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February 5, 2012ALBANY — It may not be tennis elbow or writer’s cramp, but the crush of 46,000 comments the state has received on hydraulic fracturing may have caused its own occupational hazard: scanning shoulder.
The state Department of Environmental Conservation is conducting an ergonomic review of a temporary office for scanning and logging the tens of thousands of responses after an employees’ union lodged a complaint last month.
A worker assigned to the “bullpen” — as the office has been dubbed — suffered a shoulder injury in January that the union suspects may have been caused by an inefficient setup, said Wayne Bayer, a DEC steward for the Public Employees Federation.
The complaint, Bayer said, led to a shutdown of the scanning for “a day or two” last month. The union claims the injury was likely caused by “improper equipment, improper level of the equipment” or the motion of repeatedly operating the scanners, he said.
Lisa King, a DEC spokeswoman, confirmed that the agency is undertaking the review. Some of the work in the office was “temporarily curtailed during internal analysis of work flow,” she wrote in an e-mail.
“An ergonomic evaluation is currently underway for the temporary scanning operation in the ‘Bull Pen,’ which was established to enter comments concerning high volume hydraulic fracturing,” King wrote.
The DEC accepted both electronic and hand-written comments on its 1,500-page review of high-volume hydrofracking, a technique used with gas drilling that involves the use of a high-pressure mix of water, sand and chemicals. The technique is under a de facto moratorium in New York as the agency finishes its review, which has been ongoing for more than three years.
The scanning office was set up to log the hand-written comments, which were accepted until mid-January. Twenty-six different employees from 10 different divisions within the DEC were assigned to work in the office on a rotating shift, according to King, and have so far tallied 46,000 comments.
The magnitude of the responses, thousands of which were received on the final day of the comment period, has presented a logistical challenge for the DEC. It has to respond to any substantive issue raised when it releases a final version of its proposed hydrofracking guidelines and regulations.
The final report is expected this year.
The agency last month canceled a meeting of an outside advisory panel, citing the need to focus on reviewing the glut of comments. In addition to those received on its September 2011 draft review of hydrofracking, the agency received about 13,000 on a 2009 draft.
One thing may be finished soon, though: The results of the DEC’s ergonomic review, Bayer said.
“As a minimum until they complete the study, the (agency) should strongly encourage people who were assigned down there to take breaks, not be standing up for long periods of time and make sure that they walk around and do some arm stretches and whatnot,” he said.
