OSHA may regulate tandem container lifts

OSHA may regulate tandem container lifts       A federal court has ruled the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) may regulate so-called 'vertical tandem lifts' (VTLs) of containers or flat racks, where more than one container or flat rack is lifted at a time.
      But in a decision handed down earlier this month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit agreed with the National Maritime Safety Association (NMSA) that some of the OSHA rules on vertical tandem lifts were not feasible.
      NMSA members include trade organizations such as the Pacific Maritime Association, United States Maritime Alliance and New York Shipping Association which negotiate contracts with dockworker unions in the United States and Canada.
      The court turned back some of NMSA's more general challenges to the OSHA regulations, saying the government had established there is a significant risk to tandem lifts.
      OSHA has estimated tandem lifts have been performed probably 1 million times since 1986 without any injury occurring, but it has also found evidence of at least nine incidents when containers have separated during vertical tandem lifts in the past 15 years.
      There was also testimony from longshoremen and container manufacturers that connectors between the corner castings of containers, when lifted in tandem, 'can frequently detach or not attach in the first place.'
      While the court denied the NMSA petition for a review of the rule regulating VTLs, it agreed with NMSA that some aspects of the OSHA regulation were not feasible, and remanded them to OSHA.
      These include a requirement to inspect the connections between containers that are going to be lifted in tandem from a ship to shore.
      While the court said inspecting such connections when moving boxes from a terminal to the ship was feasible, doing so in the other direction was not. The association argued it would not be safe to require employees to inspect containers that are 'in a stack between other containers sitting 80 feet above the ship's deck and twice that distance above the water and dock,' potentially exposing longshoremen to the hazard of falling.
      The court also found there was not substantial evidence to support OSHA's feasibility determination with regard to its total ban on vertical tandem lifts of flat racks or platform containers.
      NMSA argued that the total ban on vertical tandem lifts of platform containers can make it unfeasible to unload cargo from a ship because platform containers are often stacked and interconnected overseas and therefore cannot always be separated or chained together before lifting.
      'If that occurs, a domestic marine terminal operator must either lift the platform containers as a unit'and thus violate the standard ' or leave the containers ' and any containers beneath them ' onboard,' the court noted.
      It also noted that when the rule was proposed by OSHA, it would have allowed the movement of empty platform containers with their end panels folded, so companies or organizations commenting on the regulation had no notice of the standard's total ban and therefore did not address the infeasibility of the ban.
      Without a record of whether the rule was feasible, the court said it could not conclude that substantial evidence supports OSHA's feasibility determination.
      The court rejected an argument by NMSA that since terminals establish a safe work zone around container operations, employees will not face any additional danger from tandem lifts.
      But the court said 'while the safe work zone requirement adequately protects employees located on the ground, it does not necessarily protect the crane operator who moves the containers. If a container were to separate during a VTL, the separation could jar the crane and injure the operator.' ' Chris Dupin