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While green certainly is a primary celebratory color during the wintertime holiday season, the hue took on a completely new meaning on weekend following Christmas. Beginning on Saturday, December 21, 2019, a highly toxic bright green liquid gushed onto Interstate 696 in Michigan. The highly hazardous gusher of green goop contained extremely dangerous hexavalent chromium or chromium-6. The public at large became familiar with this carcinogenic chemical in 2000 when iconic actress Julia Roberts won the Academy Award for her…

A grim pall hangs over the community of Pasadena, Texas, and the employees of Quala, a tanker washing facility (also known as a bulk container cleaning company) in that community. In the middle of the night on December 28, 2019, a worker at the facility entered an 18-wheeler tanker with the intent of cleaning the container. The employee evidently did not return from the cleaning task as anticipated. As a result, a second worker entered into the tanker, who also…

Liability In Mass Shootings and Terroristic Acts In Wake of Recent Mass Shooting Incidents Businesses, Event Promoters Rushing to Purchase Special Liability Insurance This Sunday morning, a mass shooting occurred at a church in White Settlement, Texas. According to early reports carried in the online edition of the Dallas Morning News, two churchgoers have been killed and one has been transported in critical condition to a local hospital. The shooting comes at the end of a year that saw: 22 killed…

Public Housing Often Fails to Meet Modern Fire Safety Standards Many older public housing apartment buildings, homeless shelters lack smoke detectors and fire sprinklers In a previous post, we reviewed the recent tragic deaths of 6 people in a Las Vegas hotel that had been converted to an apartment building. In that post we noted that early reports suggested the building, which is privately owned, did not have an operating fire sprinkler system and that smoke detectors were either not…

Cancer Now the Leading Cause of Death Among Firefighters In the aftermath of the 911 terrorist attacks there has been an increase in the degree of attention devoted to the long-term health of first-responder personnel such as firefighters. Although most firefighter deaths that come to the attention of the general public are due to “newsworthy” events such as structural collapse or accidents while responding to fire and fire-related emergencies, heart disease has been the leading cause of “line of duty” firefighter…