Occupational Safety

Today the Supreme Court takes up a Massachusetts employment case that seems narrow in scope but is actually part of an important and growing legal battle that affects millions of people throughout the nation.

Gov. Gray Davis cut $3 million from the budget for labor law enforcement Thursday, even as state legislators heard hours of testimony at a Los Angeles hearing about the need for substantially more funding. Enforcement funding, measured against the number of workers and employers in California, has been "decimated" over the last two decades, Labor Commissioner Arthur S. Lujan conceded.

The New York City Council has approved legislation to protect the health and safety of more than 12,000 city workers who use video display terminals. The bill is the toughest VDT law in the nation and the first law of its kind in a major city, according to the New York City Video Display Terminal Coalition of labor unions and occupational safety and health groups.

Despite porn industry assurances that an adult film actress' recent positive HIV test is the first since a 2004 outbreak shut down production for a month, Los Angeles County health officials said Thursday that at least 16 additional unpublicized cases of HIV have been confirmed in adult film performers. The newly released data bring the number of HIV cases in porn performers in the last five years to 22, including the case disclosed this week.

Art Valdez spent 26 years working in the dust in the nation's last asbestos mill, pulling down $17.85 an hour before the place shut down last year. He had a pension and five weeks' paid vacation. He had health insurance for his family. He could afford to give cars to his two boys, visit friends in Texas and take his wife to Denny's as often as he wished. "I didn't know what asbestos was," he recalled recently. "I thought that was the best job ever."

It was just another work day for Rafael Jimenez, a veteran tree trimmer in his 24th year on the job. But as he stuffed branches from a Chinese elm tree into a wood chipper that sunny day in April 2008, his right hand became entangled in the branches and Jimenez found himself being jerked toward the steel knives. The machine, which devours a 20-inch branch in a second, consumed nearly his entire body.

The critics can't stop raving when they discuss Walt Disney Concert Hall, the new Frank Gehry creation now rising over Los Angeles. It's "frozen music," "a living and breathing monument" and "a lilting and harmonious composition of swelling trapezoids." But the workers toiling to erect the dramatically angled building use a decidedly different vocabulary, one that cannot be printed here. Building a Gehry, after all, is one of the most difficult jobs a construction crew can take on.

LIKE many of the immigrant men from his Mexican village, Gerardo Rodriguez was a Los Angeles gardener. But few from his village had done so much so young. The 19-year-old, who came to the United States illegally, was already his own boss. He had his own truck, tools and a small gardening route. Plus, he was learning to prune palm trees. He hadn't scaled many, but he told his friends that he liked it. Palms paid more, required more nerve and made him the focus of other men's awe.

On the last morning of her life, 26-year-old Piper Inness Cameron was doing exactly what she had always wanted to do. She was working on the deck of a tugboat and counting the days until she, like her father, would be piloting one. There were 41 to go. Then, at 11 a.m. Feb. 20 while moving through Santa Monica Bay about two miles off Marina del Rey, something went wrong. A line linking the tug and the barge it was towing suddenly struck Cameron and slammed her into a railing.

"Rope!" the biologist shouts, before the morning's divebombing begins. In the weak sunlight, Joel E. "Jeep" Pagel, 38, unfurls his faded rope down the 425-foot cliff, along with a backup rope. The sheer cliff is junk, a flaky volcanic rock with the bad habit of sloughing off and firing stones like projectiles. Atop the cliff, Pagel had secured his climbing ropes to a Douglas fir.

As prominent AIDS advocates called Thursday for Los Angeles County officials to require condoms on porn sets or shut down production, more questions arose about why the Public Health Department has not investigated 18 HIV cases reported in the last five years by the clinic that serves the adult film industry. "L.A.

It was just another work day for Rafael Jimenez, a veteran tree trimmer in his 24th year on the job. But as he stuffed branches from a Chinese elm tree into a wood chipper that sunny day in April 2008, his right hand became entangled in the branches and Jimenez found himself being jerked toward the steel knives. The machine, which devours a 20-inch branch in a second, consumed nearly his entire body.

Despite porn industry assurances that an adult film actress' recent positive HIV test is the first since a 2004 outbreak shut down production for a month, Los Angeles County health officials said Thursday that at least 16 additional unpublicized cases of HIV have been confirmed in adult film performers. The newly released data bring the number of HIV cases in porn performers in the last five years to 22, including the case disclosed this week.

Like a lot of other boys from his high school, John Vincent went to work in Wyoming's oil fields the day after graduation, hauling mud, unloading pipe and erecting rigs. One winter night, the older roughnecks sent him out into the cold to clean up after a drilling fluid accident. "I was flopping around in the wind and mud, and that's when I thought maybe my mother was right and school wasn't such a bad idea," he said. Vincent went on to college and eventually law school.

A recently hired plumber was sent into the bowels of the Orleans hotel and casino last year to unplug a sewer pipe in a large grease trap -- an assignment that would be his last. The hotel had no permit or training program to allow plumber Richard Luzier to enter a confined space where he might inhale poisonous sewer gas. He had no breathing apparatus or emergency rescue harness -- all routine precautions. Luzier fell 12 feet and landed face down in fatty sewage.

The operator of a collapsed coal mine where nine men died last August violated safety protocols by cutting pillars that should have been left standing to prevent cave-ins, federal regulators said. Mine Safety and Health Administration officials said a subsidiary of Ohio-based Murray Energy Corp. undermined other pillars by excavating coal from tunnel floors. Officials also faulted the engineering firm, Agapito Associates Inc. of Grand Junction, Colo. Murray Energy chief Bob Murray has insisted that an earthquake caused the collapse of the mine, near Huntington.

The death toll from a coal mine gas blast in northern China rose to 104 after rescuers found 34 bodies overnight, state television reported today. The explosion hit the Xinyao mine in coal-rich Shanxi province late Wednesday. Police were trying to confirm the exact number of people working underground, but it had "seriously exceeded safety limits," China Central Television said. There were 15 survivors.

South Africa's gold companies, already mining at the world's deepest depths, are looking to plumb even deeper veins in a new gold rush spurred by record prices. The deeper miners go, the richer the ore being uncovered. The price in dangers, though, includes rockfalls, poisonous gas explosions, flooding and earthquakes. That has stirred up concerns about the safety of miners, who experts say have the worst lot among South Africa's industrial workers.

State investigators Tuesday cited the Department of Water Resources for safety lapses that appear to have contributed to the deaths of two divers in the California Aqueduct this year. The state Division of Occupational Safety and Health offered no conclusive reason for the February deaths of divers Tim Crawford, 50, and Martin Alvarado, 44. Nevertheless, it fined the department $16,120 for violating several workforce safety regulations. Crawford and Alvarado drowned Feb.

On the last morning of her life, 26-year-old Piper Inness Cameron was doing exactly what she had always wanted to do. She was working on the deck of a tugboat and counting the days until she, like her father, would be piloting one. There were 41 to go. Then, at 11 a.m. Feb. 20 while moving through Santa Monica Bay about two miles off Marina del Rey, something went wrong. A line linking the tug and the barge it was towing suddenly struck Cameron and slammed her into a railing.