October is National Protect Your Hearing Month!
Are you doing what you should be doing on the job site to protect your hearing?
Around half of construction workers have some job-related hearing problem, including hearing loss or tinnitus (hearing a ringing, whistling, buzzing or humming noise all the time), according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In fact, it’s common for a construction worker to have the hearing of a worker twice his age, meaning a 25-year-old construction worker has the hearing of a 50-year-old.
But, because hearing loss happens slowly over time, it’s often difficult to get workers to care about this important safety issue from their first day on the job site.
Here is what you need to do to protect your hearing today.
Step 1: Identify your own hearing loss.
The first step to protect your hearing is to identify to what degree you may already be suffering from hearing loss.
Ask yourself these questions:
- Do you have trouble hearing people talking when there is background noise?
- Do people sound like they’re mumbling?
- How often do you have to ask people to repeat what they say?
- Do you turn up the radio or TV a lot?
- Do you have trouble hearing people talking on the phone?
- Do you have a constant ringing in your ears?
Another sign of hearing loss is difficulty hearing high pitch frequencies and differentiating words that sound similar to one another.
Take action:
Right before work, turn down the radio in your car to the lowest volume at which you can still hear it. If you need to turn the radio up to hear it when you hop back into your car after work, it’s a sign that you’ve been exposed to hazardous noise levels throughout the day.
Step 2: Identify noise hazards on the job.
Although there are a number of causes of hearing loss, including age, heredity and headphone use, the number one cause is exposure to loud noises. The damage to your hearing depends on how loud the noise is and how long you’ve been exposed to it.
Although one in four construction workers needs to shout on the job site “often” or “all the time”—signs that the job site is too loud—nearly two thirds don’t wear personal protective equipment (PPE) during these times, reported a recent study by the Center for Construction Research and Training.
There are a number of tests you can perform at your job site to determine if it’s too loud.
Ask yourself these questions:
- Do you have to shout to be heard at arm’s length away?
- Do you have to turn off equipment to be heard?
- Do you have to move to another location to talk and be heard?
- Do you turn up the car radio at the end of the day?
Take action:
Use NIOSH’s Sound Level Meter app for iPhones of the Sound Meter app for Android devices to get a reading on the noise levels on your job site. For a more accurate reading, use a personal dosimeter, an in-ear dosimeter or a sound level meter to measure the noise.
Step 3: Limit noise on the job site.
“Most [construction] workers think too much noise is just part of the job and that nothing can be done about it,” said CWPR’s Director of Environmental Hazard Training Gary Gustafson, “but we know that’s not the case.”
There are a number of ways to control construction noise. In decreasing levels of effectiveness, methods include eliminating the noise, buying quieter equipment and tools, controlling the noise hazard by isolating the source of the noise away from as many workers as possible, limiting how long any employee can work on a task above the recommended exposure time limits, and wearing appropriate PPE.
Ask yourself these questions:
- What are the noisiest tasks on our job sites?
- Is this volume safe for our employees?
- If not, what methods listed above could we use to limit the noise exposure?
Take action:
Visit NIOSH’s powertools database here to learn how loud the tools you are using may be.
Do a walk-around every day to ensure the methods you’ve outlined to limit noise exposure are being followed. This includes ensuring employees are wearing appropriate hearing protection, in the form of foam earplugs, reusable plugs, custom molded plugs or earmuffs.
provide hearing protection, and conduct training on said hearing protection.
And remember: It’s never too late—or too early—to start protecting your hearing.