Page 34 - Occupational Health & Safety, February 2017

VISION PROTECTION
Fit Makes the Difference
BLS reported there were 23,730 eye injuries requiring time away from work in 2014, or 6 percent of all lost-time cases in private industry and state and local government employment.
BY FRED ELLIOTT
OSHA notes that ensuring PPE fits an em- ployee properly is essential to effectively protecting that person; this is particularly true with eye protection. Without proper
fit, protective eyewear is likely to be uncomfortable, to slip, and possibly to be damaged or even discarded. The consequences of even momentary gaps in protec- tion can be severe.
OSHA has reported that thousands of workers are blinded every year from occupational injuries that could have been prevented through using vision protection—which must be worn by employees who are exposed to hazardous chemical splash, dust, and particles—and that eye injuries resulting from such exposures cost more than $300 million per year in this country.
The agency very much wants employers to prevent such injuries; it cited a Missouri sheet metal manufac-
turer in mid-December 2016 for more than a dozen repeated and serious violations, issuing $138,430 in proposed fines. The company had failed to ensure workers wore eye protection and other necessary PPE, according to OSHA, as well as train workers to handle hazardous chemicals, install adequate machine guard- ing, develop energy control procedures and conduct regular inspections of machine safety procedures, and remove damaged powered industrial trucks from sur- face, among other things.
OSHA’s Eye and Face Protection eTool1 offers a ba- sic hazard assessment table to help an employer start the process of selecting proper PPE. The table lists five types of hazards to workers’ vision that might be en- countered—impact, heat, chemicals, dust, and optical radiation—along with examples and common tasks related to each of them.
Chemical splash, a leading cause of serious eye
30 Occupational Health & Safety | FEBRUARY 2017
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