Dressing for Safety

Jan. 1, 2020
Just like business professionals dress for success to help them advance in their career, collision repair technicians need to dress for safety to advance in their career, at least in a healthy way. In fact, dressing for safety in a potentially hazard

A top-down examination of your shop's dress code will protect employees and help you avoid costly injuries

Just like business professionals dress for success to help them advance in their career, collision repair technicians need to dress for safety to advance in their career, at least in a healthy way. In fact, dressing for safety in a potentially hazardous environment like a collision repair facility is the best assurance of a long and healthy life. Regulations from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) for personal protection are designed to help workers protect themselves. There is no reason not to learn the guidelines and use them daily.

Any technician who has been more than a year on the job will be able to relate horror stories from not following safety rules that either happened to them or a co-worker. Everyone knows that dressing for safety when welding means wearing a welding helmet and gloves, even when you're just making tack welds. It also means wearing earplugs. Wearing earplugs when welding is not overkill. The earplugs aren't so much to protect yourself from the noise created when welding, but to prevent sparks from getting inside your ears. A structural technician tells of the time he was welding while wearing a welding helmet, skull cap, respirator and safety glasses, but no earplugs. The spark that landed inside his ear burned his eardrum. After the physician scraped the scabs off his eardrum with a needle, an experience the technician will always remember, the physician used a skin graft from behind the ear to craft a new eardrum. The technician now makes sure to wear earplugs when he is welding, and when grinding, for similar reasons.

Dressing for safety sometimes requires undressing, as in removing your jewelry. A collision repair facility is no place for wearing necklaces, bracelets, chains or even rings. A technician wearing a wedding ring and no gloves was removing a stubborn bolt in the engine compartment with an air ratchet. At one point, the ratchet twisted violently, pinning his hand with the ring against the positive battery cable while the metal ratchet was pinned against a body ground. Gold, being one of the best conductors available, carried the voltage and current from the battery through the ring and the ratchet to ground. By the time the technician was able to free his hand, the ring was as red as a burner on high on an electric stove. The technician's hand has never been the same since.

Acute vs. chronic

When dressing for safety, you have to think of the chronic as well as the acute dangers. The acute is the short-term, immediate effect, like a cut on the hand when slipping with a wrench or a short cough after inhaling a noxious vapor. Chronic is the effect on the body over the long haul after repeated exposures, like liver damage after years of breathing in products that contain the liver toxin toluene.

You don't wear quality, leather work shoes with steel toes rather than tennis shoes just to prevent a heavy straightening clamp from crushing your foot. You also wear the good shoes so well before you reach middle age you're not bent over with chronic back problems. The medium-duty nitrile gloves you put on before solvent-prepping a quarter panel is not just to help prevent you from eating chemicals with your sandwich at lunch. It is also part of a daily habit of protecting your hands from developing multiple scab scars and a permanent rough and peeling haze. Wearing a supplied-air or vapor respirator when mixing urethane clearcoat is not just to keep from getting light-headed before you enter the spraybooth. It's also to prevent you from developing an allergic reaction to isocyanates, a problem that will end your painting career, if not keep you out of the repair facility altogether.

In short, dressing for safety for the chronic effects as well as the acute, means taking care of yourself in your 20s, when you consider yourself indestructible. If you do that, you won't be ready for retirement by the time you reach middle age.

Let us quickly look at the proper methods of dressing for safety from the top down, starting with your eyes.

Eye protection

Eye or face protection includes safety glasses, goggles or a full-face shield. Goggles are recommended whenever working with refinish materials or solvents to prevent liquids from splashing into your eyes. Examples are when mixing paint and when using cleaning materials, such as thinners or solvents. A full-face shield is recommended when grinding or sanding. To make sure a face shield is used, it should be located next to grinding and sanding equipment. A welding helmet, also considered eye protection, is required when welding to protect your face from sparks and your eyes from UV flashburn. Safety glasses should be worn under the helmet to help prevent sparks from getting in your eyes.

There are magnifying safety glasses and welding helmets available. These are simply magnified slightly for general easier vision, though if necessary safety glasses can be ordered with prescription lenses.

Eye and face protection must be certified by United States and Canadian standards. United States standards are published by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). Canadian standards are published by the Canadian Standards Association (CSA). A Web site that can give you more information on eye and face protection is the ANSI Web site (www.ANSI.org). The Canadian standard can be found at www.CSA.ca.

Hearing Protection

Proper hearing protection includes earplugs, usually the expandable foam type, and earmuffs. Which one you wear depends a lot on what is comfortable and convenient. Earplugs can be reusable or disposable. They are simple to use and certainly less expensive than earmuffs. On the other hand, they provide less protection than some earmuffs. They must be properly inserted to provide adequate protection. To insert earplugs, roll the earplug into a small cylinder (see photo). With your other hand, grasp your outer ear at the top and pull upward. Insert the compressed earplug into your ear canal as far as you can, then release both your ear and the earplug. The earplug will go back to its original size, properly filling the ear canal.
Earmuffs can usually provide greater protection than earplugs, although this is not always true. They are easier to fit, generally more durable than earplugs, and they have replaceable parts. In areas where noise levels are very high, muffs and plugs can be worn together to give better protection. You wouldn't normally wear earmuffs when welding because they wouldn't fit under the helmet. Earmuffs when grinding, on the other hand, would protect your outer ears and probably be more convenient. When the excessive noise is intermittent, earmuffs are also more convenient, since inserting and removing earplugs is not as easy as putting on earmuffs. As with eye protection equipment, earmuffs should be located near the equipment where they will be used.

When do you need hearing protection? Sound is measured in decibels (dB). The extent of damage depends primarily on the intensity of the noise and duration of the exposure (see sidebar for some common dB levels). Depending on location, hearing protection should be worn when noise exposures begin to exceed 85 dB. Having to raise your voice to be heard is a good indication that hearing protection is required. At 85 dB, it is necessary to raise your voice to be heard from one foot away. You need to shout to be heard from two feet away.

Breathing protection

Breathing protection means a respirator, ranging from a simple dust mask, to a cartridge vapor or particulate air-purifying respirator, to a supplied-air respirator. You should be test-fitted for an air-purifying respirator that you regularly maintain.

Air-purifying respirators filter the contaminated air through filter layers and/or absorbent cartridges. They can be full- or half-face. Interchangeable cartridges and pre-filters allow one respirator to help protect against different respiratory hazards. The cartridges should have an expiration date when they should be changed. An air-purifying respirator also may be disposable for one-time use.

Most air-purifying respirators for collision repair facilities protect against both vapors and particulates. Vapors are the evaporation of liquids and particulates are the fine particles lighter than air that can get inhaled. Cleaning solvents emit vapors. Welding smoke is a particulate fume. Paint spray is a combination of vapors and particulates. The small paint droplets are considered particulates. Vapor cartridges for use in a collision repair facility are usually colored black for protection against organic vapors. Another color that may be used is yellow, which contains absorbents for protection against acid gases. The best particulate respirator is pink-colored, or a high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) respirator, rated P-100. HEPA cartridges or masks consist of several condensed fabric layers to trap the smallest particles. This is the best protection when welding, and in fact required when welding toxic metals, though a general welding respirator is adequate for most collision repair welding. HEPA filters are also required when working with asbestos brake pads or when buffing with products that contain silica.

Supplied-air respirators are primarily used when refinishing in a spraybooth, but should be used anywhere there are unknown contaminants, an area that is considered oxygen-deficient, or when working with products that contain isocyanates. The reason why supplied-air respirators are often the best choice when working with materials with isocyanates, is that isocyanates do not have any warning properties like odor or taste. An organic vapor cartridge could be used to capacity without warning.

Hand protection

Most technicians will point to the scars on their hands as examples of the importance of wearing the right gloves. Dressing for safety for hand protection is more than donning a pair of any gloves, it requires making the right glove selection, which can be confusing.

A technician may be subject to hazardous chemicals such as engine oils, paint solvents, battery acid and adhesives. There are also chemicals to which the technician may be allergic. Once a person has an allergy to a substance, it often never goes away. That substance will always cause a reaction and it may get worse. Electromechanical hazards include objects that can abrade, cut, tear, puncture, burn, freeze, electrocute or crush.

A common set of gloves for collision repair technicians should include a pair of mechanics gloves, for handling metal body parts and doing general mechanical work. For handling chemicals, medium-duty nitrile gloves will handle most tasks. These gloves should be disposed of after one or two uses. Welding gloves are all that should be used when welding. An errant spark will burn through mechanics gloves. The extra length of welding gloves is essential for protection from burns. A pair of neoprene gloves should be available in the facility. Neoprene is acid-resistant, so should be used when removing or installing batteries or when handling other materials that contain acid. Neoprene aprons are available to protect the body from acid splashing.

One other type of glove that should be available is a pair of rubber-insulated lineman's gloves. These are recommended when working on high-voltage systems on a hybrid-electric vehicle. A note on glove condition: Make sure there are no rips or tears in the material before using them. One pinhole in lineman's gloves, for example, is enough make them totally useless for the task.

For more help determining more specific glove selection, read the Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS) for the product. Listed in the Protective Measures section in the MSDS will be the recommended type of glove to wear when using that chemical. Another general source, for glove selection for any hazard, is the University of Edinburgh (www.ed.ac.uk), which has developed a glove selection guide that may be used as a reference. This guide addresses several different types of gloves and indicates if the glove is well-suited, suitable for limited application or definitely not recommended for particular substances or tasks.

Besides identifying the appropriate material, glove selection is also dependent on comfort, grip, dexterity and length. The characteristics of a glove affect more than just how well they work when they are put on, but the probability that they will be worn in the first place. The lack of dexterity may cause a technician to struggle or even worse, remove the gloves to do a task where the hazard exists.

Clothing and shoes

When it comes to wearing the right clothing and shoes in a collision repair facility, common sense is the rule. Why you would wear good footwear has already been discussed. Proper foot protection throughout the collision repair facility generally includes steel-toed, leather shoes or boots with solvent-resistant soles.

Clothing should be long sleeve and fire-resistant. There is no place for short sleeves in a collision repair facility, unless you're wearing the shirt under shop coveralls. Welding technicians should have a skull cap and also welding leathers, or at least a welding jacket that is spark resistant. Refinishing technicians should wear a paint suit when spraying. Paint suits are designed to prevent the refinish technician from exposure to overspray, and materials such as isocyanates being absorbed into the body. Paint suits may be made of cotton, nylon or a paper material. Paint suits are designed to be disposable and may have a limited effective life.

Long hair should be tied or pinned back to keep it out of harm's way.

Blood stains

There needs to be another note in this article regarding blood stains. Vehicles that arrive with blood stains on the seats or carpet present a unique hazard. The concerns are the diseases that can be carried in blood, called bloodborne pathogens. These include HIV or Hepatitis B viruses. HIV can live up to 30 minutes, or longer if the blood is pooled. Hepatitis B can live up to two weeks in a bloodstain, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. OSHA is well aware of the risks involved in handling blood. There is a separate OSHA standard for bloodborne pathogens that establishes specific requirements for labeling, containment, and disposal of waste material contaminated with blood (see sidebar).

Cleaning up blood requires wearing nitrile gloves, safety glasses and a high-efficiency particle respirator. Like any waste, fresh, wet blood carries the highest risk of infection. But dry blood can flake and be inhaled, or become liquid again when contacting moisture, such as moisture from your eyes, nose or mouth.

Dressing for safety is a lot like dressing for success, in that they are both designed to advance a worker's career. Protecting yourself at a young age, by wearing the proper eye, breathing, hand and body protection, will help assure that your career in the collision repair facility will be as long as you want it to be, and not cut short by doctor's orders or premature signs from your body.

The I-CAR instructional program, Hazardous Materials, Personnel Safety, and Refinish Safety (WKR01), provides skills and knowledge to enable students to better protect themselves. It is that knowledge that is perhaps more valuable than any other type of training for sustaining careers in collision repair.

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