Comment by oooyay
2 years ago
Tooling and PPE are part of the problem but not all of it. People who clean up job sites are also getting sick:
> "We actually not only saw people who were directly cutting and grinding the stone, but we saw people who were just sweeping up the work site after the stone had been cut," says Rose. "They were exposed to the silica particles that were suspended in the air just with housekeeping duties."
So, basically everyone needs to wear a P100 all the time when on site until the site has totally been cleaned up. In a manufacturing environment, if you're on the floor you wear a mask and there must be a dust collection system and tools that perform dust collection or mitigation. In this case that'd be water saws.
Read the threads here, a lot people don't like wearing respirators. The outcome isn't surprising.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/10/02/7660282...
Contractors with brooms are a huge pet peeve of mine at a construction site. Seriously, WTF? You take all the dust and re-suspend as much of it as possible into the air?
Every construction site should have a HEPA-filtered vacuum with a filter bag. (The bagless kind is to be reserved for special cases that need it, and people should wear respirators when emptying it, TYVM.). Brooms are for non-vacuumable debris only, and subcontractors should be reminded of this regularly.
Keeping dust down with water sprayers should be a thing. Also, there should be particulate counters and VOC sensors all around sites to indicate what level of PPE is non-obvious but needed.
For indoor construction, a water sprayer seems like a mistake. It would turn all that only-mildly-nasty dust into hard-to-remove goo, not to mention making wood soggy and damaging gypsum and other materials.
I've noticed that a lot in public outdoor construction where I live the last ~10 years. Whenever there's the slightest chance of dust, they have giant water mist spraying machines in addition to the PPE.
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The problem with “always wear a p100” is that they’re not comfortable in an unventilated uncooled house which is where a lot of construction happens. If everyone is wearing one you also need to take more breaks which eats into time to do the job.
The industry is set up so you only get paid for doing the job. If doing it unsafely means doing it faster or being more comfortable then a lot of small time contractors will take that short term gain despite the long term risks.
I don’t know how we incentivize doing the right thing more here.
> The problem with “always wear a p100” is that they’re not comfortable in an unventilated uncooled house which is where a lot of construction happens. If everyone is wearing one you also need to take more breaks which eats into time to do the job.
Also, solutions that require people to consistently do uncomfortable things are not realistic; we know they will fail to comply - just like we would - and they will get sick.
The same people probably work out at the gym ironically! But covid showed that people can wear masks alot.
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Also, they come up with post-hoc rationalizations that justify them not doing the uncomfortable thing.
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For comfort you'd probably want to get a positive air pressure mask. Those things are wildly underrated. Can even stick on a volatiles filter when relevant.
Yeah, those helmets that are basically face shields with optional hard hat and neck hood are generally speaking fairly comfortable: wide FOV, zero difficulty breathing, and an entire face shield (not just eye "shield") almost casually integrated. As long as you're working where you dare to go without full-on SCBA, a high-enough-tier variant of the e.g. 3M face shield helmets will suffice.
Bonus points for being able to easily just run an external air hose feed into the helmet when working in environments that don't kill you if you dare to take the helmet off in an emergency.
This is what I wear for carpentry/wood working. It's almost identical to the mask I wore in the military for CBRN just different filters and far lighter. Suggestion to look for masks that have larger outter and inner seals if you have glasses or low cut facial hair/stubble respectively as they'll continue to seal.
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You make it illegal to do the wrong thing and have surprise audits. Losing your license is a pretty strong motivator to do it properly.
How do you do a surprise audit in a customers house?
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I mean, if we can't incentivize doing the right thing by teaching people that they'll die of a respiratory disease in their 30s if they don't wear their PPE, then honestly, that's life. If people choose to do their job in a way that gives them high risk of bad health outcomes, that's on them.
Certainly if workers are being coerced into not doing the right thing, that's a problem, and employers need to be fined into oblivion if they pull that crap.
If it's uncomfortable or takes longer to do it safely, that cost should be passed on to the person paying for the work.
You implicitly lay responsibility on the worker first, then on the employer, then on the customer.
Perhaps if the order of responsibility were reversed, it would lead to better outcomes.
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I wonder instead of these diesel or whatever bans. Why not mandate that everyone wears sufficient PPE 24/7. I mean protecting your health instead of removing source seems entirely reasonable in that mindset.
There’s got to be ways to cut stone that don’t involve people sweeping up the dust with a broom. Water jets, wet saws, or even just a water mister and a wet/dry vac with a filter is going to be much better than just going about the same process with a different stone that they hope won’t be as bad on their lungs.
The sad state of australian industry is that there's very little investment in tooling, plant and equipment.
Businesses don't want to invest, and even if they do, they find it hard to find any financing as banks don't want to lend. It makes such tooling expensive, and thus a lot of small businesses don't (or can't) upgrade their tooling.
Same in the US. People die cutting stone countertops. Nobody gives a shit
> a lot people don't like wearing respirators.
Uh... tough shit? If you'll most likely get an often-fatal respiratory disease from not wearing your respirator, and you still don't wear your respirator, maybe that's just Darwin in action there.
Banning the entire thing is just dumb, assuming there are actually PPE and mitigations that will keep people healthy. If people don't follow the safety rules, they should be fired. If companies don't implement the safety rules, they should be fined a significant portion of their revenue.
If following the safety practices means it costs more to do a particular thing, then the people paying for that thing should pay more.
The trade off in this regulation is young people dying vs middle class people being able to afford a countertop that looks a bit more expensive than it actually is.