Animal attack shows need for pet control

A Bennett Estates resident says neighborhood dogs are the likely cause of a vicious attack that resulted in the death of multiple cats on her property this week.

While she did not see the actual attack, Girthal Lamp believes one or more large dogs in the neighborhood in which she lives got loose this week and killed four of the nine cats she has kept as pets for several years.

The incident occurred around midnight Wednesday on McGregor Road in Bennett Estates, located off FM 1314 near Texas 242.

“My daughter went out to feed the cats Thursday morning and discovered a very disturbing sight,” Lamp said. “At first, we thought it might be a coyote or other large predator, but that’s not the case.”

Lamp said she discovered a significant number of scratches on her car indicating a flurry of activity as the cats attempted to escape one or more dogs. She found several paw prints which appear to be from a large dog – possibly a German shepherd.

“My neighbor had her windows open and said she heard a lot of noise around midnight,” Lamp said. “We’re sure that’s when it happened.”

Lamp believes the dogs escaped from a neighbor’s yard.

Montgomery County Animal Control did not respond to calls regarding the attack in Bennett Estates, an unincorporated area.

Evelyn Heyde, with Friends of Texas Wildlife, said outdoor pets should be placed in a secure area if there is a danger from predators.

“Cats are quick and agile, but it is unlikely they could compete with multiple dogs that are larger and aggressive,” she said. “Dogs have a pack mentality that allows them to work together efficiently to hunt prey. Cats could easily be victims in an attack.”

While she does not believe the attack was intentional, she is distressed about the situation and urges pet owners to be careful about controlling their pets – especially those with a physical size or disposition that could result in harm to children or other pets.

It’s a sentiment shared by Mindi Mayfield, supervisor with Conroe Animal Control.

“All dogs and cats in public are required to be on a leash within the city limits of Conroe,” Mayfield said. “The regulations are a little different in the county, but there is a leash law in Conroe.”

Animal attacks that result in the death of pets are rare in Conroe, Mayfield said. The Animal Control office receives only two to three complaints each year on this sort of thing, she said.

“If someone has a concern about a potentially dangerous or nuisance animal, they should not attempt to capture or deal with the animal,” Mayfield said. “They should report it to Animal Control immediately.”

Lamp believes the dog that attacked her cats came from inside the neighborhood because there have been similar incidents in the past. She acknowledged the attack is an isolated incident, but said pet owners should be responsible for their animals.

“It’s a horrible thing to find four dead pets,” she said. “It’s a needless tragedy.”

Report dangerous or nuisance animals to Conroe Animal Shelter, located at 407 Sgt. Ed Holcomb Blvd., at 936-522-3211; or Montgomery County Animal Shelter, located at 8535 Texas 242, at 936-442-7738.

________________
Source: YourHoustonNews (Meyer, 9/22)

As workplace deaths fall nationally, they remain stubbornly high in Texas

Darla Vargas talked to her brother at about 9:30 the morning he was killed.

At 2:30 a.m., Michael Glenn “Tuby” Tramell, 39, of Electra had been called out to repair a blown 440-volt fuse on a pump jack unit in an open field.

He and two other workers were in the field.

“It was pouring rain,” she said, and Tramell said his co-workers were afraid of the lightning.

“As anybody knows, you don’t change a fuse in the rain,” she said.

It was only a little later that his co-workers found Tramell lying beside the pump unit, she said.

His employer, W.G. Operating Inc. in Electra, and investigators for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration are trying to determine what happened. OSHA is still investigating, according to an agency spokesman. W.G. Operating didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment.

A death certificate says Tramell died of “low-voltage electrocution.” Vargas said she expects an OSHA report on the accident in early October.

Tramell’s story is all too common in Texas.

Workplace deaths have declined across the country, but they remain stubbornly high in Texas and the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Texas led the nation with 461 total worker deaths in 2010, the most recent year for which complete data is available. Eighty-two of those were in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

The Texas total was about 10 percent of the national count of 4,547 and far ahead of No. 2 California, which reported 302 deaths, according to figures from the U.S.

Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Highway deaths are the No. 1 cause of workplace fatalities nationally, and Texas’ vast highway system could be a contributing factor.

The state’s healthier construction and drilling industries — two sectors with high injury rates — also play into the numbers.

But many blame the state’s lax workplace rules. A case in point: the deaths of two men dismantling a crane in July at the University of Texas at Dallas. An inquiry into that incident found that Texas has minimal training requirements and proficiency standards for crane operators.

State experts hesitate to characterize the tally here as high.

“Workplace deaths in Texas are a sawtooth pattern,” said Karen Puckett, director of outreach and workplace safety for the workers’ compensation division of the Texas Department of Insurance. “It’s hard to detect any trend.”

Puckett’s agency is the state body charged with promoting worker safety. She says it’s unfair to cast Texas as a dangerous state without looking at per-capita injury rates in individual industries.

Puckett said that comparing Texas, which has booming construction, oil field and logging operations, to, say, Connecticut, where the insurance industry is a major employer and with only moderate construction and virtually no logging or oil field industries, creates a distortion.

“When you only look at the numbers in Texas, you aren’t getting the entire picture,” she said.

U.S. deaths down

Nationwide, workplace fatalities declined 16 percent from 2003 to 2010, from 5,575 to 4,690. During most of the 1990s, that figure was more than 6,000 per year.

The Texas workplace death toll hit a high of 528 in 2007, when construction was at a peak.

OSHA, the federal agency responsible for workplace safety, has increased construction workplace inspections 60 percent since 2003 and has focused on fall hazards, cave-in dangers, traffic control, distracted driving and heat-related injuries.

Ken Nibarger is a safety specialist with the United Steel Workers Union who investigated the aftermath of the BP Texas City refinery explosion. He says the rise of the temporary worker is a contributing factor to worker injuries and deaths. Those workers aren’t on site long enough to become familiar with the dangers of a certain plant or job.

“Texas is a great example of the boom-and-bust economy," a lawyer said.

Companies learn to hustle while business is good. “It breeds that culture that says ‘We’ll deal with safety later.’”

“Maintenance is a cost. Training is a cost.”

Making work safer

In construction and manufacturing, OSHA seems to have made inroads in reducing deaths.

It has also targeted the oil and gas industry and health care.

All those industries have seen positive trends in recent years, though the declining number of construction deaths could also be related to less activity overall.

Construction-site deaths in North Texas averaged 27.2 a year from 2003 through 2007, according to BLS data. From 2006 through 2010, they declined to 20.6.

“Last year, we had the fewest ever,” John Hermanson, OSHA’s regional administrator in Dallas, said of the 15 construction deaths in North Texas.

“We started enhanced construction inspections in 2009, which seemed to have a positive impact on awareness and in the numbers,” Hermanson said.

Industry efforts

Local efforts have paid off in some industries.

The Cargill Inc. plant in Waco, which processes more than 3 million pounds of turkey a week, has decreased its workplace incidents and injuries from 60 reportable incidents per 100 workers per year to fewer than 3. The industry average for poultry processing is 5.9, down from 8.1 in 2003.

The plant trained safety observers to spend time on the processing floor.

“Each month we observe 350 to 400 workers,” said plant manager Wesley Carter. “That sharpens us.”

Those kinds of efforts pay off, said Puckett at the Department of Insurance.

“There are several hidden costs to injuries,” Puckett said. “There’s loss of production time, loss of equipment oftentimes, the retraining of new employees and lower morale.” At Cargill, annual worker turnover has decreased by half, down from as much as 25 percent seven years ago to about 15 percent now.

“It’s much more desirable to prevent incidents than it is to deal with them,” said Mike Martin, Cargill’s director of communications in Wichita, Kan.



____________________
Source: Dallas News (Bowen, 9/15)

Fan's death at Reliant Stadium ruled an accident

The death of a 25-year-old man who fell about 60 feet from an escalator at Reliant Stadium in August has been ruled an accident, officials said.

Jonathon Glenn Kelly died after he fell while he was allegedly trying to slide down the outside of the escalator handrail at the Coca-Cola Gate near the stadium's northeast side about 8:10 p.m. Thursday while he attending the Texans' last preseason football game.

The Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences ruled his death was an accident and he died of multiple blunt force injuries, said Tricia Bentley, institute spokeswoman.

Kelly was descending from level five to level three when he fell about 60 feet, Mark Miller, general manager at SMG Reliant Park, said during a news conference Friday.

Police could not confirm the man was horse-playing, said Jodi Silva, a Houston Police Department spokeswoman. Silva said HPD was investigating the case as an accidental death.

Kelly was attending the game with some friends, said a co-worker who was not at the event and asked that his name not be published.

The co-worker said Kelly had worked for about three months as a plant operator at a private water and wastewater utility company.

Miller said stadium staff are posted on each landing at escalators, and signs on the equipment encourage safety.

The day after Kelly's death, 20-year-old Isaac Grubb of Lenoir City, Tenn., was killed when he somehow fell over a 33-inch railing and plummeted to the lower level of the Georgia Dome in downtown Atlanta during the Tennessee-North Carolina State game, according to the Associated Press.

The Associated Press stated Grubb had been cheering Tennessee's second touchdown when the accident happened around 8:23 p.m., said Frank Poe, executive director of the Georgia World Congress Center Authority, which operates the stadium.

The fans' deaths come just more than a year after 39-year-old Shannon Stone died when he fell during a Texas Rangers game in Arlington last July.

Stone had grabbed a baseball tossed by outfielder Josh Hamilton toward the stands and toppled over the railing, falling about 20 feet to concrete below.

_______________
Source: Chron (Lezon, 9/5)