Most of the injuries I get called about happened in a moment. Somebody caught a hand in something, somebody came off a ladder. There’s a date, there’s an entry in the accident book, and there’s a straight line between the job and the damage.
Noise and vibration don’t work like that. Nobody has a bad day with an angle grinder. What happens is a lad uses one for a few hours a week for fifteen years, and then in his fifties he can’t follow a conversation in a busy pub, or his fingers go white and numb in the cold and never quite come back. By the time it turns up it’s permanent. Hearing doesn’t heal. Neither does the feeling in your hands.
That gap is the whole problem. Nearly every other risk on site gives you feedback. Get your forklift routes wrong and somebody will have a near miss inside a month and you’ll hear about it. Noise and vibration give you nothing at all for twenty years, and then they give you a claim from a bloke who left eight years ago.
It’s not that loud in here
That’s what I get told, usually while the two of us are raising our voices to say it. Which is the rough test, and it’s a decent one. If you’re having to shout to be understood a couple of metres apart, you’re around the level where the regulations start asking things of you. If you’re shouting at arm’s length, you’re well past it.
The noise regulations set two action values, at 80 and 85 decibels averaged across a working day, and a limit of 87 at the ear that you aren’t allowed to go over. What catches people out is that these are daily averages, not the number the meter flashed up. A shop that’s quiet for six hours and horrible for two can still land above an action value, and a job that’s only a bit loud all day long very often does. I’ve had firms relax because the worst machine came in under 85, having missed that the operator stands between three of them.
The one with the grinder in his hands
Vibration is worse for this, because what counts is how long the tool is actually running in somebody’s hands, not how long the job takes. The action value works out at 2.5 metres per second squared averaged over eight hours, and the limit is double that. With a lot of the kit sat in workshops round here, that’s a couple of hours a day to reach the action value and well under an hour to reach the limit. Some older grinders and breakers will have a man at the limit inside twenty minutes.
Nobody on the shop floor is doing that sum in their head. What they know is the job takes what it takes. So the control has to be built into how the work gets organised. Sharper consumables, better tools, the job shared round rather than handed every time to whoever’s quickest at it, and a rough idea of trigger time per person per day. Trigger time is the number that matters and hardly anyone writes it down.
Surveillance that nobody acts on
Where the assessment shows a risk, or where people are likely to be at or above an action value, health surveillance stops being optional. In plenty of places it’s turned into an annual questionnaire that goes straight in a file, and that’s worse than doing nothing, because you’ve now got a paper trail showing you asked and then carried on regardless.
The point of it is to catch somebody while there’s still something to save. Early hearing damage shows on an audiogram long before the person notices it in conversation. Early vibration damage turns up as tingling and numbness well before the white fingers everybody pictures. Those results should be changing something about that person’s week, not sitting in a folder waiting for the next round.
So somebody has to own them. I’ve walked into places holding a stack of surveillance reports where three people had been flagged and not one thing about their job had changed. That stack isn’t protection. In a claim it’s the other side’s best evidence.
What it looks like when it’s right
None of this needs to be complicated. You need to know which jobs are the loud ones and which tools are the bad ones, you need somebody sensible keeping an eye on how long people spend on them, and you need the health checks to land on a desk where something can actually be done about them. Get somebody in who knows what they’re measuring if you haven’t got that in house, because guessing at exposure levels is how firms end up with a file full of numbers that don’t mean anything.
The reason to bother isn’t the inspector. It’s that these are the two injuries in my trade that are completely preventable and completely permanent, and the bill for getting them wrong arrives long after the people who made the decisions have moved on.
If you want a starting point, there are free self-assessment checklists on the site. Half an hour with one will tell you soon enough whether you’ve got a measuring problem or a managing one.