Check your stopwatch to measure eyewash station needs

Hello again Bruce

The simple/complex response to your question is a function of the classic application of the risk assessment process – what is the reasonable likelihood of a release and/or exposure for which a drench shower would be an appropriate emergency response. The important thing to remember in all of this is that drench showers and eye wash stations are for when everything else (engineering controls, PPE, etc.) have failed. The first example you gave of gallons of high-level disinfectants – how are the materials stored? Are the stored on pallets? shelves? Are the case or containers stacked in such a way as to minimize the likelihood of someone being engulfed in material? Is there some sort of spill containment involved that would result in “better” control of a release? These are all practices, etc. that would need to be considered in determining the need for drench shower and other emergency equipment (also check the MSDS for guidance). Hope this helps.

Steve MacArthur, blog post author and safety consultant at The Greeley Company responds:

Ah, drench hoses! The terse answer to your question would be “no”, which is based more on your using “all” as the descriptor. Drench hoses have a very specific application when it comes to emergency response – an exposure for which you would need lots of water, and not a great deal of accuracy as far as specific body parts, etc. that you’d be drenching (and my inclination would be to look at a full-body emergency shower if you have an exposure risk that might require a lot of water to mitigate – I find that drench hoses are more useful when “applied” by someone else). Ultimately, the type of emergency equipment you want to have is specifically dictated by the exposure risks; generally speaking, the reasons we have eyewash stations, showers, and the like in clinical laboratories is not so much a function of the potential for exposure to blood or OPIM, but because of the types of chemicals that are used in that laboratories, that’s where you start to work towards eyewashes, etc. And so to the second question, if the only splash risk would be that of small amounts of blood or OPIM, then you probably wouldn’t need a plumbed eyewash station, shower, or drench hose, but you might want to provide folks in the area with some of those personal eyewash bottles (I’m not a big fan of those, but for every small exposures of blood, etc. they’d probably be OK). When it comes to what you might need because of the chemicals involved, check the MSDS for the materials being used – if the First Aid instructions for exposure response indicate flushing with water for 15, 15-20, minutes (basically anything that indicates a specific amount of time), that’s when you need to start looking at equipment with the capacity to provide that level of protection. By the way, in my practice, if you need to actually use an eyewash station, etc., then you’ve had a process breakdown somewhere – folks should be using PPE appropriate to the exposure risks – gloves, gowns, face shields, etc. This comes under the “ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” doctrine – you need to start this discussion by focusing on prevention.