Ponzi’s been worried, ever since he saw a picture of the tight manhole anybody working on the Dawes Park Lagoon would have to squeeze through, that the city isn’t assigning enough urgency in its capital improvement plan to making working conditions there safer.
Here’s a copy of the photo, from a city capital improvement program presentation, that first alerted Ponzi to the problem.
In Ponzi’s view, current conditions at the lagoon violate state regulations for work in confined spaces — putting the city at risk for legal liability if a worker is injured.
Unsafe period!
There are many problems with the city allowing the workers to enter the confine space at the Lagoon. The photo shows the city does not even have proper confined space entry procedure in effect. It is questionable that the employees have any proper training.
Anyone who wants to look into this further can go to the state of Illinois OSHA site or the Federal OSHA site and look up proper confined space procedures.
A very simple question what happens if the worker has a problem in the confined space such as a heart attack, how does the city plan to extract him?
He will long be dead, by the time they remove him.
The city has known about this problem for a long time. How many times are they going to keep on presenting it at capital plan?
At Monday council meeting they are going to bore us with a new plan ( how much did we spend on another useless study? ) or they spent $80,000 to hire a lobbying firm which they now stopped using.
To fix the problem at the confine space, clearly could be done for $80,000. The city needs to get its priorities straight.