Dust-Free Zone

Everyone can agree that silica dust is a bad thing to breathe no matter what you think of the new OSHA regulations. Leading up to our guide to handling silica dust in the May-June issue (hitting your in-box in early June), I asked contractors how they were responding to the new regulations and got some interesting answers:

Danny Montoney, Rockerz, Inc.: How do you know what the exposure is? Without real time air monitoring you can’t know, but there is a real simple rule: If you can see dust in the air you need to address it. If its visible you’re in the danger zone! In a 2007 test, the vacuums and grinders used in an enclosed and controlled testing averaged 6 ppm exposure per hour over 8 hours with 3 actionable events (times when PPM spiked to 25 ppm occurred 3 times) This was probably due to changing of the container catch. In short if equipment was properly used these tests from 2007 passed 2017 OSHA standards. These actionable events have been addressed by a design change to the vacuum that now has a longo pack system to avoid exposure of 25 ppm. We are changing out to this new designed vacuum across all my operations within the next 6 months and we are working on another future design using a multiple staged HEPA filtration vacuum system too.

Jake Vice, Vice Construction: We are very aware of the new OSHA regs and myself along with all of my guys are extremely frustrated with it. Yesterday I purchased 1- and 2-inch hand groovers for each of my eight finishers. We have been hand grooving 75% of what we have poured already this season and will be hand grooving everything that we possibly can. In situations where customers don’t want hand-tooled joints, or when concrete “gets-away” from us on a 95 degree, 90% humidity, full sunny day here in Iowa, our plan is to cut control joints wet, sweep slurry into a pile, suck it up, and pressure wash what is left behind.

Michael Hoeft, K&M Concrete: For a small contractor the impact is significant and invisible to our customers. Our investment in new equipment has been significant ($50K to $60K). 1. Table 1 has been incorporated into our corporate Safety Manual to facilitate compliance in the field. The upside to dust recovery is that it leads to a cleaner overall jobsite, safety, and provides dividends in the final cleaning effort. (To learn more about K&M Concrete, click here.)

Anonymous: This law is ridiculous, especially for outside sawing. I do most of my cutting green within the first 24 hours after pouring and it really isn’t that dusty. I visited my local saw and blade supplier figured he would have all the latest and greatest equipment but he said most guys are wet cutting and some are using vacuums but he doesn’t have a direct answer. So I purchased an $1800 vacuum and adapted it to the dust collection port on my saw and proceed to cut 12,000 sq ft and it was a joke–the vac only collected about half a five-gallon bucket of dust. I swept the rest, bagged it up, and threw it in the truck! Now what do I do with it? I don’t have a clue so I throw it in the dumpster at the shop just like the rest of the contractors. I told my guys this is the best I can do because nobody has any answers. I went to the OSHA website and got nothing but a bunch of technical data that is all great if you are a scientist. These morons should know by now they have to keep it at a 6th grade level for 99% of us. No protocol so for now I told my guys it’s better to at least look compliant than not at all.