Why Wearing the Proper Safety Equipment is Important

Roughly 14 people die per day on the job. Your job is where you are supposed to make a living, not end up dying.

Even if you don’t die from an on-the-job incident, injuries can greatly affect your life. In many cases, you may not be able to work for a time. In severe cases, you may lose a body part or live with an impairment for the rest of your life.

This is what makes proper safety equipment so incredibly important. Let’s look at how it can make a difference in keeping you safe at work.

Protect Your Eyes

Eyesight is a precious gift. But it’s probably not something you think about too much — until you don’t have it. Just ask any of the 253 million people in the world who are visually impaired.

Safety glasses might not be too sexy. But what about when a small projectile hits you in the face or you are splashed by a strong chemical? You’ll be happy that you have a sturdy pair of glasses to protect your eyes.

Protect Your Ears

Roughly 22 million Americans work in noisy enough environments that they could lose hearing over time. Frequent exposure to noise levels of over 85 decibels (dB) is enough to cause damage. Even one-time exposures to loud enough noises can damage your hearing.

As you may guess, manufacturing and construction workers are at risk. As a thermographer, you may need to work in loud industrial environments on occasion. Be sure to always protect your hearing.

You may not notice it at first. But the damage is cumulative and irreversible and eventually, you will feel the loss. This is why wearing hearing protection is so important.

Protect Your Body

There is an untold number of ways that you can damage your body while you’re working. Every work environment has different hazards. Every workplace has guidelines in place for how workers can protect themselves in the environment they are in. Be sure to follow them.

For example, thermographers often work with electricity that could ionize the air and cause an arc flash, or electrical explosion. An arc flash can reach temperatures of up to 35,000 degrees F! Obviously, anyone in its path could sustain serious injury or even death. Even someone a few feet away can be burned by the intensity.

Using an insulation blanket and wearing the right clothing can help protect from burns. But, at those temperatures, an arc flash is still very dangerous to workers.

To avoid an arc flash as much as possible, all workers should be properly trained. Something as simple as dropping a tool onto an energized conductor or testing voltage with the wrong equipment can cause an arc flash.

Anyone working with or around electrical equipment should always follow best practices to the letter to avoid this extremely dangerous occurrence.

Use Proper Safety Equipment

Bottom line — if you value your life and limb, use proper safety equipment. It might be annoying when your glasses fog up. But in the event of an arc flash, you’ll appreciate those glasses being there to help protect you.

Here at Thermal Techniques, we ensure that our people take advantage of the proper equipment when they are on the job. Live electrical equipment can present a host of dangers that we are equipped to deal with.