NIOSH Presents Data to Defend Staff from Lead Publicity

The Nationwide Institute for Occupational Security and Well being has revealed a brand new useful resource to assist employers and employees cut back hazards related to lead pipe elimination and alternative.

Office Options: Decreasing Staff’ Lead Publicity throughout Water Service Line Elimination and Substitute discusses the potential for lead publicity when employees change lead service traces and gives suggestions to scale back lead publicity.

Many varieties of employees might be uncovered to steer by way of varied actions. Staff in danger might embody managers, line supervisors, or discipline employees, equivalent to these from plumbing corporations, metropolis utilities or development corporations who work with water traces. Working in excavated pits, reducing or dealing with lead pipes or digging with heavy tools or a shovel might expose employees to steer.

NIOSH recommends methods to scale back employees’ publicity to steer primarily based on the hierarchy of controls. The Office Options doc outlines NIOSH’s suggestions for employers to scale back lead publicity equivalent to:

• Growing a written lead monitoring and management program, which can embody a testing protocol, hazard management program and job hazard evaluation for duties which will expose employees to steer
• Monitoring airborne lead exposures
• Offering transportable high-efficiency particulate air-filtered vacuums to scrub work automobiles
• Enhancing coaching, testing and housekeeping

For employees, NIOSH gives suggestions for improved work practices, equivalent to cleansing surfaces and avoiding bringing private objects into contaminated areas and utilizing private protecting tools to assist cut back their lead publicity.

The brand new useful resource is predicated on a 2019 well being hazard analysis amongst metropolis water division workers who had been changing water service traces. The air samples collected had been under occupational publicity limits. NIOSH investigators discovered lead on samples collected from employees’ palms and work gloves. Investigators additionally discovered lead on surfaces inside vans and within the locker room.