Safety Showers: An Essential Safety Products In Work Environment

Inadvertent exposure can arise even when there are good safety precautions and good emergency controls in work places

. Despite of mammoth precautions that employees take, accidents sometimes happen. Hence, it is crucial to provide safety equipments like safety glasses or goggles, boots, gloves, shields, helmets and other protective equipment at the job site. But if any incident involves a hazardous material, then, in order to minimize the exposure to such hazardous chemicals, Safety showers and eyewash stations can be extremely important and must be provided to the workers. Even with apt eye protection, safety showers and eye washes are perilously important pieces of emergency equipment in any workplaces like laboratory or location where especially corrosive chemicals are used.

After a person has been exposed to any hazardous substance, the first 10 seconds are most critical and any sort of delay, even of a few seconds can cause serious injury. Thus, Safety showers can be used to wash off corrosive contaminants from clothing and to extinguish fire from clothing. While distance of a safety-shower should not be more then 50 to100 feet from the job area but in case highly corrosive chemicals are being used then the distance from work place to the safety equipment should not exceed 20 feet. The end result is there should not be any obstacles on the way from the work area to the safety item.

The diameter of the safety shower should be of at least 20 inches so that the entire body is sprayed with the safety item and not just the head. It should be designed such that it gets turned on in a second. The handle, knob, or the lever to turn on the safety shower should always be unobstructed. The flushing fluid in the safety shower must either be preserved water, drinkable water, or any medically acceptable solution.

There should be adequate supply of water in the safety shower to enable the user to shower for at least 20 minutes. The water temperature should be tepid and the water pressure should be low as high temperature and high pressure showers can be damaging. A minimum 5 minutes shower is recommended for mild irritants whereas for moderate to severe irritants and non penetrating corrosives the shower time should be increased to 20 minutes. 60 minutes should be the time for penetrating corrosives.

A fresh pair of footwear and coveralls should be available in the safety shower area. The safety showers should be sporadically checked in order to ascertain they are in working condition. When a safety shower is in use, an automatic alarm should be triggered and standby medical attention should be activated always.

Work places like Laboratories, high dust areas, hazardous substance filling and dispensing areas, and where spraying is done should have safety showers installed. They should be installed close to an exit, and on the same floor where the work is being done. The quantity of such safety products required to be installed in a work place will depend on mainly two factors. First, how high is the probability of workers getting into an accident? Secondly, how many workers work in that hazardous area? Well, the local safety board and their guidelines should be followed in making this decision. The essential safety equipments to be installed and what flushing fluid to use may be regulated by this local safety board.

Therefore, in any hazardous working environment, safety showers are the second line of defense. They should be treated like any other safety equipment which means that their maintenance, periodic checks, and refilling etc must be synchronized. Employees may never need a safety shower or an eye wash but if in case they do, knowing where they are located and also knowing the proper procedures for using them, can prevent serious injury or possibly even save a life. Safety showers can make a vast difference between a minor injury and a casualty.

by:alfred

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