Safety Tidbits
Click here for the full copy of this week’s Safety Tidbits containing important information about eye injuries:
Every year 2.5 million eye injuries occur in the U.S. More than 6,800 eye injuries each day! That is an average of 285 each hour, more than 4 each minute. Don’t let it happen to you! Common reasons for eye injuries on the job!
• Not wearing eye protection. BLS reports that nearly three out of every five workers injured were not wearing eye protection at the time of the accident.
• Wearing the wrong kind of eye protection for the job. About 40% of the injured workers were wearing some form of eye protection when the accident occurred. These workers were most likely to be wearing eyeglasses with no side shields, though injuries among employees wearing full-cup or flat-fold side shields occurred, as well.
What Causes eye injuries?
• Flying particles. BLS found that almost 70% of the accidents studied resulted from flying or falling objects or sparks striking the eye. Injured workers estimated that nearly three-fifths of the objects were smaller than a pinhead. Most of the particles were said to be traveling faster than a hand-thrown object when the accident occurred.
• Contact with chemicals caused 20% of the injuries. Other accidents were caused by objects swinging from a fixed or attached position, like tree limbs, ropes, chains, or tools which were pulled into the eye while the worker was using them.
Life line
World War II veteran, Donald Vairin, shared his story of serving as a hospital corpsman in the invasion of Guam. While navigating some dangerous waters, the boat he was on hit a coral reef and came to a sudden halt. The commanding officer, realizing the ship was sinking, ordered everyone off at once.
Donald jumped into the water and sank like a rock, with his rifle, medic pack, canteen pulling him down. He forced himself to the surface, gasping for air, only to sink again. He tried to pull off his boots, but the effort exhausted him, and he began to sense he wasn’t going to make it.
Just then he saw a man thrashing in the water next to him, and in desperation he clutched onto him. That proved enough to hold him up and get him to the reef where he was picked up by a rescue boat. But Donald felt so guilty about grabbing the drowning man to save himself that he never told anyone what had happened.
On shore leave, about six months later he stopped into a restaurant where a sailor in uniform waved him over. When he approached, the sailor announced to his friends, “This is my buddy. He saved my life.”
“What are you talking about?” asked Donald.
“Don’t you remember?” asked the sailor. “We were in the water together at Guam. You grabbed on to me. I was going down and you held me up.”
Source: Real Stories for the Soul
We’re all here for a purpose and we need to help each other out when we can. Sometimes as we struggle to help ourselves we are helping others, too, without even realizing it – and that’s a good thing. We all need a life line at some point.
Safety Wayne
Be thankful for your allotment in an imperfect world. Though better circumstances can be imagined, far worse are nearer misses than you probably care to realize. ―Richelle E. Goodrich
Thanks, WK
