NORA Partnership Award

NIOSH presented the first NORA Partnership Award for Worker Health and Safety to the Asphalt Partnership at the 1999 NORA Symposium. The award recognizes outstanding NORA partnership activities that lead to improved worker health and safety. Through a unique collaboration, the Asphalt Partnership brought together diverse partners to achieve the goal of reducing workers' exposure to asphalt fumes during highway paving. The partners included NIOSH, the National Asphalt Pavement Association, the Federal Highway Administration, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the International Union of Operating Engineers, the Laborers' Health and Safety Fund of North America, the Laborers' International Union of North America, and the Asphalt Institute.

Through use of innovative engineering controls, the partners achieved an unprecedented accomplishment - 100 percent of an industry voluntarily agreeing to implement control technology equipment (which reduces worker fume exposure by about 80 percent) on all new highway pavers produced after July 1997. The partnership formed amid ongoing controversies surrounding the health effects of asphalt fume exposures and possible regulatory activity aimed at reducing these exposures. Working together, the partners avoided the protracted regulatory process and ensured that effective control technologies, designed and evaluated by NIOSH and its partners, were implemented to protect the approximately 300,000 highway paving workers across the nation.

This unique partnership was also selected as one of 25 finalists (out of 1,420 applicants) in the 1998 Innovations in American Government Awards Competition sponsored by the Ford Foundation, the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and the Council for Excellence in Government. The prestigious Innovations Award recognizes excellence in government and celebrates outstanding examples of creative problem-solving in the public sector.

To be eligible for the NORA Partnership Award for Worker Health and Safety, partnership activities must include collaborative research in at least one NORA priority area that results in the development of interventions that reduce hazardous exposures or adverse outcomes. Partners should represent a broad and diverse spectrum of organizations and individuals, such as manufacturers, end-users, labor, the public health community, academia, and government. The next award will be given at the 2001 NORA Symposium.