Nations Forgotten Responders

Nations Forgotten Responders
Recent Report to NIEHS Finds Significant Training Gap for Skilled Support Personnel Construction Trade Personnel Are at Risk If Called Upon to Respond to Incidents of Terrorism or the Use of Weapons of Mass Destruction

Bruce Lippy, CIH, CSP, Director, National Clearinghouse for Worker Safety and Health Training

Recent safety and health training requirements for "skilled support personnel" – a term used by OSHA for the construction trades needed during disaster responses – are insufficient to protect these workers during responses to weapons of mass destruction (WMD) incidents, according to a report released in December by the National Clearinghouse for Worker Safety Health and Training. The report, commissioned by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) Worker Education and Training Program (WETP), contains recommendations for improving current federal training requirements for skilled support personnel, and examines the feasibility of a national registry of trained workers that could be used by emergency management organizations during future responses.

Improving the Training of Skilled Support Personnel for Responding to Terrorist Actions: A Review of the Problems and Feasible Solutions focuses on training needs for "skilled support personnel" (SSP) – a worker population that includes heavy equipment operators, truck drivers, iron workers, carpenters, and laborers – many of whom worked at the World Trade Center site for months. The lessons learned from the WTC site, the study suggests, necessitate a review of current OSHA training requirements for these workers and argues against their current status under the OSHA standard as merely "temporary workers" at emergency response sites.

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"As a member of a team performing exposure assessments of heavy equipment operators at the World Trade Center site, I saw first-hand the inadequacies of the training for skilled support personnel," said Bruce Lippy, Director of the National Clearinghouse and co-author of the report.

"Subsequent studies by Mount Sinai Medical Center have indicated that over half of the 2,500 workers they have screened as of November 25, 2002 are still suffering respiratory symptoms. This indicates a real need for better training of these worker populations: we can give them more than the three-hour training we provided three months after the attack."

The report contains significant conclusions, developed as a result of a five-month review conducted by the National Clearinghouse for Worker Safety and Health Training, which involved agency and current NIEHS WETP grant recipients, skilled support personnel populations, and local and state-level emergency management organizations:

• Current training requirements for SSP under OSHA’s hazardous waste worker standard (HAZWOPER) only mandate "awareness training" of unspecified duration, which is not sufficient to protect construction workers during responses to WMD incidents.
• The OSHA HAZWOPER 40-hr general construction worker course should be required for SSP, and should be supplemented with trade-specific training for responding to acts of terrorism.
• Training requirements for SSP must differentiate between pre- and post-incident conditions.
• A national registry of trained SSP should be pursued further, and must include consideration of the communications links between such a registry and local emergency management organizations.
• Greater focus on prevention is needed to minimize the consequences for all worker populations – including SSP, emergency responders, chemical and transportation workers.
• All terrorist incidents start as local events, and it is therefore critical that local incident commanders be aware of safety and health protections for skilled trade workers who respond to an incident. Likewise, SSP need to be trained about the incident command structure (ICS) so that they may work more effectively at a response site.

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This report represents the latest in a series of studies undertaken by the federal program to assess training needs for various worker populations involved in response, recovery and cleanup operations to WMD incidents. Representatives of the WETP conducted the first safety and health training assessment on the WTC site. Awardees of the program subsequently developed and delivered the official 3-hour safety and health awareness course on the site, in addition to conducting respirator fit testing.

The program then released a report in August of this year, Learning from Disasters: Weapons of Mass Destruction Preparedness Through Worker Training,that identified several matters specific to worker training that should be considered in order to improve our nation’s response to actual WMD incidents. Each of these reports can be found on the National Clearinghouse for Worker Safety and Health website, located at http://www.wetp.org.

About the NIEHS WETP - The NIEHS WETP was created in 1987 by Congress as part of the Superfund Program to support the development of a network of non-profit organizations that are committed to protecting workers and their communities by creating and delivering high-quality, peer-reviewed safety and health curricula to target populations of hazardous waste workers and emergency responders. Through NIH grants, the WETP awards cooperative agreements to support the development of curricula and training programs throughout the country to help employers meet OSHA requirements under 29 CFR 1910.120, Hazardous Waste Operations and Emergency Response.

About the National Clearinghouse - The National Clearinghouse for Worker Safety and Health Training is the centralized distribution point through which members of the worker education and training community can access technical documents and workshop reports, safety and health update information, and curricula produced by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) Worker Education and Training Program (WETP) awardees. http://www.wetp.org

* TNEC has been a part of NIEHS Worker Education Training Program since its inception in 1987.

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