After perusing the thread for a few months, my observations:
1) Welcome to corporate contracting!
2) Most of what I see here is a result of a corporate lawyer who needs to make work for himself.
3) OSHA, MSHA have some foolish rules, many derived form corporate lawyers.
4) The corporate lawyers “interpret” what all the regulatory people say and do a wonderful job of screwing things up by putting their spin on things.
I have a friend with a gravel pit; he has only been tagged twice in the last 20 years, both times for berms at the edge of the pit being either too low or too close. Both times he was told to fix the problem and by the time the inspector got back, at the end of his tour, the issue was repaired and no fine. I believe the East and Midwest have more problems with inspectors than the West does on a general basis. Most of the state and federal safety people I meet never went to college for safety; they just worked the job and understood safety.
Every encounter I have had with a safety idiot involved someone quoting the “rule” without any knowledge of the rule. When asked to show the chapter and verse they cannot. The best way to cure the problems is to do away with corporate contracting, go back to the one man and his company, who stood by his word, load all the lawyers and corporate safety weasels in an old rock pit and backfill it.
I do have strong feelings about workplace safety, as I started my working life, in the late 60’s we were killing 6-8 men a month in the woods in Washington. Construction when I started in the mid 70’s was killing a man for every 9 million dollars of work. OSHA and all the other regulatory agencies brought that down. Unfortunately, Darwin’s rule did not always get the dumb one. I once watched a dumb laborer open a 1-yard bucket of concrete on a good man, he never worked again. OSHA is fun to ridicule, (and I do) but there are some good people out there that retired uninjured due to OSHA.