When it comes to protecting your eyes at work, are you cutting corners? Here’s why you should pay attention to using safety goggles PPE.
Wearing the correct Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) in line with your training, site risk assessments and method statements is vitally important – and eye protection is one of the most crucial pieces that often gets forgotten.
Why do we need to wear safety goggles?
Eyes are so delicate. Although they’re absolute powerhouses and part of helping our brains convert the world around us into images we can understand, the eyeballs themselves can be easily damaged. Just think how irritating it can be when an eyelash or piece of sand gets stuck in your eye – now imagine that’s a fixing nail or some metal swarf.
Goggles (pictured below – bottom right) offer more protection than safety glasses (pictured below – top left) against serious hazards. By creating a tight seal around the eye area, they can prevent objects or flying material from falling into the gap between the eyewear and face.
All SMD eye protection PPE is to BS EN 166: 2002 – Personal eye protection. Minimum Class B for Metal Decking.
Did you know?
Let’s look (no pun intended), at some of the tools and materials you may be working with on a day-to-day basis and the force they have behind them:
- Hilti GX3 – There is 120kN of force in a nail fired from a GX3. This is the equivalent of the weight of 63 barrels of studs.
- Hilti DX5 – There is 460kN of force generated from a DX5. In weight, that’s like 25 SMD vans power of force.
- Hilti DX76 – This generates 750kN of force, which is approximately 75 ton in weight – around 4 stud welding rigs.
- Makita Petrol cut off saw – This one runs at 5100rpm, if we converted it to speed, that would be 180mph.
When must eye protection be worn?
Short answer. When any of the above tools are being used, no excuses, YES they should! If you are unsure when to wear them, please refer to training materials and site risk assessments.
What happens if I haven’t got any appropriate eye protection?
Next time you’re about to put your safety goggles on, give them a look over and make sure they are usable and ready-to-wear.Should your safety goggles, or in fact any of your PPE is missing, unsuitable or damaged, please raise this so we can order replacements right away. Never undertake a task without the correct PPE – it’s just not worth the risk.
You only have one pair of eyes, so look after them.
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