Dust and silica toolbox talk

The point

Today it's dust. The fine dust off concrete, brick, mortar and stone. You can't see the worst of it, and it kills people in our trade - HSE reckons over 500 construction workers die from silica dust every year. Five minutes now, so we keep it out of our lungs on this job.

The hazard, in plain terms

Concrete, mortar, brick and stone all carry silica. Cut it, grind it, drill it or chase it, and the tool throws that silica out as a dust too fine to see in normal light. It hangs in the air, you breathe it in, and it settles deep in the lungs. It scars them. Scarred lung does not grow back. The damage is permanent, and enough of it means disability and an early grave.

And it's sneaky. You feel fine for years. Silicosis usually takes ten years or more of breathing the stuff before it shows, and by the time you're short of breath, the harm is already done.

Here's the bit that surprises people: the amount that matters is tiny. The most you should breathe in a whole working day, with everything working right, would sit beside a penny and look like nothing. One dry cut with no controls can blow straight past that. Enclosed rooms are worse, but don't kid yourself that outside is safe with a big saw running.

What to do

• Plan the dust out first. Order the right sizes, get pieces cut off site, use a block splitter instead of the saw when you can.
• Keep water on the blade for the whole cut. A splash on the slab before you start does nothing.
• Use the extraction on the tool, hooked to a proper M-class unit - not a household vac.
• Wear the FFP3 mask you were face-fit tested in, every time the dust is up.
• Turn up clean shaven. Stubble breaks the seal, and a leaking mask is no mask.
• Clean up with the vacuum, or damp the mess down first.

What to never do

• Never dry sweep. It lifts the whole day's dust straight back into the air.
• Never blow dust off your clothes or your kit with the airline.
• Never treat the mask as the whole answer. Water and extraction do the work - the mask is the last line, not the first.

Questions to ask the crowd

The talk ends in a conversation. These are the ones that start it.

• Where are we making dust on this job this week - which cuts, which drilling, which chasing?
• When were you last face-fit tested, and is the mask in your bag the one you were tested in?
• What gets in the way of using the water or the extraction here, and what would fix it?