Aftermath of Chatsworth rail disaster, Sept. 12, 2008. (Kelly B. Huston)

Less than four years after a California train disaster spurred passage of major safety legislation, railroad companies are pushing hard to relax the law’s chief provision.

They have won over key Republicans, and extracted a major concession from the Obama administration, in their bid to scale back and delay a system to prevent crashes such as the head-on collision that caused 25 deaths and 135 injuries in Chatsworth, Calif.

This story was written and reported by Justine Sharrock, Laurie Udesky, and Stuart Silverstein.

The Rail Safety Improvement Act, passed in late 2008 soon after the Chatsworth disaster, mandated the $13 billion project and stuck railroad companies with nearly all of the cost. The law calls for installation of a technology known as Positive Train Control, or PTC, that automatically puts the brakes on trains about to collide or derail.

Railroads are required to install PTC by the end of 2015 on an estimated 70,000 miles of track used by trains carrying passengers or extremely hazardous materials such as chlorine.

The technology’s champions include the National Transportation Safety Board, an independent advisory and investigative agency. It has advocated PTC for more than two decades to prevent accidents resulting from human error, the main cause of rail crashes.

Investigators with the agency have identified 21 train wrecks since late 2001 that, they say, would have been averted by PTC. In all, the accidents caused 53 deaths and nearly 1,000 injuries.

“PTC can prevent these human errors from causing collisions, hazmat releases, passengers killed and injured, and train crews being killed,” said Steven Ditmeyer, a former rail industry executive and federal official who now teaches in Michigan State University’s railway management program.

Serious train crashes, he said, “are very rare events, but they still occur.”

PTC supporters such as Paul Hedlund, a lawyer for many families of Chatsworth victims, say they are appalled by efforts to relax the mandate. It’s a “scary step backwards,” Hedlund said, calling existing protections “horribly archaic.”

Since 2008, he added, “We haven’t had another crash of the magnitude of Chatsworth that would be affected by this but we are going to.”

But the railroad industry and its allies, arguing that the project is unaffordable, have put up stiff resistance. They also maintain that the technology still needs to be refined, even though Amtrak already operates a similar system from Boston to Washington, D.C. (Story continues below.)
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PTC critics have argued for delaying the installation deadline by three years, exempting as much as 20 percent of the track and allowing railroads to use other safety systems that might be cheaper, but also less effective.

The industry is bolstered by a political climate that is hostile to federal dictates, a factor behind the executive order President Obama issued early last year to streamline regulations. They have extra leverage because federal agencies are divided on the merits of the PTC mandate.

PTC opponents also are drawing ammunition from a 2010 report by the Government Accountability Office. The GAO assessment didn’t address PTC’s effectiveness but said technological hurdles could delay completion of the project beyond the 2015 deadline.

“What you hear from all the railroad companies is that everyone supports PTC in theory, but the realities of how difficult it is financially and technologically to install [mean] it can’t happen by 2015,” said Matt Ginsberg, director of operations for the National Railroad Construction and Maintenance Association, which includes contractors that work on PTC installation.

The industry’s strategy, he added, is that “instead of an outright repeal, they will slowly chip away at it, making small little tweaks that will make a big change overall in the effect of the rule.”

Leading the resistance are the Association of American Railroads, which represents freight haulers and Amtrak, along with the American Public Transportation Association, which represents commuter rail systems. They have called PTC the biggest federal mandate the industry has faced in more than a century, and say they anticipated that the government would step up its financial support.

To deliver their message on PTC and other issues, railroad interests spend heavily on lobbying. According to the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the railroad industry poured $73.4 million into lobbying in 2009 and 2010, and another $8.75 million in the first quarter of 2011.

The industry also has retained dozens of lobbyists, including the firm of former Senate powerhouses John Breaux, D-La., and Trent Lott, R.-Miss.

Meanwhile, as political currents have shifted and PTC has fallen out of the spotlight, the technology has fewer forceful advocates.

Former U.S. Rep. James L. Oberstar, a Minnesota Democrat who led the push for PTC in the House and who argued for it since the 1990s, was voted out of office in 2010, when Republicans took control of the lower chamber.

January 2005 rail crash in Graniteville, S.C., that killed nine people and caused the evacuation of 5,400. (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)

The Democrat who perhaps was most pivotal in getting the rail safety act through Congress and signed into law was Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California. Days after the Chatsworth crash in September 2008, she said the failure to install PTC would amount to “criminal negligence.”

Today, she still favors PTC but no longer is a leader on the issue and is not a member of the panel with jurisdiction over railroads, the Commerce Committee. Feinstein’s office quoted the senator as saying that she has urged colleagues to maintain the current deadline.

PTC systems include GPS and wireless communications technology and central control centers. They can monitor trains and stop them if they enter the wrong track or are about to run a red light.

According to the National Transportation Safety Board, one of the accidents that PTC would have prevented was the freight train-commuter train collision in Chatsworth. The NTSB investigation blamed the accident on an engineer on the commuter train who ran a red light while text-messaging on a cellphone. (Metrolink, the rail system that operates the Chatsworth commuter line, hopes to finish installing its PTC system by mid-2013.)

The NTSB said the January 2005 rail crash in Graniteville, S.C., that killed nine people and injured 554 also would have been prevented by PTC. The crash punctured a chlorine tank car, releasing a toxic, greenish cloud that led to the evacuation of about 5,400 residents.

However, the agency responsible for enforcing the deadline has expressed ambivalence about PTC. The Transportation Department’s Federal Railroad Administration concedes that PTC increases safety. But the agency says PTC would save only about four or five lives a year, not nearly enough to justify the cost – though the agency analysis was completed in 2005, before the Chatsworth disaster.

PTC advocates say the agency’s analysis ignores the enormous business benefits that the technology could provide, not only by preventing accidents but by coordinating train traffic more efficiently and cutting shipping times.

Still, after the Transportation Department spelled out its rules for enforcing the PTC law, it was sued in November 2010 by the Association of American Railroads. The industry group accused the agency of issuing “a regulation that imposes a staggering and unjustified burden” that went beyond the intent of Congress.

Among other grievances, the industry said federal officials wrongly required railroads to put PTC on track that by 2015 will no longer be used to haul chlorine or other extremely hazardous materials.

The Transportation Department, to settle the litigation, offered to reduce the amount of track required to have PTC. The proposal, expected to be adopted in some form this spring, would remove 7,000 to 14,000 miles of track from the mandate, a cut of about 10 percent to 20 percent.

In an Aug. 23 announcement, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood characterized the move as being in line with the Obama administration’s initiative to streamline regulation.

NTSB officials, however, say the proposal also could have a pernicious effect. They say it could crimp regulators’ flexibility to require PTC on troublesome track not specifically designated by the statute.

For instance, regulators can insist on PTC when they are concerned about the safety of track where freight trains haul, say, ethanol – a dangerous material, but not one of the extreme hazards specified in the law. But the head of the NTSB, Deborah Hersman, said her agency is concerned that the “ability to identify other high-risk corridors will be hampered” because, under the proposed change, the railroads no longer would have to provide the government with as much risk data.

Separately, House Republicans have advocated relaxing the PTC requirements. One of the leaders is U.S. Rep. John Mica of Florida, chairman of the House Transportation Committee.

According to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Mica is one of the biggest recipients of railroad industry campaign contributions, with $182,298 since 2008.

He is working on a long-term surface transportation authorization bill that is regarded as a likely legislative vehicle for key breaks sought by the railroads. Lawmakers are expected to resume working in earnest on the authorization bill by the beginning of February.

Mica has voiced support for extending the PTC deadline by three years and allowing trains to use so-called non-technological safety systems.

Frank Kohler, severely injured in the Chatsworth train wreck.

Such systems, unlike PTC, can’t automatically counter human error, which the Transportation Department says causes 40 percent of train accidents. Mica has described his goal as to “protect against overly-burdensome regulations and red tape.”

Another vocal critic of PTC is U.S. Rep. Bill Shuster, R-Pa., chairman of the railroads subcommittee.

According to The Center for Responsive Politics, railroads were the top-contributing industry to his 2008 and 2010 election campaigns. Shuster has received $165,800 in campaign contributions from railroad interests since 2008.

He has criticized the PTC mandate ever since it was adopted. At a March hearing, Shuster advocated extending the deadline beyond 2015 and reducing the amount of track covered, while calling the existing requirements “regulatory overreach.”

Talk of accommodating the industry, however, infuriates union leaders. “It’s hard for me to believe that anyone can go to Congress and say with a straight face that seven years after the bill passed is ‘not enough time for us to do this,’’’ said James Stem, legislative director of the United Transportation Union. “But that’s what’s going on.”

It’s also distressing to crash victims such as Frank Kohler.

Kohler was one of those injured in the Chatsworth disaster. He woke up after the collision lying on the ground with his head split open; he suffered a brain injury that, Kohler says, causes him to get confused and has ended his 36-year career as an emergency responder and registered nurse.

If PTC has been in place three years ago, Kohler said, he would have arrived home safely. Kohler added, “I would still have my professional life intact and I would be a productive member of society.”

(iStockphoto)

Just over a decade ago, hospitals around the country began spending millions of dollars to buy automated defibrillators to save the lives of more patients who go into sudden cardiac arrest. The purchases were spurred by a recommendation from an American Heart Association committee that decided the new equipment would bring patients speedier emergency help.

But today the costly equipment switchover increasingly seems to have been a mistake. The latest, most extensive research suggests that the new gear, now found in nearly all hospitals, saves fewer lives than the old, lower-tech defibrillators.

By one estimate, the shortcomings of the automated equipment mean that close to 1,000 more hospital cardiac arrest patients die every year in the U.S.

A FairWarning review of the decision that prompted the switch reveals that the pivotal committee recommendation was made without clinical research answering a crucial question: Did the new devices, when used in hospitals, produce better results than the old equipment?

Instead, committee members endorsed automated defibrillators largely on the unproven theory that they would improve response times because even less-skilled hospital staffers could operate them.

“I think they jumped the gun,” said Dr. Steven Nissen, chair of cardiovascular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. “Why would we want to dumb things down to a level of having a machine do the thinking for us?”

Or, as Dr. Roger D. White, who was on a heart association subcommittee that provided advice on the defibrillator decision in 2000, put it: “We just assumed that we were going to make a difference.”

White, an anesthesiologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., added, “What we thought would work, hasn’t worked so far.”

What’s more, the recommendation came amid a network of business relationships between equipment makers and some members of the committee that endorsed the new gear.

The heart association said its policies in place at the time “prevented undue industry influence on its guidelines recommendations.” A science editor for the heart association, Mary Fran Hazinski, who was a member of the key decision-making committee in 2000, added that the recommendation was “very carefully considered and based on the evidence available at the time.”

In theory, getting the new defibrillators made sense. Committee members were alarmed about the amount of time it took at many hospitals to provide shocks to patients who went into cardiac arrest. A big part of the problem was that, although critical care nurses typically knew how to work the traditional defibrillators, many nurses in general wards did not. The devices, using pads placed on a patient’s chest, deliver a shock that can restore a heart’s normal rhythm.

The new equipment, which provides step-by-step voice instructions, figured to be easier for more people to operate.

And the cost was modest, by hospital equipment standards. The widely used basic automated models begin at around $1,600. The dual mode equipment — which can run automated or manually, like the older generation devices – can cost more than $10,000.

Automated defibrillator hanging on hospital wall.

In crafting the recommendation in 2000, the committee itself acknowledged that research had not yet proven that the new devices improved survival rates for hospital patients. Instead, committee members said, they acted based largely on evidence that the simpler version of the new devices – often known as automated external defibrillators, or AEDs – saved lives in non-hospital settings such as airports.

In its recommendation, the committee scolded hospital administrators for failing to stock up on the new generation of defibrillators. “An unacceptably high percentage of hospitals,” the heart association’s 2000 guidelines read, “have not made significant attempts to improve the availability” of automated defibrillators.

Purchases of the devices zoomed after those guidelines were released. U.S. hospitals bought close to 100,000 of the basic automated models between 2000 and 2010, according to the consulting firm Frost & Sullivan.

The firm projects that sales of those basic models to hospitals will keep rising 9 percent to 12 percent annually over the next few years, and that purchases in 2013 will surpass 14,000. That would translate into spending of $21.8 million for the year.

Soon after the recommendation came out, however, product quality flaws began to emerge, a major problem even if it wasn’t the biggest issue hospitals faced with the defibrillators. Manufacturers have recalled tens of thousands of the devices.

An assessment published in August in the Annals of Emergency Medicine found that more than 1,000 cardiac arrest deaths between 1993 and 2008 were connected to the failure of the automated devices in hospitals and other settings. In many instances, the devices failed to turn on, or they turned off unexpectedly.

An industry group, the Advanced Medical Technology Association, said that companies are working with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to improve the safety of the devices. But it added that the agency “continues to advocate the use of external defibrillators and is not recommending any change to current use practices for these devices.”

A defibrillator with both automated and manual modes.

For hospitals, however, an even worse problem than the equipment failures is that automated defibrillators often appear to be poorly suited for many of their patients. That issue was spotlighted by a broad analysis completed last year by Dr. Paul S. Chan, a cardiologist with St. Luke’s Health System in Kansas City, Mo. His critical study, funded by the heart association and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, tracked 11,695 patients in 204 hospitals who suffered cardiac arrest between 2000 and 2008.

Cardiac arrest causes the body’s electrical pump, the heart, to abruptly lose function, much like a house that suddenly loses power when struck by lightning. In the population at large, an electrical shock, or defibrillation, often is the only cure.

But Chan noted that hospital patients who suffer cardiac arrest tend to be sicker than the average victim, and may have complex medical problems that are interfering with their heart. They are more apt to suffer “non-shockable” cardiac arrest – in other words, episodes that can’t be fixed with the electrical shock delivered by a defibrillator. Chan’s research showed that 82 percent of hospital cardiac arrests are non-shockable.

To treat those patients, a defibrillator still may be needed to provide readings on how a patient is responding to CPR. Ordinarily, CPR is applied, and then periodically interrupted so that the defibrillators can provide those crucial readings.

A big drawback to the automated machines is that they require longer interruptions – or “hands off” periods – to make those readings, and the lost seconds of CPR can make the difference between life and death in some cases.

On top of that, Chan said, statistics show that hospitals equipped with the new defibrillators have failed to achieve one of the major aims of buying the equipment – delivering the first shock to patients in cardiac arrest more quickly. The hospitals failed to foresee that many less-skilled nurses apparently find it intimidating to operate any defibrillator, and balk at using even the simpler, newer machines.

They have “psychological and emotional” barriers, said John Stewart, a Seattle-area nurse and resuscitation specialist.

All told, Chan calculated that cardiac arrest patients treated at hospitals with automated defibrillators survived only 16.3 percent of the time. By comparison, the survival rate, though still modest, was a somewhat higher 19.3 percent over the same time period when hospitals used manual equipment to shock patients.

Given that automated defibrillator equipment is used in about one in six of the approximately 200,000 annual cases of cardiac arrest in hospitals, the lower survival rate would translate into about “965 fewer patients potentially who may be alive” every year in the U.S., Chan said.

For Dr. Gordon Guyatt, a health policy expert at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, the bottom line is clear: “It is extremely unwise to be spending all this money on intervention that may not prove to be of benefit, and may actually be doing more harm than good.”

Manufacturers and others counter that research shows that patients at individual hospitals, particularly those with a shortage of staffers with the training to use manual defibrillators, benefit from the automated devices. They say that the advantages of automated devices will grow as new, faster-working versions come out.

Ad in medical journal advocating hospital use of automated defibrillators.

“I think it would be a mistake to throw out a blanket statement hospitals shouldn’t be using an AED,” said Dr. Dana Edelson, a board member of the nonprofit Sudden Cardiac Arrest Foundation and an assistant professor at University of Chicago Medical Center. “It depends who is there in the middle of the night.”

Interviews and documents show that at least three people on the 11-member committee that recommended the in-hospital use of automated defibrillators had ties to device manufacturers.

Dr. Richard E. Kerber, chair of the committee and currently a University of Iowa medical school professor, said in an interview that, at the time, he was receiving defibrillator research support from Agilent Technologies, which used to make the devices.

Dr. Peter J. Kudenchuck, committee vice chair and a medical school professor at the University of Washington, disclosed at the time that he had conducted research for Medtronic.

Dr. Richard O. Cummins, a science editor for the committee and a professor of emergency medicine at the University of Washington, said in a 1995 article published in the Annals of Emergency Medicine that he had received research support from Physio-Control, Zoll and other makers of automated defibrillators.

He also disclosed he had received honoraria and travel and accommodation compensation from automated defibrillator manufacturers for participating in conferences. Cummins was also compensated for testifying for Laerdal Medical Corp., another automated defibrillator maker, in a federal court trial.

Kerber and Cummins said they no longer have records indicating how much money they received from the industry, and Kudenchuck failed to respond to repeated email and telephone requests for comment.

In an email, Cummins dismissed the idea that financial considerations could have influenced his thinking. “Certainly didn’t occur with me,” he said, adding that “I still endorse the idea.”

Most of the financial support for the heart association’s 2000 emergency cardiac care conferences also came from makers of automated defibrillators. The association declined to indicate how much it received from the companies.

Committee members, however, say the impetus for recommending the automated defibrillators stemmed from the sometimes prolonged delays in reaching cardiac arrest victims, documented by a 1995 analysis, as well as other studies showing that more nurses could be trained to use the automated devices.

The heart association, which updates its guidelines every five years, will have the chance to revisit the issue in 2015. The association isn’t offering any clues on whether its posture will change, but indicated that it doesn’t consider the Chan study persuasive enough by itself to warrant revisiting the issue. “Guidelines,” the association said, “are based on the entire body of evidence.”

Erionite in rock formations, Rome, Ore. (Photo courtesy of Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries.)

Mesothelioma, an exceedingly rare and lethal form of cancer, was once thought to be caused only by inhaling asbestos fibers.

Then in the late 1970s, when astonishing rates of the disease were reported among villagers in central Turkey, it turned out that a different fibrous mineral was the culprit. Erionite was abundant in native soil and stone, and so easy to work with that villagers had used it to build homes.

In the most devastated communities, known locally as “cancer villages,” mesothelioma rates were off the charts — responsible for 40 percent to 50 percent of all deaths. Animal studies showed erionite to be 100 to 800 times more carcinogenic than asbestos and, according to a scientific paper, “almost certainly the most toxic naturally occurring fibrous mineral known.”

In the U.S., medical journals and news stories presented the Turkish epidemic as a gruesome, but distant, catastrophe. They largely omitted a key fact: Erionite deposits are present at scores of sites in at least a dozen western U.S. states.

Interviews and documents from the 1980s show there was a flicker of interest in assessing the risks in the U.S., but researchers and officials lost interest and moved on to other things.

The result is that, after three decades, erionite remains a word most Americans — and many environmental officials — have never heard. Amid an expansion of roads, pipelines, power lines, wind and solar farms and recreation sites in remote areas of the West, erionite is unregulated, and federal agencies have failed to alert land-use officials, developers and residents of affected areas so that they might take precautions on their own.

Uneasy about the long silence, some government officials and scientists are trying to fashion a federal response. Toward that end, a meeting planned next Wednesday at the National Institutes of Health will bring together representatives of the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, the Mine Safety and Health Administration, and the U.S. Geological Survey, to discuss potential risks from erionite and other hazardous minerals.

“We need to be cautious because there’s clear evidence of disease” from mineral fibers, said Dr. Aubrey Miller, a senior medical advisor at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, who will chair the meeting.

“At a minimum, we can begin to start to educate the public and policymakers,” he told FairWarning. “I certainly don’t want to count bodies later.”

Driving the renewed interest is fear of repeating past government failures to promptly inform the public of potential hazards.

Map by Emily Chow.

One case involved Libby, Montana, where asbestos contamination from a mine near the town caused scores of deaths and illnesses among workers and residents. Vermiculite ore tainted by asbestos and mined from about 1920 to 1990 was given to unwary residents for use as insulation and in other building projects. When the EPA arrived on the scene in 1999, it came under scathing criticism for failing to act earlier to inform the community and launch a cleanup.

Then came the disclosure that road crews in North Dakota, heedless of the danger, had used erionite-tainted gravel to cover hundreds of miles of unpaved roads in the western part of the state, including school bus routes, along with parking lots and recreation sites.

Erionite is found where volcanic ash and rock have been weathered by alkaline water. Like asbestos, it is harmless until it is disturbed, and the microscopic, needle-like fibers become airborne. And like asbestos, greater and more frequent exposure generally means higher risks.

No proof has emerged of erionite-related illnesses in North Dakota or other western states, but experts say that is less than reassuring. Mesothelioma usually takes 30 to 50 years to develop, is sometimes mistaken for other cancers, and when identified is often automatically assumed to be asbestos-related.

In central Mexico, a mesothelioma cluster has been reported in a rural area near the border of Zacatecas and Jalisco states. Medical reports say victims had no known exposure to asbestos, but lived on a plain rich in zeolites, the mineral family that includes erionite.

When Turkish researchers in the 1970s found soaring rates of mesothelioma in the Cappadocia region, they linked it to villagers inhaling dust while farming potatoes and scallions. They soon discovered that residents were also being exposed inside their homes built with erionite-containing stones.

Research later uncovered a genetic factor. People in the hardest-hit villages had long been shunned by horrified outsiders, leading to inbreeding and magnifying the risk for those with a genetic predisposition to the harmful effects.

Documents reflect a brief interest in the health implications for the American West.

Photo of a volcanic tuff containing erionite. (Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries)

In an area of north central Nevada where erionite was present in road dust, researchers from the University of Utah in the early 1980s examined chest radiographs from a local hospital, but turned up nothing unusual. But they also published a case report describing a local road construction worker with respiratory disease whose lung biopsy showed fibrous particles “consistent with erionite.” An investigation of mesothelioma “in the Intermountain region and exposure relationships would be useful,” they wrote.

But according to two of the researchers, Dr. William N. Rom, currently director of the pulmonary division at the New York University School of Medicine, and Dr. Kenneth R. Casey, now at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, their request for a grant from the institutes of health was turned down.

About the same time, with the Defense Department proposing to build a network of “racetracks” to shuttle nuclear MX missiles over a vast area of the Great Basin, opponents seized on the problem of erionite dust. The plan was abandoned, and interest in erionite faded, too.

It was revived by chance after an official from the U.S. Geological Survey gave a talk at the spring banquet of the University of North Dakota geology department in 2005. He spoke of the need for geologists to be aware of naturally occurring hazards, mentioning erionite. An assistant professor named Nels Forsman piped up: “Hey, we’ve got some of that right here in North Dakota.”

In the mid-1980s, Forsman had done a field study in the Killdeer Mountains of western North Dakota for the state geological survey. His 1986 report noted the presence of erionite, but he knew nothing of the events in Turkey and didn’t give it much thought.

“Nobody in our department had heard anything about it” until the banquet, Forsman told FairWarning.

But Forsman then alerted the geological survey, which contacted the state health department, which in turn brought in the EPA. Their investigation launched in 2006 revealed that erionite-containing gravel from pits in western North Dakota had been spread over some 300 miles of unpaved roads.

Air sampling along the gravel roadways and in vehicles, including inside school buses, revealed erionite levels similar to those in some stricken Turkish villages, though at lower concentrations than the most devastated communities. A preliminary health study that included 15 people thought to have high exposure to road gravel found two with pleural plaques, or lung scarring, consistent with inhalation of mineral fibers.

Though the erionite mess quickly erupted into a major story in North Dakota, it drew virtually no media attention outside the state. So complete was the blackout that last December, when Dr. Michele Carbone, a prominent mesothelioma researcher, briefed lung specialists at a national medical meeting in Chicago, it was the first they had heard of it, according to some who attended.

Dr. Michele Carbone, director of the University of Hawaii Cancer Center.

In response to the discovery, the North Dakota Department of Transportation has banned the use of erionite-containing gravel on state roads. But the western part of the state is in the midst of a gigantic oil boom, bringing a massive increase in truck traffic and road dust that residents say clouds visibility and may be harming crops and human health. Last month the state industrial commission and two of the most affected counties authorized a study of the best ways to reduce road dust.

Some agencies in other states are taking safety measures, though the efforts have been isolated and piecemeal.

In eastern Oregon, which has large erionite beds, the state transportation department is conducting a study. The idea is to avoid being “blissfully ignorant” of the locations of erionite or other naturally occurring hazards in future construction and maintenance work, said Matthew Mabey, a research engineer with the Oregon Department of Transportation.

In Montana, where road building crews in the 1960s ripped the top off an erionite-bearing mountain and spread the fill along more than three miles of State Highway 323, soil samples have shown erionite levels as high as 20 percent. Highway workers have been directed to use protective suits and respirators when their work involves land disturbance, such as clearing ditches and mowing vegetation.

Erionite also occurs in rocky outcrops in parts of the Custer National Forest in southeastern Montana and western South Dakota. Forest Service officials have adopted dust control measures, including wetting down helicopter landing spots when fighting wild fires.

In a joint report, Custer National Forest and Montana officials cited the need for a federal policy to reduce risks from erionite and naturally occurring asbestos.

Mining is another activity without any rules on erionite exposure. No erionite has been mined in the U.S. for about 30 years, but it is sometimes mixed in with other types of zeolites that are produced at a few mines in the West. According to an EPA report in 1987, a producer contacted by the agency stated that its zeolite products “can contain 10 to 30 percent erionite.”

Most zeolites produced today are of two varieties, chabazite and clinoptilolite. With their ability to trap and filter contaminants, they have been used to purify water and to treat radioactive and other hazardous wastes.

From its Mud Hills mine in the Mojave Desert in California, Steelhead Specialty Minerals has produced clinoptilolite for cleanup of the tsunami-stricken Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan, said its president Wallace McGregor.

Along with others in the industry, McGregor said current operators are well aware of erionite, and take pains to avoid it. But “I wouldn’t say there isn’t a trace,” he added. It’s “maybe an overstatement that there are not traces of a little bit of this, and a little bit of that, in a zeolite deposit.”

Carbone, who will be among those presenting at next Wednesday’s meeting at the Institutes of Health, has called for action to prevent and detect mesothelioma cases in North Dakota and other erionite-rich areas.

Mesothelioma is “a cancer that in most cases can be prevented,” he said in an interview. “We really have the possibility to do something…to prevent cancer in future generations.”

(iStockphoto)

Saying it is “passionate” about the safety of young drivers, Ford Motor Co. is sponsoring clinics at U.S. high schools to urge teens to heed traffic laws and avoid distractions behind the wheel. The auto giant, as part of its “Driving Skills for Life” program, also recently awarded $25,000 to students who created the best music video about the hazards of distracted driving.

Likewise, BMW has launched ‘Don’t Text and Drive,’ a series of ads to dramatize the risks of distracted driving. And the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, an industry trade group, is teaming with the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons in a similar campaign.

Through efforts like these, automakers are positioning themselves as leaders in the fight against distracted driving, which federal authorities estimate caused 5,474 deaths in 2009, including 995 from using cellphones.

But even as they tell drivers to act responsibly and pay attention to the road, the companies are seeking to pump up sales by packing their new models with cutting-edge infotainment systems that encourage multi-tasking behind the wheel.

Ford’s SYNC system, for example, enables drivers to use voice commands and touch screens to make and receive calls, listen to their text messages, and choose from a menu of replies. BMW’s ConnectedDrive provides calling, e-mail and text read-backs, and displays headlines of the messages on a screen.

General Motors strutted its stuff with a Super Bowl ad of a young Chevy Cruze owner whose face lights up as he drives away and plays back the Facebook message: “Best first date ever…’’

Auto executives are counting heavily on arresting, high-tech features to boost sales, especially to younger buyers. David Mondragon, president of Ford Canada, put it bluntly: “The biggest turnoff to a twentysomething consumer is to put their life on hold when they sit in a car,” he said in a speech to the Canadian Marketing Assn., according to an account in The Globe and Mail.

“And what does it mean to put their life on hold? To get disconnected when they get in the car, to have a system that will not allow you to sit there and e-mail, read your BlackBerry, talk on the phone. So you have to have a seamless transition from your home to your transportation device, to your workspace. Or to your play space.” (Mondragon, through a spokeswoman, declined to be interviewed.)

Safety officials are worried about the trend. “I’m not in the business of helping people Tweet better,” groused David Strickland, head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, or NHTSA, in a speech at a national conference in June.

Critics say that in highlighting distracted driving, automakers are hoping to inoculate themselves against tough scrutiny of their built-in systems. “The best defense is a good offense,” said Clarence Ditlow, executive director of the Center for Auto Safety in Washington, D.C. “One has to watch what auto companies do, versus what they say. While they say distracted driving is unsafe, they are making hundreds of millions of dollars by selling distracted driving technology.”

Industry officials, however, deny they are sending a mixed message about distracted driving. They say that drivers are so intent on staying connected that telling them to turn off their devices is a lost cause. By giving motorists built-in connections that are simpler and less distracting than portable devices such as cellphones and GPS, they say they are making the roads safer.

“Given that the driver has decided they are going to do something, it’s better to be doing it with their eyes on the road and their hands on the wheel,” said Louis Tijerina, senior technical specialist in research and advanced engineering at Ford.

In fact,“Eyes on the road, hands on the wheel,” has become an industry mantra, particularly for Ford. More than a marketing slogan, it presents a fundamental challenge to the long-held precept that distraction involves not only the eyes and the hands, but the mind.

NHTSA’s official position, backed by a body of research, is that there are three types of distraction: visual, manual and cognitive. That is, even when a motorist is looking straight ahead, the cognitive demand of a phone conversation may cause “inattention blindness,” or a failure to respond to visual cues because the mind is somewhere else.

The evidence includes a study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety that found that drivers are four times more likely to crash when they are talking on the phone, whether using a hand-held or hands-free device.

Researchers at the University of Utah found that cellphone conversations slow drivers’ reactions as much as having a blood alcohol level at the legal limit of .08 percent. Moreover, in some fatal cellphone crashes, there is anecdotal evidence that drivers were simply talking — not dialing or groping for their phones.

However, automakers say that drivers have always multi-tasked, and can do it safely if they keep their eyes on the road. They have drawn ammunition from other research, including studies by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute. These studies have found that visual and manual tasks can be serious distractions, but that there is little crash risk when drivers have their eyes on the road, “regardless of any other ‘cognitive demand,’ “ as one paper put it.

Even if on-board systems are better than portable devices, there is a question of whether they will become an ever-present temptation and cause drivers to “spend more time distracted in some way,” said Adrian Lund, president of the insurance institute.

“The honest answer is, we don’t know. This is an experiment we’re all in.”

The experiment is taking place in a regulatory vacuum, since there are no regulations to draw the line on electronic distractions.

Federal safety rules dictate the minimum strength of vehicle roofs and door latches, the performance of seat belts and airbags, the brightness of headlamps and stopping power of brakes. But when it comes to the design of electronic systems, vehicle makers are completely on their own.

It’s been that way since NHTSA, a decade ago, challenged the industry to use its best judgment and do the right thing. As Jeffrey Runge, NHTSA administrator during the George W. Bush presidency, put it in 2003: “We cannot regulate fast enough to keep up with technological advances, nor would we want to. This administration will always prefer voluntary brilliance to enforced compliance.”

Automakers responded by developing a set of voluntary guidelines. Among other things, they call for placing displays high enough that drivers can see them and scan the road at the same time.

They also provide that electronic tasks be simple enough that drivers can perform them without looking away from the road for more than two seconds at a time. That means that the most complex tasks, such as typing requests for directions, may be locked out when a car is in motion. Even so, a car traveling at 60 miles per hour covers 176 feet in two seconds — plenty of time for a deer, or a child, to run onto the road.

There has never been an independent review of the guidelines, nor monitoring of the companies’ compliance.

But under Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, who has called distracted driving “a deadly epidemic,” federal authorities are becoming more active.

NHTSA is developing its own set of guidelines, and this fall plans to publish the first phase — addressing visual and manual distractions. Guidelines for voice controls and portable devices will be covered in future phases. Portable electronics pose a special challenge because NHTSA has no legal authority over devices drivers bring into their cars.

But some fear it may be too late for regulators to assert control.

Henry Jasny, vice president and senior counsel for Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, said that as long ago as the 1990s, his group urged NHTSA to prepare for an onslaught of high-tech electronics. Now, they’ve let ‘’the animals get out of the barn,” said Jasny, “and it may not be possible to get them back in.”

Meanwhile, automakers say that work by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute has shown they’re on the right track.

The Blacksburg, Va., research center has extensive contracts with federal transportation agencies and private clients, including several automakers. For example, GM and Ford hired it to compare the safety of drivers using their built-in systems instead of portable devices. The built-in systems came out on top, and both automakers issued press releases to tout the favorable results.

The institute has pioneered the use of “naturalistic studies,’’ conducted by mounting cameras and sensors in vehicles to see what drivers were doing at the time of crashes, near-crashes, or lesser incidents such as veering out of lanes.

While the studies confirmed risks from drivers using electronic devices, they found that nearly the entire risk stems from dialing, texting or reaching for a phone or other device — and almost none of it from talking.

In one study of commercial truck and bus drivers, researchers reached the provocative conclusion that wireless conversations had a “protective effect.” That is, the crash risk dropped when drivers were on the phone.

The institute prepared safety tips that are posted on the website of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, which regulates commercial trucking. One of them is: “Turn Off Your Cell Phone While Driving.” Rich Hanowski, director of the institute’s Center for Truck and Bus Safety, said that in light of the institute’s research findings it will recommend softening the warning. (The National Transportation Safety Board earlier this month reached a much different conclusion, recommending that the motor carrier agency prohibit use of cellphones by commercial truckers.)

But to suggest “there’s no such thing as cognitive distraction…is obviously not right,” said David Strayer, a University of Utah researcher and co-author of the study that compared cellphone use with having a blood alcohol level of .08. “They’re really postulating a model that would run counter to the way we, as cognitive scientists, know how the brain works.”

Safety groups insist the best advice for drivers is still to turn off their devices.  

“We just don’t get why people should be encouraged not to pay attention to the driving task,” Jasny said. 

“I understand that people get bored, they have other things they want to do, but they can pull over and do those without endangering the public.”

Related:
DRIVE Coalition Hits a Wall
Lobbyists Target Distracted Driving Campaigns by Oprah, Ray LaHood
Do Cell Phones Kill 1,000 People a Year?

The explosion that killed James F. Spotts easily could have been avoided.

It happened as he was cutting into a fuel mixing pipe at a Pratt & Whitney rocket motor plant near San Jose. Heat or sparks from the saw triggered a powerful blast that sprayed the 47-year old worker with metal shards and set him on fire.

Investigators later blamed the tragedy on supervisors ordering the work without first making sure the pipe was cleansed of explosive residues.

Coming barely a month after a larger explosion destroyed another building at Pratt & Whitney–luckily, without killing anyone–the September, 2003, incident suggested a pattern. The company and its parent, United Technologies Corp., wound up paying more than $1 million in criminal and civil fines.

Reported by Stuart Silverstein, Lilly Fowler, Laurie Udesky and Myron Levin, and written by Levin.

Pratt & Whitney had not been considered a bad actor. In fact, it enjoyed an elite status reserved for California employers with exemplary safety records. It was a member of the Voluntary Protection Program, or VPP, an honor roll of ostensibly safety-minded companies that win public recognition, friendlier ties with regulators and exemption from some safety inspections.

Yet some of these workplaces have mixed records, and are allowed to remain in the VPP anyway. Moreover, while state officials say they closely scrutinize the members, an investigation by FairWarning found that officials have ignored their own requirement that all members have injury rates that match, or beat, industry averages.

The VPP, a national program run in California by the state Division of Occupational Safety and Health, has been steadily growing. In the last five years, the agency, better known as Cal/OSHA, has nearly quadrupled the membership to 144 job sites with more than 39,000 employees and some additional contract workers.

Participants include aerospace plants, food processors, oil refineries, power generators and construction companies with payrolls ranging from a mere handful to more than 6,000 workers. The aim, supporters say, is to hold up employers with stellar safety performance as examples to follow, while freeing the thin corps of Cal/OSHA inspectors to focus on problem sites.

Cal/OSHA Chief Ellen Widess (Photo courtesy of Cal/OSHA)

“This is the kind of recognition that we want to offer,” said Cal/OSHA Chief Ellen Widess, “as well as the stiff penalties we give to employers who try to cut corners.”

Supporters hail the VPP as a motivational force that unites management and workers in the cause of safety. At the Gonzalez Winery in Monterey County, which joined in June, 2010, gaining entry was “like this glue that got everybody to pull together,” according to Morgan LeBlanc, West Coast safety director for the winery’s owner, Constellation Wines.

These days, LeBlanc said, employees run safety meetings, discussing “how to wear protective clothing properly, how to sanitize a tank safely…They do all these things on their own.”

Officials say members are required to go beyond mere compliance and show strong management and employee commitment to safety. They must pass a site evaluation typically lasting four days.

Contrary to Policy

But records and interviews raise questions about whether all members deserve their special status.

A key issue is the written policy requiring that members have injury rates that are at least average for companies in the same industry. Rates for the job sites are compared to national averages using two standard measures—known as the TCIR (Total Case Incident Rate), and DART(Days Away from work, Restricted work or job Transfer).  The companies are responsible for recording their own injuries and reporting the numbers to Cal/OSHA.

FairWarning reviewed injury rates for the 81 VPP “Star” members, the program’s top category. The data showed most sites with injury rates well below average.

However, nine of the 81 Star members, or 11 percent, had worse than average rates for TCIR, DART, or both, from 2007-2009, the last three years available.

After being contacted by FairWarning, some companies asked Cal/OSHA to review and adjust their injury rates. The agency then provided FairWarning with revised numbers for several companies, lowering rates for some and raising them for others. The net effect was to shrink the ranks of members with worse than average rates from nine to seven. (Story continues below)

Vicky Heza, head of CalOSHA’s consultation unit, which includes the VPP, told FairWarning she wasn’t sure what happened to justify the changes. It could have been “just a typo or something on our part.” She added: “Accidents can be recorded as work-related, and then, later on, discovered that they’re not, and vice-versa.”

Another criticism of the program is that members—mostly large, sophisticated companies—have the know-how to run strong safety programs on their own without drawing on Cal/OSHA’s resources.

“I’m not opposed to highlighting people who are doing a good job,” said Linda Delp, director of the UCLA-Labor Occupational Safety and Health Program. “But government resources really do have to be targeted to bad actors.”

Stretched Too Thin

For their part, supporters call the program an inexpensive way to promote injury reduction, citing the cost of about $840,000 per year in state and federal funds, or just over 1 percent of Cal/OSHA’s budget. If the staff of up to six people switched from VPP to enforcement duties, they say it would hardly make a dent.

“You could quadruple our staff” and “we would not get to but a tiny fraction of the workplaces out there,” said Len Welsh, the agency chief before Widess took over in April.  The agency, critics say, is so understaffed that, by one estimate, it would need 147 years to inspect each workplace under its jurisdiction once.

For members, tangible benefits include exemption from pre-planned or “programmed” inspections, though they remain subject to inspection after serious accidents or safety complaints. Moreover, VPP companies can get a leg up in competing for contracts. For construction firms, for example, VPP status ‘’is a definitive plus for them getting awarded jobs,” said Terry Schulte, regional chairman of the VPP Participants Assn., a members group.

Launched in 1982 under President Reagan, the VPP had a growth spurt during the George W. Bush Administration, with its preference for voluntary measures over enforcement. Currently, there are more than 2,400 member sites around the country, nearly two-thirds under the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The rest are managed by 22 states, including California, with their own safety and health programs.

Outside of California, too, VPP sites have experienced serious accidents and deaths. Nationwide, there have been at least 80 fatalities since 2000, according to an investigation by The Center for Public Integrity’s iWatch News, a Washington-based news organization that contributed to this report.

One occurred at the BAE Systems ship repair yard in San Diego—hailed on OSHA’s website as a VPP “success story’’ thanks to dramatic reductions in injury rates (BAE is under the federal, rather than the state, program like other U.S. shipyards.).

But in February, 2008, a 37-year-old worker was crushed between a moving crane and a steel column at the shipyard.

OSHA cited BAE for a serious violation for failing to prevent access to the area while the crane was in motion. After BAE appealed, OSHA agreed to downgrade the citation and drop the penalty from $5,000 to $4,000. A BAE spokesman declined comment.

Despite such incidents, OSHA officials say injury rates for VPP members nationwide typically are 50 percent better than average.

But the U.S. Government Accountability Office found in a 2009 report that 12 percent of OSHA’s VPP sites had worse than average injury rates—similar to the proportion FairWarning found in California.

The GAO also found that OSHA lacked a system for determining when companies should be booted from the program for subpar performance, rather than being treated as members for life. “OSHA’s internal controls are not sufficient to ensure that only qualified worksites participate,”’ the GAO said.

In California, there appears to be only one case of a company being stripped of its VPP status. In that case, involving an International Paper plant in Visalia, records show that Cal/OSHA declined to renew the membership after the standard three-year reevaluation. Officials said they believed some other companies had voluntarily withdrawn for fear of not being renewed.

Fatal Blast

The agency wasn’t forced to decide in Pratt & Whitney’s case. The company closed the site in 2004, though state investigators lambasted the slipshod practices that led to James Spotts’ death.

There were “no written procedures for decontaminating fixed equipment used in explosive processing,” according to the agency’s report. “There were no written procedures for visual or chemical testing to determine if decontamination of equipment was completed.”

Spotts’ assignment the day he died was a result of the explosion the previous month. The first blast leveled a building used to mix rocket fuel. To keep production going, Pratt & Whitney ordered that a mothballed fuel mix station be put back in service.

Ali Hassan Cemendtaur, a mechanical engineer and, like Spotts, a contract employee working on the renovations, was a few feet away when Spotts was blown apart. Cemendtaur was on the floor doing measurements behind a piece of machinery, which shielded him from the flying shrapnel. If not for that, “for sure I would not be here to talk to you,” Cemendtaur, of Santa Clara, said in an interview.

Ali Hassan Cemendtaur (Photo by Laurie Udesky)

As for Spotts, “a part of him had to be scratched from the wall.”

Cemendtaur says the memory comes back every September, “and I consider myself very fortunate that I had this brush with death, and death did not get me this time.”

In November, 2005, Pratt & Whitney’s parent, United Technologies, paid $1.32 million in fines and investigation costs in Santa Clara Superior Court after pleading no contest to a criminal misdemeanor. It also accepted liability in a companion civil case. In March, 2007, the company paid another $177,000 in penalties to Cal/OSHA.

Despite the gross negligence that led to Spotts’ death, United Technologies units Pratt & Whitney and Hamilton Sundstrand are mainstays of the VPP, with about 20 member sites nationwide, including six in Southern California.

Pratt & Whitney declined interview requests but e-mailed a statement. “Any incident where an employee is injured or killed means there are always lessons that can be learned and processes that can be put into place to prevent the incident from recurring,” said Erin Dick, spokeswoman for Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne. “Cal/OSHA places a significant amount of emphasis on ensuring that VPP applicants are going beyond all regulatory requirements for health and safety in the workplace.”

Covanta Energy Corp. is even more deeply involved in the VPP, with more than 30 biomass and waste-to-energy plants as members, including three in California.

The Covanta Stanislaus plant in Crows Landing is one of the California members with injury rates worse than the industry average. In 2008, a worker suffered a serious injury when his hand was caught in machinery that was missing a protective guard door. Cal/OSHA’s investigation revealed that the door had broken off its hinges months earlier. The hazard had been noted by workers and management, but never fixed.

Cal/OSHA charged Covanta with a ‘’willful’’ violation and sought $84,000 in penalties. Willful violations, the most serious kind, are for intentional disregard or indifference to safety, and are potential grounds for disqualification from the VPP.

Covanta said in an email that since the accident, it has “strengthened the management team and…increased employee engagement.” The company also said injury rates at the Stanislaus site improved in 2010.

In  a settlement with Covanta, Cal/OSHA downgraded the charge from willful to serious, and cut the penalties to $43,600. Covanta Stanislaus was renewed as a VPP member last December.

Marin Montgomery was a few days shy of her first birthday when she stumbled into the glass front of a gas fireplace and suffered second- and third-degree burns.

Days shy of her first birthday, Marin Montgomery stumbled into the glass of her family’s fireplace. The pane was so sizzling — hot enough to cause third-degree burns at the slightest touch — that the toddler severely scorched her hands, arms and face.

It happened four winters ago but for her mother, Deirdre Wooldridge, the memories are fresh: of melted skin sticking to the glass, Marin’s agonized screams even after morphine shots and painful surgery to graft skin from the toddler’s groin to her left hand.

Marin was one of the more than 2,000 children ages 5 and under who, according to federal estimates, have suffered burns from the glass enclosures of gas fireplaces since 1999.

While everyone knows the danger of an open flame, many fail to recognize the risk from the superheated glass. It is an “insidious and unappreciated hazard,” said Carol Pollack-Nelson, a psychologist formerly with the Consumer Product Safety Commission and an expert witness in a case against a major fireplace manufacturer.

There is no government mandate to protect or warn consumers about the risk from the glass of gas fireplaces, which in recent years have been installed by the millions as cleaner alternatives to wood-burning hearths.

Instead, the industry polices itself under a voluntary standard that allows the glass to reach a peak temperature of 500 degrees. The limit is meant to keep the glass from cracking, not to prevent people from getting burned. The standard, written by a business-dominated group, doesn’t require a screen to prevent contact with the glass. Rather, it relies on warnings that many consumers never see.

The Hearth, Patio and Barbecue Assn., a trade group for fireplace makers, says it is doing it its part to promote awareness with a safety brochure provided on its website and at fireplace stores.

However, of seven retailers visited by FairWarning in four cities: Los Angeles, Sacramento, Philadelphia and the Washington, D.C. area — none carried the brochure.

Many in the industry argue that the dangers of a fireplace are so obvious that keeping kids safe is simply a matter of good parenting and common sense.

However, a leading manufacturer, Hearth & Home Technologies, has taken steps to protect consumers by attaching a mesh safety screen on all of its glass-enclosed fireplaces. The screen “is a huge help,” said Joel Ginsberg, a division manager with the Lakeville, Minn.,-based company. “If you touch the screen, you reduce the risk of a serious burn significantly,” he said. “If you touch the glass, you can potentially leave skin on the glass.” According to some industry observers, the company began using safety screens several years ago after a child related to a company executive was burned on the superheated glass. Hearth & Home representatives would not confirm or deny the report.

Awkward, endlessly curious and leading with their hands as they explore their surroundings, toddlers are uniquely vulnerable. Hand burns may permanently affect their range of motion. Fortunately, most end up like Marin — the December, 2006, accident in the house her family was renting in Elk Grove, Calif., left the toddler with some scars but otherwise fully recovered. Even then, healing comes at a high price in physical pain, parental anguish and medical costs that can run into the six figures.

There are other costs, too. Wooldridge, for example, lost her job as a real estate appraiser due to the demands of caring for her suffering child — including cleaning and bandaging Marin’s hands and following her around to make sure she didn’t break the blisters.

“They’re producing something that’s outrageously hot and putting it at a perfect height for infants,” Wooldridge said. Throughout the ordeal, “I kept thinking, you know what? There should be some kind of label or something.”

A recent photo of Marin Montgomery, now 5, with her mother Deidre Wooldridge. (Photo by Elise Craig.)

In 2006, Wisconsin lawyer Paul Bucher lost his bid to become the state’s attorney general, but the defeat wasn’t his worst experience of the campaign. That came as his wife was giving a campaign speech at a hotel with their toddler, Anna, and a babysitter in tow. Exploring the lobby, Anna planted both of her hands on the glass of the fireplace. As the babysitter pulled her away, the child’s melted skin stuck to the glass.

“She was only two and saw the fire, and was intrigued by it,” Bucher said. The fireplace “was right on the wall and totally accessible.”

“I remember crying my eyes out” at the hospital, he recalled. “I was just sobbing when they were busting the blisters. It was heart-wrenching.”

As has been the case with other product hazards, litigation may force change. Wooldridge and her family settled a lawsuit that accused the fireplace maker of failing to disclose the risk of the unguarded glass. Bucher settled a case against the hotel, which he said has since put a barrier in front of the fireplace.

In a proposed class action settlement, a top fireplace maker, Lennox International, has agreed to provide safety screens, free of charge, to hundreds of thousands of owners of its fireplaces. Under terms of the deal, granted preliminary approval Jan. 6 by a federal judge in San Francisco, the company will also provide warning stickers to apply to the fireplace switch or remote control.

The settlement would resolve a case filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco that accused Lennox of failing to guard against serious burns or adequately disclose the danger. Lennox did not admit liability in agreeing to settle. Company officials have declined to comment.

Falling temperatures typically bring a procession of tiny victims to hospital emergency rooms. “I usually admit 10 to 12 injuries per year because of this,” said Dr. Lee Faucher, a surgeon at the University of Wisconsin Burn Center.

Medical staff at Shriners Hospital for Children in Sacramento, where Marin’s skin grafts were performed, treated 25 children with fireplace burns in an 18-month period, according to a paper presented at a national burn conference in March, 2009. “Supervision of a child is inadequate prevention,” said the paper, which called for use of a screen or guard.

At British Columbia Children’s Hospital in Vancouver, Dr. Cynthia Verchere, a pediatric plastic surgeon, said one to two dozen burn victims turn up in the emergency room each year. She compared the exposed glass to “having your oven on…with the door open in the middle of your living room.”

Said Verchere: “It is amazing to me that there’s no rules about it, considering what we do have rules about.”

*****

It may seem there are government regulations for everything but, as the fireplace glass example demonstrates, that’s hardly the case. In fact, most standards for machinery, appliances and other consumer goods are written by committees drawing most of their members from affected businesses.

Drafted in obscurity, voluntary standards can have a significant effect on consumers. Often, they get the blessing of influential standards organizations and even become law by being adopted into municipal codes and state or federal regulations.

The guidelines serve a variety of purposes: reducing liability exposure, leveling the playing field by setting minimum levels of performance, ensuring that components made by different manufacturers match up. Safety isn’t the only or even the main concern.

“The problem is that voluntary self-regulation often works more to benefit the manufacturers than it does to benefit the final consumer, “ remarked David Hemenway, a professor of health policy at the Harvard University School of Public Health. “There’s no question industry cares some,” he said. “They just may not care enough — especially if public health and safety conflicts with a more immediate goal such as making money.”

Manufacturers and other interested U.S. and Canadian businesses came together to draft the fireplace standard in the 1990s, as concern about energy efficiency and wood-smoke pollution fueled demand for gas fireplaces that would serve as heating, and not just decorative appliances. A technical committee on gas appliances and a fireplace subcommittee took charge of the effort.

The influential American National Standards Institute certified the gas fireplace rules in 1998. That meant the drafting process met the institute’s thresholds for fairness and balance — such as a requirement that various interests be included and no single group have more than one-third of the votes.

As a practical matter, however, there has been little involvement by consumer advocates, who often lack the money, time or expertise to participate in standards committees.

A spokesman for the technical committee declined to provide a list of members and affiliations, saying the information was confidential. But interviews and documents show that most participants have come from affected businesses such as gas utilities, fireplace makers and installers.

The committee is “very careful to look out for safety,” said Tony James, president of Woodbridge Fireplace of Brampton, Ont., one of the participants. “We’re constantly trying to make these standards better.”

Toward that end, the members have discussed, but not approved, amending the standard to require protection against glass burns. An industry consultant, testifying in the Lennox class action, suggested that members had not required such measures because government officials had not forced the issue.

“I think the primary thing that committee relies on is that CPSC (U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission) has not required them to control that temperature,” said Paul Tiegs, president of OMNI-Test Laboratories, Inc., in a deposition. Tiegs did not return phone calls.

A working group of panel members is revisiting the issue, a spokesman said. Recently, the standard was amended to provide an amped-up warning depicting a hand close to flames and the words: “Hot Glass Will Cause Burns.”

Fireplace makers recently adopted this warning label but the labels do not appear on fireplaces, so many consumers never see them.

Among engineers and safety experts, there is wide agreement on the need to design products to eliminate or guard against hazards, rather than rely on warnings to do the job.

“You really want to make the world safe for people,” said Hemenway, “rather than train people to be eternally vigilant, which they can’t be.”

Warnings on fireplaces may be particularly ineffective because consumers rarely see them. Typically, they are hidden behind a panel covering the pilot light, or in an owner’s manual that few read and many never see. That’s because the manual goes to the buyer of the fireplace—in many cases, a building contractor or the home’s original owner—rather than to the second owner or a renter, like Deirdre Wooldridge.

For its part, the CPSC has no plans to address the issue, chief spokesman Scott Wolfson said. Under federal law, the commission is supposed to defer to voluntary standards unless there is proof they aren’t effective in preventing injuries or deaths.

But the Lennox agreement to provide safeguards could encourage smaller rivals to follow suit.

It’s wrong to “sticker over” a hazard of this type, said R. David Pittle, a former commissioner of the CPSC. “What you really need is a product that is designed so that predictable experiences don’t end in tragedy.”

Patrick Corcoran contributed to this report.

This article, published on Jan. 11, was updated on Jan. 12.