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Inspectors noted that four out of every 100 post-Ian workers had some type of respirator, such as an N95 mask, the records show.
CJI and Public Integrity obtained two internal databases meant to track OSHA’s company interventions during climate disasters. The records are incomplete: The data didn’t include any floods or wildfires; nor did it include at least four major hurricanes during which the agency had carried out its compliance assistance policy. Instead, the data catalogs OSHA interventions following five hurricanes since 2017 — from Harvey to Ida and Ian. The agency’s sporadic record-keeping suggests that workplace issues can go unchecked from one calamity to the next.
In the wake of Hurricane Matthew in 2016, for instance, Thompson Consulting Services, a Florida-based disaster debris monitoring company, came onto OSHA’s radar. Records show a Thompson worker in Lumberton, North Carolina, filed identical complaints with the North Carolina Department of Labor against the company concerning three of its demolition worksites. According to the complaints, Thompson failed to consistently enforce the use of safety equipment it provided to its employees at the worksites. Without steel-toed boots, some workers wore tennis shoes and Ugg boots, according to the complaints. This series of complaints was logged in OSHA’s central information systems database.
OSHA inspectors visited all three worksites, but only found workers on one of them. Two complaints were closed. It’s unclear the status of the third inspection.
Thompson has continued to hire workers to monitor debris on post-disaster cleanup sites. The company has more than a dozen contracts with municipalities in four states, including a $10.4 million deal for monitoring Ian debris in Lee County, records show.
Workers have reported similar concerns about Thompson in Florida.
Michelle, a 48-year-old immigrant from Venezuela, worked for Thompson Consulting in the aftermath of Ian. Hired at a job fair in October 2022, she said she didn’t know much about the company. Ian destroyed her mobile home three weeks earlier — killing her dog, Chico. Thompson offered her $15 an hour to oversee the removal of debris from sunrise until sunset, plus an additional $2 a day for gas. She started almost immediately — without the minimum two-hour training required for her post, she said, as outlined in the company’s Lee County contract.
For weeks, Michelle watched a truck carrying rubble out of Saint James City, an island off the Southwest Florida Coast, and transporting it to the weighing station. Every night before she slept inside her Toyota Sienna van, she had to scrub off the dust caked on her body.
“My respiratory system felt as if … I was breathing fire,” she said, adding that within two weeks her ears felt so clogged that she temporarily lost her hearing. A Red Cross clinician told her that she had a respiratory infection and needed antibiotics. When she notified her manager at Thompson, she was told to wear a mask, she said, but the company refused to provide her one. She quit soon afterwards.
Thompson Consulting Services did not respond to multiple phone calls and emails seeking comment.
OSHA records show inspectors visited Thompson worksites across Lee County on seven occasions from mid-October to mid-December 2022. On the last visit, an inspector noted that the company’s site supervisor and another employee declined OSHA safety hand-outs. The pair weren’t “receptive of education,” the inspector’s report states.
In its statement, OSHA said it is overhauling its data collection around post-disaster interventions to allow for “more timely, consistent and accurate entry of information.”
Referring to the company, Michelle said, mostly in English, “When I got sick, they don’t care. They don’t show care.”
 “Hurricane Passes” sign hangs at Sanibel City following Hurricane Ian. Sanibel officials limited access to the wealthy community by issuing hurricane passes to workers involved in the recovery effort. (María Inés Zamudio / Center for Public Integrity)
‘We want to protect each other’
Just before sunrise on a foggy morning in November, six weeks after Hurricane Ian had hit Fort Myers, restoration workers filled a parking lot on the city’s north end, waiting to be hired. Marcos had woken at 4:30 a.m. that day, fought back his symptoms and trekked here to join dozens of immigrants. Many slept in cars or tents behind a dollar store. Most were dressed in baseball caps, long-sleeve shirts, jeans and tennis shoes. Few could afford masks and gloves.
“All of us Hispanics who have worked hard [in this industry], we feel it in our own flesh. We all have suffered,” said Marcos, describing the coughs, hives and reddened eyes he’d experienced after demolishing hurricane-impacted buildings.
Local parcel data shows that more than a third of the structures damaged by Ian were built before the 1980s, when asbestos and lead were common in building materials.
No government body maintains a system for cataloging companies on the ground in Lee County, post-Ian. But Sanibel Island, an affluent community of 6,800 residents located on a 16-mile stretch of land off the county’s west coast, has tallied up a log: After officials there blocked the road connecting Sanibel to Florida’s mainland during the recovery, they handed out 2,284 “hurricane passes” to construction companies hailing from Florida, Texas, Alabama and beyond. Only 154 companies were local.
That’s a scale the architect of OSHA’s emergency-response policy never envisioned. As OSHA’s assistant secretary during the 9/11 cleanup, John Henshaw, now a Sanibel Island city councilor, agreed to lift the agency’s enforcement activities for the four contractors sifting through the pile of wreckage — an act that gave birth to the current policy. He helped formalize the voluntary compliance approach for future disasters in 2003, as part of the agency’s emergency-response plan.
 John Henshaw was the head of the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration during the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. (Janelle Retka / Columbia Journalism Investigations)
As he sat in his Sanibel office last March, when heavy construction equipment still cleared debris on the adjacent lots, the 75-year-old Henshaw said he now believes it’s infeasible for OSHA inspectors to oversee so many contractors rebuilding devastated communities.
“For a natural disaster, the only way I think it can work is that there is some degree of enforcement,” said Henshaw, surrounded by 9/11 memorabilia, including former-President George W. Bush’s hard hat. But that means OSHA inspectors would have to surveil cleanup sites at all times, he said. “They just don’t have the resources to do it.”
OSHA acknowledged its limited staff and resources in its statement, adding, “We do everything we can to protect the safety and health of all workers during emergency response and recovery operations.”
Meanwhile labor advocates have tried to fill this gap. Over the past two decades, worker groups have received about $3.1 million in OSHA funds to provide safety and health training for immigrant restoration workers.
Last December, one grantee, the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, worked with OSHA inspectors on Spanish-language outreach, post-Ian. NDLON staff say they donated gear to roughly 200 Spanish-speaking workers at cleanup sites across Lee County.
Members of Resilience Force, the restoration-worker rights organization, have shown up at the county’s day-laborer corners nearly every month since Ian, enrolling workers in OSHA safety and health training sessions, and connecting them with other services.
Some 770 miles west, in New Orleans, the Familias Unidas en Acción can be found doing similar advocacy work. One sunny morning last spring, one of the group’s community health workers handed out free NIOSH-approved masks and leaflets on workplace toxins to day laborers waiting in a local Lowe’s parking lot.
“How many times have [workers] been exposed to mold, to asbestos, and how many times have the contractors given them protection?” the volunteer community health worker, Miriam Romero, asked in Spanish. “This is not the time to be silent.”
 Miriam Romero, community health worker with Familias Unidas en Acción, speaks to disaster restoration workers. Romero handed out free NIOSH-approved masks and leaflets on workplace toxins to day laborers waiting for a job in a Lowe’s parking lot in New Orleans. She also gave workers food, water and COVID-19 tests. (María Inés Zamudio/ Center for Public Integrity)
But the advocates’ reach has limits as restoration workers are called to respond to more frequent and more intense hurricanes, floods and wildfires nationwide. For many, policy solutions can’t come soon enough.
When OSHA began drafting its proposed disaster-response regulation in 2007, Joseph “Chip” Hughes Jr. was among those who urged the agency to include immigrant restoration workers. Hughes, who led the worker-training program for the National Institutes of Health for three decades, had hoped the regulation would eliminate OSHA’s voluntary compliance approach to climate events, and apply workplace health and safety protections across an entire cleanup site.
Today, the rule is still pending. As proposed, it would focus on first responders, not immigrant restoration workers.
“We had this dream that people would be prepared for the [next] climate disaster,” said Hughes. “But I don’t think that’s the nature of the OSHA emergency-response standard.”
While OSHA’s Bill Hamilton, who oversees the rulemaking process, said that the new rule would not include restoration workers, OSHA touted its commitment to equity in its statement: “We are embedding equity in everything we do, including in emergency response work.”
Some lawmakers are looking beyond the agency for solutions. U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a Democrat from Washington state, has proposed federal legislation that would create a temporary immigrant status for these workers. Immigrant laborers would receive training on toxins, among other benefits. Jayapal’s office describes the bill as “a gold standard” for creating an equitable climate-restoration workforce.
Project team
Reporters: Janelle Retka, Samantha McCabe, Jiahui Huang, Columbia Journalism Investigations, and María Inés Zamudio, the Center for Public Integrity
Editors: Kristen Lombardi, Columbia Journalism Investigations, Mc Nelly Torres, Public Integrity, and Peniley Ramirez and Andrea López-Cruzado, Futuro Investigates
Audience engagement: Lisa Yanick Litwiller, Ashley Clarke, Vanessa Lee and Charlie Hsing-Chuan Dodge, Public Integrity
Design: Janeen Jones, Public Integrity
Visuals: Zhaozhou Dai, Public Integrity
Fact-checking: Peter Newbatt Smith and Merrill Perlman, Public Integrity
Translation: Roxana Aguirre and Nancy Trujillo, Futuro Investigates
But for now, climate disasters are continuing to fuel the restoration industry’s growth — and its growing population of ailing workers. Many, like Santos, are left to worry about whether their short-term symptoms will turn into more serious diseases.
He still feels the impact of his 17 years in the industry. Once a dominating force on the soccer field, Santos, now 60, has asthma, and struggles to play with his 13-year-old son for more than five minutes. His nightly ritual includes dabbing VapoRub under his nose to soothe his cough. Recently, he temporarily lost his eyesight after dust from a hurricane-related demolition clouded his vision.
Santos and other veterans see themselves as the elders of this workforce, compelled to pass down their knowledge and training to newer arrivals.
“I warn others about the consequences from this work,” Santos said. “We only have one life.”
Janelle Retka, Samantha McCabe and Jiahui Huang reported this story as fellows at Columbia Journalism Investigations, the investigative-reporting unit at the Columbia Journalism School. María Inés Zamudio is an investigative reporter for the Center for Public Integrity based in Chicago. CJI and Public Integrity provided reporting, editing, fact checking and other support. This story was co-published by Futuro Investigates, a division of Futuro Media
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