Anatomy of an environmental fiasco By TRACEY L. REGAN, Trenton Times, NJ
Visits by OSHA inspectors were - and continue to be - extremely rare, because the agency has so few inspectors, said Senn, who left the agency in the 1980s to work as a research scientist for the state Department of Health's occupational health surveillance program.
'We used to joke that we would do better if we just had cars that said OSHA on them and drove through industrial areas,' she laughed. 'It's a blue moon when OSHA inspectors come.'
In the absence of this reconnaissance, the agency relies for its intelligence almost entirely on complaints by employees.
But former plant workers say they too were kept in the dark about the hazards of the vermiculite ore delivered to the plant by rail from Libby.