Saturday, April 05, 2014
PPE: What You Need When You Need It
Occupational Health & Safety: In our quest to provide the safest work environment for our employees, our goal always should be eliminating all hazards. What if you have a hazard that cannot be eliminated? Electrical workers face this challenge every day due to the nature of our jobs. Even the use of our most important tool, the volt meter, requires us to be exposed to electrical hazards.
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I think it is perhaps most important for employers in fields such as the electricity industry to be extremely aggressive about assessing personal protection equipment and making sure their workers are using it. For electricians, the nature of their work is dangerous. There is actually no way for the danger of electricity to be completely eliminated. However, if the employer is aggressive and trains and requires their employees to wear PPE, the danger of the employees definitely decreases. It is essential for employers to be vigilant about PPE and training in industries where the nature of the work is inherently dangerous.
This is a very applicable article to my current situation, as at the moment I am sitting on the Morewood parking lot overseeing all electrical work on booths for Spring Carnival. Although most of the situations covered in this article where well above the scope of the work being done by organizations for Carnival, it was still a good primer on the type of PPE required for electrical work. It is surprising how few people where eye protection when doing basic electrical work, as there is a chance that when cutting a wire, debris may fly into the eyes. It was also good that the article specifically noted that PPE is the responsibility of the employer to provide, in order to ensure a safe working environment for all.
Electrical PPE is not something we typically think of in the entertainment industry, as the biggest thing we normally do is tie into a distro. That being said, it’s easy to get in over our heads sometimes when it comes to electrical safety. Perhaps knowing what PPE is required at what levels is a great way to determine what we should and should not be doing at our skill level.
I may not be on Midway at the moment, but the same thoughts went through my head while reading this article. Electrical PPE is not something that I think of very often, though I have been shocked enough times that you think it would be. Some of the things mentioned in here, like eye protection make sense, yet at the same time it never really was connected in my head until now.
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