Workplace Safety and Health Hazards at DOD Installations

Gao ID: HRD-80-20 December 12, 1979

A review was conducted of the efforts made to identify and correct workplace safety and health hazards at Department of Defense (DOD) installations.

DOD has identified and corrected many hazards as part of its safety and health programs. However, many serious hazards have remained uncorrected for long periods of time. The primary reason why hazards remain uncorrected is a lack of funds; many hazards would be costly to correct. The DOD cost estimate of $500 million to correct all serious hazards is significantly understated. However, many corrections could be made at little cost. In such cases, greater management attention is needed to assure compliance with existing safety and health standards. Since the Occupational Safety and Health Administration cannot require DOD installations to correct the hazards, DOD must enforce standards itself. An effective program to correct existing safety and health hazards requires a realistic estimate of how many hazards exist in the workplace and how much it would cost to correct them. Although DOD Instructions provide for such estimates for each installation, it does not require the consolidation of these estimates into a DOD-wide estimate.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

Director: No director on record Team: No team on record Phone: No phone on record


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