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Comment by oooyay | Hacker News Reader

Tooling and PPE are part of the problem but not all of it. People who clean up job sites are also getting sick:

> "We actually not only saw people who were directly cutting and grinding the stone, but we saw people who were just sweeping up the work site after the stone had been cut," says Rose. "They were exposed to the silica particles that were suspended in the air just with housekeeping duties."

So, basically everyone needs to wear a P100 all the time when on site until the site has totally been cleaned up. In a manufacturing environment, if you're on the floor you wear a mask and there must be a dust collection system and tools that perform dust collection or mitigation. In this case that'd be water saws.

Read the threads here, a lot people don't like wearing respirators. The outcome isn't surprising.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/10/02/7660282...

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Contractors with brooms are a huge pet peeve of mine at a construction site. Seriously, WTF? You take all the dust and re-suspend as much of it as possible into the air?

Every construction site should have a HEPA-filtered vacuum with a filter bag. (The bagless kind is to be reserved for special cases that need it, and people should wear respirators when emptying it, TYVM.). Brooms are for non-vacuumable debris only, and subcontractors should be reminded of this regularly.

Keeping dust down with water sprayers should be a thing. Also, there should be particulate counters and VOC sensors all around sites to indicate what level of PPE is non-obvious but needed.

For indoor construction, a water sprayer seems like a mistake. It would turn all that only-mildly-nasty dust into hard-to-remove goo, not to mention making wood soggy and damaging gypsum and other materials.

I've noticed that a lot in public outdoor construction where I live the last ~10 years. Whenever there's the slightest chance of dust, they have giant water mist spraying machines in addition to the PPE.

may i ask where you live? I’ve worked outdoor construction as a teen for a while, even up till now, I’ve never seen mist sprayers in use round here in Germany.

Western Norway. The rock here is high in quartzite I hear, maybe that's got something to do with it?

Surely you use mist sprayers during building demolition though? That's where I first saw them.

yeah, i think they are pretty standard for demo work around the world afaik. Very interesting, Germany tends to be hellishly strict on building codes and such, but PPE is seriously lacking over here. It bred the mother of all toxic cavalier attitudes.

The problem with “always wear a p100” is that they’re not comfortable in an unventilated uncooled house which is where a lot of construction happens. If everyone is wearing one you also need to take more breaks which eats into time to do the job.

The industry is set up so you only get paid for doing the job. If doing it unsafely means doing it faster or being more comfortable then a lot of small time contractors will take that short term gain despite the long term risks.

I don’t know how we incentivize doing the right thing more here.

> The problem with “always wear a p100” is that they’re not comfortable in an unventilated uncooled house which is where a lot of construction happens. If everyone is wearing one you also need to take more breaks which eats into time to do the job.

Also, solutions that require people to consistently do uncomfortable things are not realistic; we know they will fail to comply - just like we would - and they will get sick.

The same people probably work out at the gym ironically! But covid showed that people can wear masks alot.

Lots of people refused and caused lots of deaths.

A paper Covid mask is nowhere near as uncomfortable as a p100!

Also, they come up with post-hoc rationalizations that justify them not doing the uncomfortable thing.

The error they make is thinking that only "they" - other people - do these things.

For comfort you'd probably want to get a positive air pressure mask. Those things are wildly underrated. Can even stick on a volatiles filter when relevant.

Yeah, those helmets that are basically face shields with optional hard hat and neck hood are generally speaking fairly comfortable: wide FOV, zero difficulty breathing, and an entire face shield (not just eye "shield") almost casually integrated. As long as you're working where you dare to go without full-on SCBA, a high-enough-tier variant of the e.g. 3M face shield helmets will suffice.

Bonus points for being able to easily just run an external air hose feed into the helmet when working in environments that don't kill you if you dare to take the helmet off in an emergency.

This is what I wear for carpentry/wood working. It's almost identical to the mask I wore in the military for CBRN just different filters and far lighter. Suggestion to look for masks that have larger outter and inner seals if you have glasses or low cut facial hair/stubble respectively as they'll continue to seal.

I believe 3M makes a mask that pretty much doesn't have a seal at all, instead relying on the positive air pressure to keep crap out. That has always seemed like the best solution comfort-wise to me. Anything that seals to the face will end up sweaty at the seals. Should work with basically any variety of lush woodworking beard too.

You make it illegal to do the wrong thing and have surprise audits. Losing your license is a pretty strong motivator to do it properly.

How do you do a surprise audit in a customers house?

You pass a law giving a class of inspector the right to enter premises where building works appear to be progressing. You strictly limit what they are permitted to observe and record and require recording of reasonable suspicion. Refusal to grant entry is itself an offence.

Approaches like this would work but are also a huge can of worms.

>You pass a law giving a class of inspector the right to enter premises

In most countries (and I'd expect to include Australia), there cannot be a blanket invasion of privacy - and it'd require a court order. The amount of paper would would be ridiculous, then what if I do that on my own, or I used a cousin to do it for me, for free?

The customer would be made to sign a contract allowing random state inspection.

> what if I do that on my own, or I used a cousin to do it for me, for free?

You and your cousin could decide to go and mud wrestle crocodiles, but we'd still ban opening an amusement park where that was offered to members of the public.

As the customer of a builder, I would very much approve of someone making sure said builders work wasn't dogshit.

Seriously, who in their right mind is going to deny entry to an auditor making sure that your builder isn't an idiot?

Like I said, can of worms. There are no easy solutions.

I mean, if we can't incentivize doing the right thing by teaching people that they'll die of a respiratory disease in their 30s if they don't wear their PPE, then honestly, that's life. If people choose to do their job in a way that gives them high risk of bad health outcomes, that's on them.

Certainly if workers are being coerced into not doing the right thing, that's a problem, and employers need to be fined into oblivion if they pull that crap.

If it's uncomfortable or takes longer to do it safely, that cost should be passed on to the person paying for the work.

You implicitly lay responsibility on the worker first, then on the employer, then on the customer.

Perhaps if the order of responsibility were reversed, it would lead to better outcomes.

It would be ridiculous to have any responsibility on the customer.

The only feasible order is government, employer, then worker. The government is tasked with the making the rules and surprise inspections, and the rest follows from there.

Well, the customer also has a lot of power. They can decide to hire a company (if available of course) that encourages/forces their workers to use PPE, even if it's a little more expensive (and maybe also takes longer) instead of just going for the lowest bidder...

How would a customer verify that? They are supposed to also monitor the worksite? And be knowledgeable about consistent work and the type of PPE it requires?

It's not really that hard to understand PPE requirements.

Is it dusty? Wear a mask.

Is it loud? Hearing protection.

And everyone should wear shoes with steel caps.

If you see someone with a bandana over their mouth in sandals you know they are unsafe. They know it too. This is not something that is difficult to understand.

And then what? The customer takes pictures and reports them to the government? Fires them? What if there is a dispute, the laborer takes the customer to court for false claims?

Who polices the customer? The logistics of making everyone a cop make no sense to me.

You are overthinking it.

If you see your contractor not using PPE, you just tell them to put it on. Just like you'd tell him to do it properly if you saw him cutting corners somewhere else.

Contractors want to get paid, so they generally tend to do what the person paying the bill asks them to do.

I wonder instead of these diesel or whatever bans. Why not mandate that everyone wears sufficient PPE 24/7. I mean protecting your health instead of removing source seems entirely reasonable in that mindset.

There’s got to be ways to cut stone that don’t involve people sweeping up the dust with a broom. Water jets, wet saws, or even just a water mister and a wet/dry vac with a filter is going to be much better than just going about the same process with a different stone that they hope won’t be as bad on their lungs.

The sad state of australian industry is that there's very little investment in tooling, plant and equipment.

Businesses don't want to invest, and even if they do, they find it hard to find any financing as banks don't want to lend. It makes such tooling expensive, and thus a lot of small businesses don't (or can't) upgrade their tooling.

Same in the US. People die cutting stone countertops. Nobody gives a shit

> a lot people don't like wearing respirators.

Uh... tough shit? If you'll most likely get an often-fatal respiratory disease from not wearing your respirator, and you still don't wear your respirator, maybe that's just Darwin in action there.

Banning the entire thing is just dumb, assuming there are actually PPE and mitigations that will keep people healthy. If people don't follow the safety rules, they should be fired. If companies don't implement the safety rules, they should be fined a significant portion of their revenue.

If following the safety practices means it costs more to do a particular thing, then the people paying for that thing should pay more.

The trade off in this regulation is young people dying vs middle class people being able to afford a countertop that looks a bit more expensive than it actually is.

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