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Hard Hats - Yes / No?

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While visiting with my daughter (who is in the Military) over fathers day the subject of hard hats came up, forget why. . but she said in her unit you can earn a Hard Hat Exemption and go without if you like. I said how do you earn one of those? and she handed me this list:



Hard Hat Exemption Procedure

  1. IMMERSION TEST-

    Your head must be immersed in water for 24 hours & absorb no more than 0. 5% of your head's weight.
  2. IMPACT TEST-

    While laying horizontal with your head resting on a 0. 75" steel plate, an 8 pound steel ball will be dropped on your head several times from a height of 50'. To pass, there can be no damage to your head.
  3. CHEMICAL RESISTANCE TEST-

    A variety of acids, solvents, oils & industrial gasses will be rubbed all over your head. There can be no deformities or obvious color change from the test.
  4. FIRE RESISTANCE TEST-

    For this test, we will torch your head for 5 minutes with a propane torch. if it is only slow burning, you may earn a class G or E rating. If there are any holes in your head, you fail the test.
  5. ELECTRICAL TEST-

    For this final test, your head must sustain 2200 volts AC, 50 HZ, for 3 minutes, with leakage currents not exceeding 9 milliamperes. breakdown threshold has been established at 300,000 volts.
 
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I believe these catagories have pretty well covered the "Brain Bucket" exemptions. They should be standardized and placed into the Code of Federal regulations for job site safety. :D GregH
 
Hard hats suck , remember when working on navy jobs, we do interior work (cabinets) what the heck is going to fall on my head. Long sleeves and pants go figure. I would work late and when all the needle****s would go home out came the shorts and off with the hard hat. Guess I'm a bit of a rebel.
 
lets hear it for hard hats......

I had to wear a hard hat on my last job. In a boiler room!

At 140 + deg and 100% humidity, it SUCKS!!

And as far as the safety aspect, if something in the boiler room fell on your head, rest assured the hard hat is WEARING YOU for protection. :D

I wont even go into safety glasses... ... .
 
Good job! OSHA just added these to the 1926CFR. :-laf



I didn't know hard hats protected you from drowning. :confused:

Besides, my head is too hard to hurt. I've had #2 + 5 done lots of times! :-laf
 
I fight with Contractors all the time. I hate hard hats to no end and have actually hurt my neck because I'm not used to that extra hight and hit my head on crap all the time when wearing them. I Mainly install custom stainless steel kitchens for restaurants and i i need a hard hat while doing it I shouldn't be there because no one should be working over head at all when I'm rolling in thousands o dollars of equipment and I hate having to fix crap other people break for me. I get yelled at from time to time but most of the time i win.
 
We are required to wear hard hats when outside of the control room or when in a response (Emergency Response Team) such as haz-mat or fire. I am waiting for someone to ask me to put one on inside of the control room while I am working the console. :rolleyes:
 
Was delivering an underground storage tank to the proving grounds north of Yuma earlier this week. . first 3 clowns that unloaded, no problem, my turn the safety dude shows up and asks where are my long pants, steel toed boots, safety vest , safety glasses, and hard hat?? :eek:I'm like. . 'yeah, back in town at the store?" :Dbig dummy was not too impressed and said I won't be allowed back on site till I have it, one of the workers loaned me a vest and hard hat, just the stuff i want to wear out in the middle of the desert when its 120* at 9 AM!... . Hope the hat dried out before he used it again !!!:-laf
 
I actually like hard hats, because I H-A-T-E hitting my head on stuff. I turn into The Incredible Hulk when I whack my head - it makes me unbelievably angry, for some reason.

Ryan
 
How we got here (from Wikipedia):

Management professor Peter Drucker credits writer Franz Kafka with developing the first civilian hard hat when he was employed at the Worker's Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia (1912). [1]



In the USA, the E. D. Bullard Company was a mining-equipment firm in California created by Edward Bullard’s father who was in the industrial safety business for 20 years. His father sold protective hats but they were only made of leather. Edward Bullard, arrived home from World War I with a steel helmet, which provided him with an idea to improve industrial safety. In 1919 Bullard patented a "hard-boiled hat", created through steaming canvas with resin, gluing several layers together which provided that hard molded shape. Within the same year the US Navy commissioned Bullard to create a shipyard protective cap, which began the widespread use of hard hats. Not long after, Bullard developed an internal suspension which would provide a more effective hat.



In 1933 construction began on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco California. [2] This was the first construction site in history which required all employees to wear hard hats, by command of the project chief engineer, Joseph Strauss. He wanted the workplace to be as safe as possible; hence, he placed safety nets and required hard hats while on the job site. Strauss also asked Bullard to create a hard hat to protect workers who do sandblasting. Bullard came up with a design covering the worker's face with a vision window and a pump to bring fresh air into the mask.



Around 1938 aluminium became a standard for hard hats except in electrical applications.



In the 1940s fiberglass came into use.



Around ten years later thermoplastics took over because they were easy to mold and shape with applied heat. Today most hard hats are made from high-density polyethylene (HDPE).



Brown fiberglass is still preferred by workers who buy their own equipment, for better balance, lighter weight, resistance to scrapes and stains, and shedding rain without big drops forming on the edge. These hats stay on when tilting the head at an extreme angle to do the job.



In 1997 ANSI allowed the development of a ventilated hard hat to keep wearers cooler. To it could be added accessories like face shields, sun visors, ear muffs, and perspiration-absorbing cloths which line the hats. Today, attachments include radios, walkietalkies, pagers, and cameras.



For nearly sixty years, aluminum hard hats were extremely popular and had almost a cult-like following but were phased out about 1997 when new regulations required stricter safety standards. There were about a half dozen companies producing a version of the aluminum hat throughout that time. Nearly a decade later, new full brim and cap-style aluminum hard hats were introduced by Skull Bucket. They are easily recognizable due to a re-inforced crown secured by eight rivets. They are constructed of space-age aluminum alloy and are ANSI safety compliant. Aluminum hard hats are used almost exclusively by oil well fire fighters due to the extreme heat they encounter. The forestry industry and loggers favor the aluminum version as well, many wearers remembering the solid, reliable McDonald-T hard hats that were so popular for years. Other industries using the aluminum hard hat are rock quarries, heavy machine operation, oil production, mining, bridge construction and maintenance, water well drilling and pipelines, and construction. The aluminum hats are restricted from use wherever electrical hazards exist. To our knowledge, Skull Bucket is the only company currently manufacturing aluminum hard hats.
 
When you least suspect it ....

Worked in industrial automation (Rockwell) for a bunch of years. I've had a lot of close calls is steel mills, mining, material handling, chemical plants, etc. All these facilities required hard hats and safety glasses which was a pain in hot humid weather. Then while sitting at a customer's desk located beneath a second-floor mezzanine at a chocolate factory a worker accidentally dislodges a folding sawhorse stored on the mezzanine above, which lands on my head and lays open a nice gash requiring a bunch of stitches. My hard hat was in the trunk of my car. :confused: Chocolate is dangerous stuff!
 
Sorry, but that is very funny. Looks like a light-hearted post has turned a bit serious, but this is serious subject. I hate hard hats as much as anyone, but I've traveled to some third world industrial facilities that have no safety or PPE requirements at all. They can at times be petty and hard-headed, but I'll take OSHA anytime. Some companies, of course, go overboard, well beyond OSHA requirements. This is driven by liability, some of it of the secondary effect variety (bumped his head, fell and broke his arm). If the facility requires it, put on the bucket. Ditto, glasses and shoes. If you get hurt and are not wearing PPE, regardless of the type of injury, a sharp company lawyer will take the smallest thread and shift the liablity to you. One issue I've had with hard hats is that the brim reduces overhead vision. I switched to a "lineman" style hat, similar to a fireman's hat, short front brim. Have also seen them put on backward, suspension reversed, though some companies frown on that (unprofessional looking). BTW, thanks for the reminder about safety glasses.
 
I hate the hard hat also, I normally follow whatever is being done on each jobsite as I arrive for inspections. Never put it on for residential jobs thoough. My current hard hat is a cowboy style that generates a lot of conversation.

Larry
 
Worked in the Oil Patch for a while in western Canada back in the 70's and 80's. Couldn't walk on to the platform without one. It took a while but you got used to it. However, a rather large nut dropped from about 80' and caught one of my crewmates square on the hard hat. He when down like a rock, 1/2" dent in the hat but no damage to his head!

Saved his life... #*it happens. .
 
I don't particularly care for them, but I recognize their value. Those of you who are naysayers, make sure to write a letter to your family and keep it in a safe place, just in case something happens to you, you know, *&it happens.
 
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