National Safety Month, wildfires, and the UNSCEGHS meeting

What’s going on in EHS this week? Find out with Safety at the Frontline!

Tune in on Mondays to get the latest safety news with Frontline’s podcast. We’re covering the top EHS news, along with some quick and useful tips, so you can stay safe and keep rocking on the frontlines.

National Safety Month

It’s June! This means it’s National Safety Month!

In 1996, the National Safety Council established June as a time for organizations, companies, and individuals to increase awareness of workplace safety and health risks and to make efforts to reduce occupational injuries and deaths.

The first week of June will be dedicated to musculoskeletal disorders, week 2 will focus on workplace impairment, the third week will bring injury prevention into discussion and the final week will be on slips, trips, and falls.

Wildfires in numbers

This next news item is from a while back, but the numbers are so impactful, that I wanted to include it.

Each year, thousands of wildfires burn millions of acres in the United States. We’ve talked about the wildfire in New Mexico on this podcast, and we’ve featured California wildfires.

And fire season may be a reality or concern for only certain places around the country, but the threat is spreading to areas that were generally unscathed by wildfires, a new study suggests.

In the journal Science Advances, a team of environmental scientists found that fire frequency has tripled in some parts of the United States — and that in the 2000s, wildfires grew up to four times the size of fires in previous decades.

This means not only are they occurring more and more frequently, but they’re also getting bigger, which may make wildfires a reality for many people.

The UNSCEGHS meeting

The last update for this week, the 42nd session of the United Nations Sub-Committee of Experts on the Globally Harmonized System of Classification and Labeling of Chemicals will be held on July 6-8 in Geneva, Switzerland. OSHA has scheduled a meeting to prepare for the 42nd UNSCEGHS session. The meeting will be held on June 15th, to gather comments and information which will be taken into consideration when developing the US government positions for the session.