Respiratory Protection

OSHA recently posted a Letter of Interpretation where they reference their Compliance Directive, Inspection Procedures for the Respiratory Protection Standard, CPL 02-00-158, and the standard’s preamble in establishing the medical evaluations for “voluntary use” of negative pressure (tight-fitting) respirators.  This issue has been made clear in the CPL for years, but I thought I would share the LOI…...

Breathing… we do it all day long, every day, and yet we never even put a thought to it.  But so many respirator users do not understand the basics of how we get the air (more importantly, the oxygen in the air) into our lungs so that it can enter our bloodstream for survival.  As…...

Step 1: If your only respirator use is for escape, skip to Step 8 to select the appropriate respirator.   Step 2: If the respiratory hazard is a biological aerosol, such as TB (tuberculosis), anthrax, psittacosis (parrot fever), or hanta virus, select a respirator appropriate for non-emergency activities recognized to present a health risk to…...

In OSHA’s fiscal year 2018 the agency performed 1,154 Respiratory Protection Inspections, resulting in 2,599 citations worth $3,228,420.  The top 5 industries accounted for 176 of these inspections, 460 citations, and $377,748 in penalties. Total for all industries and the Top 5 industries shown in the table below. Also, below is a breakdown of all 2018…...

Nov 02, 2018 MEMORANDUM FOR: REGIONAL ADMINISTRATORS FROM:  KIMBERLY STILLE, Acting Director Directorate of Enforcement Programs SUBJECT: Enforcement Policy for Respiratory Hazards Not Covered by OSHA Permissible Exposure Limits As you are aware, Section 5(a)(1) of the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSH Act) is occasionally used to cite respiratory hazards from exposure to an air contaminant that is…...

Many program administrators already know that OSHA does not require that medical evaluations be done annually, and many companies take full advantage of this. But all too often, we come across employees wearing respirators that were never medically evaluated and cleared by the PLHCP to wear in the workplace. Here is how this happens…… Membership...

As safety departments get squeezed for $, we are seeing a spike in a severe deficiency in a site’s respiratory protection training.  I first got wind of this when a client I was scheduled to do some respiratory protection training for canceled the course.  This is a client we provide other services for, so while…...

Nationwide, approximately 1.3 million workplaces provide at least a portion of their employees with respiratory protection. One of the most common types of respiratory protection is the filtering facepiece respirator (FFR), which is designed to be discarded when it becomes unsuitable for further use due to considerations of hygiene, excessive resistance, or physical damage. However,…...

On February 3, 2017, at approximately 5:57 p.m. an employee was working in the crawl space of Tower B to unclog food sink drains underneath the facility’s kitchen. Workers were working in a confined space in Mechanical Room Number 5. They were tasked to unclog four food drains, which were located 50 to 60 feet…...

Escape respirators have a SINGLE function: to allow a person working in a normally safe environment sufficient time to escape from suddenly occurring respiratory hazards. Given this function, selection does not rely on assigned protection factors.  Instead, these respirators are selected based on: a consideration of the time needed to escape, and the likelihood of IDLH or oxygen…...