Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
15
Basic Calculations for
Occupational Safety
and Environmental
Health Professionals
General Manager:
Well, in my opinion, safety in the workplace is relative.
My response:
Safety is relative? Relative to what? Relative to how many are injured, made ill, or
killed on-the-job?
General Manager:
[total silence]
My observation:
When dealing with mental midgets, sometimes silence is all that needs to be said.
—F.R. Spellman (1989)
15.1 INDUSTRIAL HYGIENE: WHAT IS IT?
*
According to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), industrial hygiene is
the science of anticipating, recognizing, evaluating, and controlling workplace conditions that may
cause workers injury or illness. Industrial hygienists use environmental monitoring and analytical
methods to detect the extent of worker exposure and employee engineering, administrative controls,
and other methods, such as personal protective equipment (PPE), to control potential health hazards
(OSHA, 1998).
Do you remember 9/11? How about the post office anthrax mess? Dumb questions, right? The
proper question should be “How can we ever forget?” It started with the word being passed around
about airplanes crashing into the Twin Towers. News coverage was everywhere. Remember those
TV shots with the planes crashing, the towers falling? Over and over again those shots were replayed,
etched into our human memory chips. We watched mesmerized, like fire watchers or falling water
gazers, hypnotized. Our defaulted perception and memory chips could not believe what our eyes
were showing us.
Later, during the frantic hunt for survivors, TV coverage continued. We saw the brave police,
fire, and emergency responders doing what they do best—rescuing survivors. We saw construction
workers and unidentified others climbing over and crawling through the tangled, smoking mess, the
warped-steel, jackstraw-like mess, helping where they could. We saw others, too; for example, do
you recall seeing folks walking around in what looked like space suits, instruments in hand? The
average TV viewer who saw these space-suited people moving cautiously and deliberately through
the smoking mass of debris and death and destruction had no idea who those dedicated professionals
were. They were professionals doing what they do best: monitoring and testing the area to make sure
it was safe for the responders and everyone else and ensuring that it was safe for the President, arm
around a hero and standing on the rubble in the smoldering mess, to speak those resolute words we
all needed to hear, words the terrorists needed to hear, words they are still hearing—loud and clear.
*
Portions of this chapter are adapted from Spellman, F.R.,
Industrial Hygiene Simplified,
, Government Institutes Press,
Lanham, MD, 2006.
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