Does it bother anyone when we see this sign?
I am not telling you anything you don’t already know… Hearing Protection is very much like Respiratory Protection – it comes with some serious limitations and is based on the worker’s EXPOSURE.
However, as a consultant working in plants, I am always told in my contractor safety package that I have to wear hearing protection when entering areas posted as “high-noise”. The safety package, and oftentimes the purchasing personnel providing me this information, does NOT quantify what “high-noise” is and when I ask what the necessary NRR for each area is, I hear crickets and rarely get helpful info.
So we always use HP with an NRR of 33 and may even double it up with muffs, depending on what my phone says. And yes, I know my iPhone is NOT a calibrated instrument. Still, if the host can’t tell me the needed NRR, I will determine it myself, always erring on the side of safety with a large safety margin in my Noise Attenuation Evaluation.
This brings me to my disappointment… why have facilities not performed their hearing protector attenuation evaluation (1910.95(j)(1)?