Shipyard Under Review Again for Alleged Safety Violations : Labor: Electrical hazards and unsafe operations are reported at the Long Beach naval facility. It was cited three years ago as the worst of eight in the country.

The Long Beach Naval Shipyard, cited three years ago for exposing its workers to more hazardous conditions than any of the nation’s seven other government-owned yards, is under federal investigation again for what one official said are nearly 100 alleged safety violations.

Inspectors from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration of the U.S. Department of Labor in San Diego confirmed that they are investigating complaints about heavy industrial machines lacking safety guards to protect hands and limbs, stagnant pools of water in the workplace and numerous electrical hazards.

Also under review are reports of civilian workers being used “like canaries in a coal mine” to check for poisonous gases in confined spaces without backup in the event they are overcome.

“The only reason we haven’t had a death at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard is we’re lucky,” said Joe Walsh, a union safety official.

But Jeff Gooding, director of industrial relations at the yard, said safety is a “very high priority” and that the accident rate dropped 79% from 1987 to 1990. The shipyard employs 4,100 civilian workers.

“Shop management, the labor organizations and the safety department work together to ensure a safe and healthful work environment,” Gooding said. “When unsafe conditions are noted, they are either corrected on the spot or employees are prevented from being exposed to the unsafe condition.”

The federal OSHA, which oversees health and safety conditions at federal offices and military installations across the country, has been inspecting the shipyard and parts of the adjacent Long Beach Naval Station since Oct. 30, said Pauline Caraher, an industrial inspector in San Diego and the lead shipyard inspector.

Caraher said the yard “is not in horrendous shape,” but several violations had been found, some of them life-threatening. Caraher declined to discuss the violations in detail until the investigation is concluded later this month, but said the most serious already have been corrected.

The shipyard received a safety rating of unsatisfactory in January, 1988--the worst rating given to any of the nation’s eight shipyards in eight years--when the naval inspector general’s staff discovered more than 500 safety violations. At that time, industrial equipment was found to be without proper safety guards and inspectors noted so many noise- and eye-protection violations that they stopped counting.

Hundreds of industrial accidents had occurred at the shipyard in the years before the 1988 inspection. In two of the most serious, a worker’s right hand was crushed in a metal-bending machine and another worker lost three fingers in a punch press.

Representatives from two other unions said the yard’s record has since improved markedly, that work is stopped when a hazard is found and that most of their members consider the yard reasonably safe.

The naval inspector general reinspected the yard in April, 1989, and gave it a satisfactory rating, Gooding said. Shipyards are rated either satisfactory or unsatisfactory.

“A shipyard is a dangerous place to work, quite naturally. Any insurance company will tell you that,” said Frank Griffin, president of the Metal Trades Council, a coalition of 13 shipyard unions. “But we try to take safety as seriously as possible and (administrators) have been quick to react.”

But Walsh, safety chairman of the shipyard’s International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Local 2293, said safety was made a high priority only after The Times reported those conditions in 1988.

“It was like a sprint runner in a mile race,” Walsh said.

But within seven months, hazards were being overlooked again, he said.

Jim Seay, the 39-year-old shipyard worker whose complaints started the OSHA investigation, said safety violations are virtually a daily occurrence at the yard.

Seay, a former shipyard safety inspector who was laid off last year and rehired as a gas detection monitor, recently reported to OSHA 44 violations he said shipyard supervisors had ignored. Among them was the practice of sending monitors like him into fuel tanks and sewer pits to check for toxic fumes without a backup, as federal law requires.

“You could be in the tank for hours, overcome by gas, and no one would know,” Seay said.

Because the government does not fine itself, the federal OSHA only has the authority to cite violations, and has no punitive powers if the violations go uncorrected.

“If OSHA found these conditions at a place like McDonnell Douglas, there would be hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. Here, it’s all in the federal family,” Walsh said.