Word: osha
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...latex in surgical gloves that clung to surfaces in the building; Florida's Martin County Courthouse, where fungi infestation required a $3.5 million gutting by workers wearing respirators and bodysuits; even the epa's Washington offices, where brand-new carpets were blamed for gas emissions and were removed. OSHA's beleaguered inspectors can't begin to keep up with the complaints. A whole new business of industrial-hygiene companies has sprung up, offering everything from one-shot inspections to year-round prevention programs...
Sick-building syndrome, as scientists and health officials call it, is a disease of modern architecture: sealed, energy-conserving buildings continually recycle contaminated air. According to a survey by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), one-third of the 70 million Americans who work indoors are quartered in buildings that are breeding grounds for an array of contaminants, from molds and bacteria to volatile organic compounds like formaldehyde. A 1996 Cornell University study found the problem was even worse: in every one of 35 buildings surveyed for the study, at least 20% of the occupants had experienced symptoms...
Inspection reports from 1995 and 1996 obtained by TIME reveal that a wide variety of active molds, including Stachybotrys and Penicillium, continued to grow inside the building, alongside bacterial levels that were 200 times as great as OSHA's suggested "contamination threshold." Yet the '96 report, prepared by Crawford Risk Control Services for Southwest's insurance company, rated airborne spore counts inside the building as "normal" compared with those outside. Reviewing this record, Dr. David Straus of Texas Tech University's Health Sciences Center observed, "There's nothing normal about Stachybotrys. It produces a bad toxin. That...
Employees insist, however, that management has known about the problem for years--and actively concealed it. In 1992 OSHA fined the airline for its failure to maintain complete records of employee illnesses and injuries at the center for each year since 1987, with an additional fine for failing to record descriptions of illnesses and injuries in 80 cases during 1992 alone. According to Hardage, the company has since complied, and the fines have been reduced...
...mandated by OSHA [Occupational Safety and Health Administration] to make sure that everyone knows what hazards are in the lab and that they are sufficiently protected against them," she says...