we also have wooden floor joists and roof structures. They have
metal floor joists and metal trusses that they\'re using, also, in
homebuilding and the gist of the motion is that should be a part of
rather than excluded from the residential construction definition.

MR. SMITH: Thank you. Mike, we\'ve been asked to have you restate your
motion one more time.

MR. THIBODEAUX: Okay. And then Dan wants to ask you a question.

MR. THIBODEAUX: I\'m glad I wrote it down.

MR. SMITH: Can you give us the written copy? Maybe that would help. Go
ahead.

MR. THIBODEAUX: The motion is that the ACCSH Committee recommend to OSHA
that they include concrete block and cinder block and metal stud framing
in trusses in the definition of residential construction so long as
they\'re used only in residential homebuilding.

MR. SMITH: Thank you. Dan?

MR. MURPHY: Dan Murphy. Mike, you\'ve got to help me out a little bit.

Yesterday, I sat in on the committee meeting or the subgroup meeting,
and one of the major areas of concern was poured-in-place concrete
basement, and you don\'t identify that as part of residential, at least
I didn\'t hear poured-in-place concrete, but yesterday\'s example was
they had handrails around a basement that was poured-in-place.

So, I don\'t mean to muddy the waters, but I wonder if that should or
should not be a part of your definition.

MR. THIBODEAUX: From my standpoint, you\'re going to have to be very
narrow in doing that. Poured-in-place basement foundations only used in
residential construction might be, you know, appropriate, but I
wouldn\'t want to just say poured-in-place concrete because that just
widens it way too much and gets into the commercial area way too much.

MR. MURPHY: Yes, because your cinder block example would cover a base,
correct?

MR. THIBODEAUX: Correct.

MR. MURPHY: But poured concrete wouldn\'t be included, but we have the
same exposures?

MR. THIBODEAUX: Right. I don\'t have any problem in amending my motion
to include, you know, poured concrete for basement walls in residential
homebuilding.

MR. SMITH: Okay. Say it one more time.

MR. KAVICKY: Now you now why Mike is here.

MR. THIBODEAUX: This is the last time, Tom.

MR. SMITH: No, not the entire motion, just the part about the
poured-in-place concrete.

MR. THIBODEAUX: Okay. To include poured-in-place concrete for basement
walls in residential construction.

MR. SMITH: Very good. Thank you. Any other comments? Would OSHA like to
comment on that or anyone else?

MR. WITT: Not at this time.

MR. SMITH: Okay. You\'ve heard the motion. Have a second. No more
discussion.

All in favor, say aye.

(Chorus of ayes.)

MR. SMITH: All opposed?

(No response.)

MR. SMITH: Okay. Thank you. Do you have another motion?

MR. THIBODEAUX: No, sir, not at this time.

MR. SMITH: Okay. You don\'t have one on the interpretation?

MR. THIBODEAUX: No. We want to get more on the engineering data and
truss information before we finally make that.

MR. SMITH: That\'s fine. Thank you very much.

Dan, are you ready to make your report? I know you wanted Tom to make
it, but he keeps \-- and you have to understand today, Tom doesn\'t have
a personal medical situation himself but his parents have a situation
today and he\'s been called to the phone on that several times. So,
please understand his not being in the room today. He\'d be here if he
could.

MR. MURPHY: With that said, Linwood, if at all possible, I would like to
\-- we have a report that would probably be no more than five to 10
minutes, but there was a lot of discussion that Tom led and if it would
be okay with you, Mr. Chairman, and the committee, we\'d like to report
out when Tom\'s available and hopefully that will be a little later
today or tomorrow morning, if you don\'t have issue with that.

MR. SMITH: That will be fine, sir.

MR. MURPHY: Thank you.

MR. SMITH: Everyone, if you would, take out your sheet in your folder at
this point that\'s entitled ACCSH Work Group Membership and DOC Staff.
Please take a look at that. It\'s in your brochure. If you don\'t find
it, let us know. This is a test. It\'s amazing how confusing we can get
papers here today. Does everyone have it?

MR. HAWKINS: Mr. Chairman, I don\'t think I have a copy.

MR. SMITH: It\'s not in your packet of information?

MR. BUCHET: Originally, it was the third sheet in on the right side.

MR. SMITH: Okay.

MR. HAWKINS: I got it.

MR. SMITH: Okay. He\'s got it, he\'s got it. Okay. Everyone got it?
Okay. Let\'s look at that for a second and talk about our work groups
and we want to talk about the work groups and first we want to talk
about whether they should continue or not, they should carry over, or
whether their charter and purpose has been fulfilled, and then we want
to talk about the chairman and vice chairman and if the chairman or vice
chairman this year, we\'d certainly defer to them for their comments,
and then we\'ll take recommendations.

Let\'s just start at the top of the page, Diversity and Multilingual was
Dan Murphy and Tom Broderick, and they did meet yesterday.

Do you recommend they continue? Dan?

MR. MURPHY: Well, as a part of the report, this is as good a spot as any
to talk a little bit about Diversity and Multilingual.

It was the committee\'s consensus that we have fulfilled the
requirements of the charge that we had and basically what we said was
we\'re at a point in the free market where there\'s a lot of materials
available in other languages for trainers and educators to use and so we
have a lot of the stuff.

One of the suggestions that was made was we split this committee
actually into two groups because we had the Women in Construction
document that\'s housed on the OSHA web page that we felt could
certainly be a plus to employers today but it\'s a 1999 document and so
we\'re nine years out of date and a lot has happened.

From a Multilingual \-- so, we thought maybe there should be a work
group on Women in Construction and then we thought the Multilingual may
continue, but we wanted to talk more about issues, develop goals and
objectives for that committee that certainly include like culture change
in a construction company and how we could maybe get some more of that
happening and we had two folks from NIOSH at our meeting and they were
saying that most of the incidents that they have looked at were with
construction companies with 10 or less employees.

So, from a work group perspective, maybe we could work on figuring out
how to get more of the safety culture into the smaller construction
companies. So that was the recommendation of the group that we wanted to
bring here and see if that made sense to the rest of the committee.

MR. SMITH: Okay. So, you\'re recommending we split Diversity and
Multilingual into two work groups?

MR. MURPHY: Yes.

MR. SMITH: Okay. You\'re an employer rep, Tom\'s the public rep on the
total committee now. Have you all talked about how you would like to \--
what you would like to do?

MR. MURPHY: That\'s when the stuff started happening. So, I haven\'t
talked to Tom since that started.

MR. SMITH: Okay.

MR. MURPHY: So, if we can give you some feedback on that, if he ever
gets off of this conference call, we\'ll be able to do that either today
or tomorrow morning.

MR. SMITH: Okay. Would anybody like to volunteer for Diversity or
Multilingual? Elizabeth?

MS. ARIOTO: I\'ll volunteer for Diversity.

MR. SMITH: For Diversity?

MS. ARIOTO: Yes.

MR. SMITH: Diversity, for Women in Construction. And also, per your
recommendation, we\'ll rename it Women in Construction?

MR. MURPHY: I guess I would need some help there, but that was one of
the things that we thought could be accomplished as an update of a
fantastic report that was done nine years ago.

MR. SMITH: Okay.

MR. MURPHY: But that may not be the only issue as Women in Construction,
there may be other diversity issues that that group may deal with. So, I
don\'t know what you should name it.

MR. SMITH: Okay. Any volunteers from employee reps for Diversity or
Multilingual? Anybody like to volunteer for either one of those two
groups? And this is just all recommendations, I guess, at this point,
but would anybody like to volunteer for those two?

I assume what we\'re doing is making recommendations to the Director of
Construction and they will make decisions.

MR. KAVICKY: I wouldn\'t mind \-- I had originally talked with Emmett
about going on Trenching, but I\'m involved in Women in the Trades and
Diversity back home. So, I would be willing to work with Elizabeth on
Diversity.

MR. SMITH: Okay. Tom Kavicky.

MR. KAVICKY: Yes.

MR. SMITH: Very good.

MR. KAVICKY: Thank you.

MR. SMITH: Okay. Focused Inspection Initiative. Frank? Kevin?

MR. BEAUREGARD: I\'m not sure exactly what our goals are on that
committee because it was established awhile back, but I know that OSHA
has a focused inspection initiative. I know many state plans have OSHA
focused inspection initiatives in construction.

Does anybody recall what our goal or objective was for that particular
committee?

MR. SMITH: Steve, we\'ll ask you to comment on that.

MR. KRUL: Is this your final official duty?

MR. CLOUTIER: No. I just learned something you don\'t know yet.

If you remember back, Bruce and I brought this before you last time.
Based on a question that came in from one of the past members of ACCSH
that said that focused inspections were not uniformly being done across
the 10 regions and that\'s how this whole thing started, so Bruce wanted
to do a study, and he\'s left or he could do this instead, but Bruce
wanted the committee to look into that and do a study throughout the 10
regions to see just whether they were or they weren\'t and that was the
charge, Kevin, that was given to the original focus.

MR. BEAUREGARD: What was the purpose of the work group?

MR. CLOUTIER: The purpose of the work group was to conduct a study at
any way they chose to do that and then report back at the next meeting
what their findings were, but we never had \-- we didn\'t have the next
meeting, so we didn\'t hear the findings.

MR. SMITH: One of the purposes of having a work group, we may recommend
that to OSHA that they do it.

MR. CLOUTIER: Well, it\'s up to Steve if he wants to continue that or
not. I mean, I don\'t see a need to do it anymore.

MR. SHANAHAN: And the chairman doesn\'t either?

MR. SMITH: No, no. We will ask, you know, if that\'s something OSHA
might consider looking at.

MR. GILLEN: I\'m interested in that. I think that\'s a partnership.

MR. SMITH: Okay. You\'re public. Matt Gillen. What\'s the sense of the
committee? Obviously, you know, my opinion is noise is still an issue
and certainly is and we\'ve asked questions about it today, I believe.
So, I think we can do it. Okay. We\'ve got employee/employer. Would
people like to volunteer?

MR. MURPHY: Linwood, Dan Murphy. I would be happy to do the employer
piece.

MR. SMITH: Okay. How about from employee side, employee rep?

MR. MURPHY: Frank.

MR. MIGLIACCIO: I\'ll take it.

MR. SMITH: Thank you, Frank, for volunteering, with Dan\'s help.

OTI, who we just talked to. We\'ve already got a motion that it \--
we\'ve already got a second committee with Frank.

MR. HAGGERTY: I would like to be called for that on the employee side.

MR. SMITH: Okay. You can be on the committee and not be the chairman and
Frank, I think, wants to keep \-- be the chairman. You\'ve got a new
recruit there, Frank.

Residential Fall Protection, Kavicky and Mike.

MR. THIBODEAUX: Yes.

MR. SMITH: Okay. That definitely needs to continue, I think. You had a
tremendous meeting yesterday.

MR. THIBODEAUX: Yes.

MR. SMITH: ROPS, ROPS.

MR. GILLEN: Can I ask a point of clarification?

MR. SMITH: Yes, sir.

MR. GILLEN: This is to pick the chairs or is this to indicate interest
in being on the committee?

MR. SMITH: No, this is just the chairs and the vice chairs \--

MR. GILLEN: Okay.

MR. SMITH: \-- and the reps from each, you know, each segment. Good
point. Thank you, Matt.

ROPS, ROPS.

MR. RUSSELL: I can take that over from Frank.

MR. SMITH: Okay.

MR. RUSSELL: Emmett Russell.

MR. SMITH: Thank you, Emmett.

MR. MIGLIACCIO: I want to stay on the committee, though.

MR. SMITH: Does this committee need to continue?

MR. RUSSELL: Yes, we should be close to a final report back to the
group. So, yes, it does.

MR. SMITH: Okay. And what are you working on?

MR. RUSSELL: ROPS is on compactors. Right now, the OSHA standard says
that rollover protective structures are not necessary and the committee
was to take a look at that and make a recommendation as to where we go
in the future with that.

MR. SMITH: Okay. Thank you very much, Emmett.

For employer, we\'ve got Mike listed and Dan Murphy. Well, I guess we
just need one basically, right? I know. We need the employer rep and
employee rep. We\'re showing two employer reps right now. We only need
one as chairman. They both can be on the committee, but we only need one
as the vice chair or chairman.

MR. MIGLIACCIO: Chair is much more knowledgeable.

MR. SMITH: That\'s fine. We\'ll take your name off the chart then. So,
I\'m saying from the employer side, we\'re showing Mike and Dan and we
only need one of them, you know, for the chairmanship or vice chairman.

MR. MURPHY: Congratulations, Mike.

MR. THIBODEAUX: I said it first.

MR. MURPHY: Either way is fine with me.

MR. SMITH: Okay. Who\'s on the most committees, I guess? Probably about
equal, right?

MR. MURPHY: I got three.

MR. SMITH: Okay. Let\'s use Mike on this then.

Silica. Silica Work Group. Have you got a work group on that? I show
Mike. I show Matt.

MR. GILLEN: I\'m interested in that one.

MR. SMITH: Okay.

MR. KRUL: Mr. Chairman, I\'ll be interested in that committee.

MR. SMITH: Okay.

MR. WITT: Can I ask a question?

MR. SMITH: Yes, sir. Thank you, Robert.

MR. WITT: The interest expressed in the subject. The work group will
have a purpose. It\'s not just interest. There will be an assignment or
a purpose for the work group to have discussions on a particular issue
and report back to the full committee? I just want to make sure it\'s
not just for interest in the subject. There\'s probably 30 construction
subjects you\'re interested in, but we don\'t necessarily need a work
group.

MR. SMITH: Can someone tell us what their assignment was or what their
charge was as a subcommittee? Scott?

MR. SCHNEIDER: Yes, I chaired this previously and I think part of it was
to review a lot of information that was coming out on silica in
construction, there\'s quite a bit, and I think part of it was also in
preparation for action that OSHA was going to take in reviewing their
reg analysis, et. cetera.

So, we\'re anticipating that something will need to come before the
committee and I would hope it would be sooner rather than later, but I
would hope that they would work closely with this committee in
developing their regulation and also their regulatory package.

MR. SMITH: Okay. Thank you. Anyone like to volunteer from the employer
side? This don\'t mean all these committees are going to be formed now.
This is just \-- if they are formed and we\'ve got them in place and
ready to go.

But is there an employer rep that would like to \--

MR. SHANAHAN: Sure. I will.

MR. SMITH: Okay. Thank you, Tom. Okay. Training and Certification. What
was their charge? Is that something we need to continue? Mike?

MR. BUCHET: I don\'t think so.

MR. SMITH: That\'s all gone? We\'ve got consensus on one.

Trenching. Trenching Task Force. Yes, sir?

MR. BUCHET: In the packet, there is a list of action items. Michael
Buchet, Director of Construction staff.

In your packet, originally on the left-hand side, there is a print-out
of materials that we received from Brent Strudwick, the past co-chair of
the Trench Work Group, and it includes the action items from that work
group and if you don\'t mind, if you can refer to Mr. Scott Schneider, I
think he can tell you about half of them were done because he was the
other co-chair.

MR. SMITH: Okay.

MR. BUCHET: And we at the agency are continuing our trenching initiative
for another year. You may want to put that in the balance.

MR. SMITH: Okay. So, there may be other work to do on it, right? Okay.

Daniel, would you serve as the employer rep?

MR. ZARLETTI: On trenching? Sure.

MR. SMITH: Okay. Employee rep?

MR. GILLEN: I\'m interested in serving on that committee.

MR. SMITH: Okay.

MR. RUSSELL: I would volunteer for employee.

MR. SMITH: Okay. Thank you, Emmett.

MR. HAWKINS: Mr. Chairman, I\'d be willing to \-- Steve Hawkins. I\'d be
willing to serve on that committee as well.

MR. SMITH: Okay. Super. Keep in mind, you know, each committee needs a
chair and a vice chair, a public representative assigned to it, and keep
in mind that the agency will actually look over these subcommittees and
determine resources and how many, you know, they can fund and how many
can meet and how much work is left to do and what the charge is and, you
know, then they\'ll report back to us on what committees have actually
been formed.

Yes, sir, Emmett?

MR. RUSSELL: Mr. Chairman, I\'d like to make a recommendation that,
based on a presentation this morning, which was on structural failures,
I think it might interest us to look at a Structural Failures Prevention
Work Group because I think clearly on some of the presentations this
morning, it was clear that if employees had a chance to voice what they
saw on the job, they had a chance to exercise some options, a number of
those failures could have been prevented, and I think that\'s the case
where we can look at a possibility of what are some of the options we
might present where, when we clearly see signs of failures and in a lot
of cases, the signs were there, how do we prevent them from happening
and empower people to have a voice.

To give you an example, for instance, in the cranes and derricks
proposal, it was clear that when it comes to critical lifts, you had to
have a competent person, you had to have a meeting before you start the
process, also an assembly/disassembly, and I think in some cases,
something similar to that in some of the cases presented might actually
prevent the loss of lives and injury.

MR. SMITH: Okay. Thank you, Emmett, for those comments.

Any other comments on starting that subcommittee?

MR. BEAUREGARD: Not on starting up another subcommittee, but I\'d like
to make a recommendation that at some point, we go on record in the
meeting minutes or somewhere and outline what the scope and the
objectives and the goals of these work groups are because people come
and go off these committees and I\'ve been around for awhile and it\'s
really nice when there\'s a charge, you know what you\'re supposed to
do, you do it, and you disband the group. Otherwise we get in a
situation where nobody really knows what the group\'s supposed to do and
they go on in perpetuity.

So, at some point in time, I\'d like to see if we can\'t do that.

MR. SMITH: By consensus, can we ask DOL, DOC, Director of Construction
Office, to look at our list and see if there\'s a charge already in
place and if there is, you know, if we need it to continue, to continue
it, or either help create a charge for the new subcommittees? Would that
be fair?

MR. BUCHET: Yes, but \-- yes, that\'s fair, as the former chair.

MR. WITT: That was a year and a half ago. You want to count on his
memory?

No. Of course we\'ll do that. We\'ll review the past documents that
contain the purpose or the charge for each subgroup and we\'ll
distribute copies of that to everyone, but we would then ask for
feedback on whether that purpose still asks and are there any other
responsibilities we\'d like to get to these particular subgroups or
should they be disbanded.

I agree that some of the work groups go on in perpetuity. The work
groups usually are established to meet a certain purpose and then
dissolve. So, yes, I think it would be good to go through this process.

MR. SMITH: Okay. And you can use the people here especially after we go
through the process and hopefully we\'ll send that out to you, but when
the DOC sends that out, then maybe the people listed here could write
back, you know, will you agree or you think some changes need to be made
to the charge or, you know, you disagree, and we can talk about it next
week.

MR. RUSSELL: One other issue I would like to bring up and that is, that
if it\'s agreed that a Structural Failures Prevention Work Group \-- and
I\'m not saying that\'s the formal name, but for right now at least that
identifies the possibility, I did talk to the engineer, Mohammad Ayub or
however you pronounce his last name, and I thought that if the work
group were to be formed, it would be crucial that he or his organization
be part of that group because I think clearly he could bring some
substance for consideration, if that were to be a work group.

MR. SMITH: Okay. Yes, sir, Bob?

MR. KRUL: Along those lines, maybe it should come through the work
group, but I\'ll ask Steve Witt this question.

That to me was a very, very dramatic presentation on structural failure,
and Mr. Ayub\'s recommendations as an engineer for prevention to me seem
like they\'re invaluable.

I know OSHA has limited resources, but would it be possible to put that
on the OSHA website under Construction, that that could be a resource
for contractors to use?

MR. WITT: The structural reports that Mohammad\'s office does when they
go onsite, I can look into it. There may be some problems, but I\'ll try
and get those resolved because these reports were all part of \-- these
are all part of enforcement inspections.

Mohammad and his staff are called out when there has been a structural
collapse and OSHA goes onsite as part of an inspection, but I\'ll look
into it and if we can, we\'ll link them through the ACCSH page.

MR. KRUL: Okay. Thanks, Steve.

MR. ZARLETTI: I want to go back to the work group when we split up the
Multilingual and Diversity.

Now, do I understand that you and Tom continue on the Multilingual and
Liz took on the Diversity with who? Who else?

MR. SMITH: Tom Kavicky.

MR. ZARLETTI: And you only need two on there? Is that what you\'re
saying?

MR. SMITH: Well, no. What we\'re saying is we\'re just looking at the
chairs. When we have a subgroup meeting, you know, they need other
members obviously and you can be \-- you can volunteer for those
committees or you can go to all of them, you know, or some of them.

Like yesterday, Residential Fall Group had over 30 people in attendance
and the work groups traditionally, if they have a meeting, even have
people from outside this committee to come in and participate in the
work group.

So, you know, this is just looking for chairs. Like I sat in on some of
these committees the other day. So, thank you for asking me the question
and we\'ll ask them also to look at the structural issue.

MS. SHORTALL: It looks like there still needs to be Diversity and \--

MR. SMITH: We\'ve got a recommendation on Diversity. Multilingual,
Dan\'s going to get back to us after he talks to his \--

MS. SHORTALL: If you\'re going to have the committees, then you still
need either a public \-- excuse me \-- either an employee or employer
rep on some of these. Liz represents public. So, you don\'t have an
employer rep on that one.

MR. ZARLETTI: That\'s what I was doing.

MS. SHORTALL: Multilingual, you don\'t have an employee rep.

MR. SMITH: Okay. Very good. Anyone like to \--

MR. ZARLETTI: I\'ll take the employer on Diversity.

MR. SMITH: Diversity.

MS. SHORTALL: So, then you need an employee on the Multilingual side.

MR. SMITH: Right. Then an employee on the Multilingual side. Anyone
interested in that? I\'m getting confused.

MR. MIGLIACCIO: Okay. Let me suggest that we work out the final chair
and how many chairs and vice chairs we need for each one after we first
resolve which committees we will have and which will continue and what
their purpose will be.

MR. SMITH: Well, I agree with that. We\'ve got some names, but we\'ll
work out the final. After we work out which groups we\'re going to have,
we will certainly need to look at it and make sure that it\'s kind of a
fair split between everybody and everybody\'s got a fair load and, you
know, we don\'t have one person chair or vice chair of all the
committees. So, we\'ll try to make sure everybody\'s got an equal
workload. Does that sound good?

Okay. Any other comments on work groups?

MS. SHORTALL: Mr. Chair, I have a number of housekeeping items to take
care of today and they are marking certain items as exhibits and
entering them into the record of this meeting.

They will be entered into Docket Number OSHA-2007-0082. The first one is
Minutes from the October 11^th^ and 12^th^, \'06, ACCSH Meeting, marked
as Exhibit 0002.

The Minutes from the December 8^th^, \'05, ACCSH Meeting as 0003.

The hard copy of OSHA\'s Standards and Guidance Update PowerPoint
Presentation by Amanda Edens as 0004.

The Memo to ACCSH from Dorothy Dougherty regarding the PortaCount
Proposal as 0005.

The Draft OSHA Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on PortaCount Quantitative
Fit Testing Protocols as 0006.

The National Response Framework and Annex of January 2008 as Exhibit
0007.

The NRF Fact Sheet as 0008.

The NRF Press Release of January 22^nd^, 2008, as 0009.

The hard copy of OSHA Structural Response Plan PowerPoint Presentation
by Mr. Mohammad Ayub as 0010.

The hard copy of Minnesota OSHA\'s PowerPoint Presentation by Jeff
Isakson to be reserved as 0011.

The hard copy of OSHA\'s Construction Cooperative Programs PowerPoint
Presentation by Paula White as 0012.

And finally, the Residential Fall Protection Work Group Report from the
January 23, \'08, Work Group Meeting, as 0013.

MR. SMITH: Thank you. That will be entered into the record after some
corrections.

MS. SHORTALL: And all of those exhibits will be located for your perusal
once again in OSHA Docket OSHA-2007-0082.

This change in the OSHA Docket represents the fact that OSHA, like all
other agencies of the Federal Government, have moved over to the
eRulemaking Federal Portal which is now on regulations.gov. So that\'s
how you will now access the documents. You will go to
www.regulations.gov.

MR. SMITH: Okay. Thank you.

MR. KRUL: Mr. Chairman, just a question for Sarah. 2007 or 2008?

MS. SHORTALL: We\'re putting them in the 2007 because they\'re related
to the meeting announcement, the meeting announcement that came out on
December 17^th^. So, those relate to that, but you\'re right, the next
thing we\'ll do will be entered in under 2008.

MR. KRUL: Okay. Thank you.

MR. SMITH: Okay. Any other comments? Frank?

MR. MIGLIACCIO: Frank Migliaccio with the Ironworkers.

Yes, it\'s been brought to my attention yesterday coming in here and
then today about the badges and I was asked to bring it up in front of
the committee, what happened with the badges. The photos that need to be
taken now with, you now, another \-- having to stand in line and waiting
to get in.

MR. WITT: I can answer that, Frank. That\'s not something OSHA\'s done.
There\'s a new Homeland Security Directive that controls photo badges
that are given out to those who have access to federal buildings. All
our new badges have microchips with personal information stored and our
fingerprints.

The practice now is not to give those badges out generally. There is a
background check that needs to be done before they\'re given and at
least the Department of Labor at this point is not issuing those type of
badges, to my understanding, and I can check on that.

Now we do \-- there are contractors in the building who have them and
others that have some financial relationship with the Department of
Labor, but I can check as to whether they\'re willing to give them out
to advisory committee members, but there has been a change in the type
of badges we get and the rules that apply to the issuance of badges.

MR. MIGLIACCIO: Will the badges you\'re carrying now, are they similar
to the TWIC badges?

MR. WITT: They look like this and they have little microchips.

MR. MIGLIACCIO: Yes, I\'m talking about \-- well, the TWIC has the same
thing.

MR. SMITH: Anybody on this committee got a problem with background
check?

MR. THIBODEAUX: It\'s Frank.

MR. MIGLIACCIO: I come here, I\'m legal.

MR. SMITH: Would it be appropriate for this group to go on record as
asking that the agency consider that?

MR. WITT: Sure. And of course, if it\'s possible, we\'ll do it, but
it\'s not within our control, but I\'ll have someone check with the
department\'s administrative people who control the issuance process.

MR. SMITH: You know, of course, they\'ve got to find your name, stand in
line, and then you only got one door you can come through, same thing.
You know, depending on where you\'re staying, that could be a little bit
more of a walk. That\'s a longer walk.

Can I get a motion on this?

MR. THIBODEAUX: And Frank, you\'re on one of those watch lists.

MR. MIGLIACCIO: I know, but they couldn\'t find my name.

MR. BUCHET: Committee members should be at the top of the list, not
alphabeticized with everybody else. That\'s the way we sent it down
there.

MR. SMITH: Can I get a motion on that?

MR. MIGLIACCIO: I make a motion.

MR. SMITH: Okay. Frank makes the motion that we ask the DOC Office,
Director of Construction Office, to see if they can somehow get us name
badges which would be very beneficial. Is there a second?

MR. THIBODEAUX: Second.

MR. KRUL: Second.

MR. SMITH: Any more discussion?

(No response.)

MR. SMITH: Okay. All in favor, say aye.

MR. RUSSELL: One question.

MR. SMITH: Okay.

MR. RUSSELL: I am a member of another committee and let me say this.
What I have to go through to deal with that committee is something I
would not recommend because with that committee, not only do they have
to do a background, you\'ve got to give financial disclosure and it\'s a
whole bunch of other stuff.

So, I would say if we can get the badges without all of that, we get
them, but if all of that\'s going to be required of each committee
member, let me say that\'s a lot of process and I think we\'re better
off with what we have.

MR. MIGLIACCIO: Because the Department of Labor, they know what I make
anyway. So, it doesn\'t make any difference.

MR. SMITH: Well, \--

MR. WITT: Let me make one other comment. Michael distributed about a
37-page document that relates to the issue that was raised earlier on
the PortaCount and I said we\'d like to look over the Federal Register
Notice. Two pieces of material that John Steelneck gave you earlier.

Please, if you have a chance, look at it. I know we\'re not all going to
go back and study this material tonight, but we would like to get a
sense of the committee or any recommendations.

Michael is going to describe to you the additional document that was
handed out that\'s even longer and what this represents from the last
committee meeting.

Michael?

MR. SMITH: It\'s getting late in the day and my friend here is letting
me slide with this. We haven\'t voted on this motion that Frank made
yet.

All in favor of the motion, say aye.

(Chorus of ayes.)

MR. SMITH: All opposed, likewise.

(No response.)

MR. SMITH: Okay. Then we have an official recommendation from this
committee.

Any other items to claim our attention today?

MS. SHORTALL: Yes, we have reconsideration of the minutes from 2005.

MR. SMITH: The minutes from 2005.

MR. MIGLIACCIO: I make a motion to accept them after reading them again.

MR. SMITH: Thank you. Is there a second?

MR. THIBODEAUX: Second.

MR. SMITH: Any discussion?

(No response.)

MR. SMITH: All in favor, say aye.

(Chorus of ayes.)

MR. SMITH: All opposed, likewise.

(No response.)

MR. SMITH: Thank you. Everything clear? Sarah\'s got something else.

MS. SHORTALL: I have one question. I\'m sorry. I was trying to look
something up.

Mr. Migliaccio\'s earlier recommendation. Was there a second? Had there
been a second?

MR. SMITH: Name badges?

MS. SHORTALL: Name badges.

MR. SMITH: Yes, oh, yes.

MS. SHORTALL: Okay. Just want to make sure. Thank you.

MR. SMITH: Okay. Anything else? Yes, sir, Michael? Would you give us
directions?

MR. BUCHET: Which order would you like it? Talk about this or
directions?

MR. SMITH: Either way.

MR. BUCHET: While your memory is still fresh.

MR. SMITH: Either way, sir.

MR. BUCHET: You want to know where the food is. After you pay attention
on this sheet of paper.

Michael Buchet, Director of Construction staff.

This is an excerpt of the transcript from the October 11^th^, 2006,
ACCSH Meeting. John Steelneck and Carol Jones came and gave a lengthy
presentation on sign protection factors and a lengthy one on PortaCount.

It is the entirety of their testimony and the questions and answers. You
will recognize some of the names of the committee members who asked
questions that you might want to look at. Mr. Kavicky asked some
questions. Mr. Hayslip, who is not here, asked some questions.

It will give you some background into the presentation they gave today
and some more meat in your thoughts on the subject.

There are actually, if you want the full transcript, another 300 pages.

Thank you.

MR. SMITH: Okay.

MR. KRUL: You know, I know how much everybody\'s going to take this home
tonight and read it with their reading light on after going to Stew\'s
retirement party, but there\'s one thing in this draft NPRM that I will
put out now and not want an answer until tomorrow.

But there\'s three issues in these two test value tables. One of the
test values failed, the other one\'s borderline failure, and then the
other test value for full face respirators, there\'s a borderline
failure, and my pragmatic side says why would we be considering giving
any kind of a positive response or nod from this committee for
respirators that are failing or are borderline failing in any test
protocol?

I\'d just leave that for thought.

MR. SMITH: Okay. Thank you, Bob. Okay. Directions, if anybody needs
them.

MR. BUCHET: Directions to My Brother\'s Place. How many of you know
where My Brother\'s Place is? That\'ll simplify it.

MR. KRUL: If there was building security, you could walk out that door.

MR. SMITH: Hold on a minute.

MR. BUCHET: You will have to walk \--

MR. SMITH: Just a minute. Let\'s go off the record. Meeting is hereby
adjourned. We\'re off the record now.

(Whereupon, the above-entitled matter was adjourned at 4:46 p.m.)