In the modern day, the Emergency Shower and Eyewash Stations are the most important safety features used across varied industries. These can be widely seen in facilities handling hazardous chemicals or even hazardous materials.
Emergency Shower and emergency eyewash stations would provide immediate relief for the employees who encountered harmful chemicals or materials. These are suitable for preventing serious eye blindness or injury.
The importance of emergency shower and eyewash stations:
Normally, workers in the Facilities handling the hazardous materials need to know about using these emergency shower and emergency eyewash stations. These employees could be at risk of exposure to harmful substances. It will be a critical situation, even a 15-second exposure to hazardous substances like corrosive substances.
When these hazardous substances come in contact with the eyes then they can be causing serious injuries like corneal damages, chemical burns and many more. Normally, emergency showers can easily help remove harmful substances from the eyes or skin. It would provide instant relief for the affected person.
Workers affected or exposed to the chemicals need to make quick access to these stations to prevent long-term damage. Emergency Eyewash and Showers need to be placed in the nearest location for the employees to access with maximum identity. Preplanning the experiments also involves emergency procedures.
Emergency eye wash stations can be used for various areas such as:
- Workers handling corrosive materials likely to cause eye damage
- Workers handling materials causing serious eye infections
- Workers handling materials causing severe eye irritation
- Workers exposed to airborne particles or chemicals causing eye irritation or damage
Getting effective and quick treatments is the best way to prevent damage to the eyes. It also plays an important role even in preventing vision loss. Emergency eye wash stations involve flushing eyes with a saline solution or water. These can be carried out during emergency situations.
How to use emergency eyewash stations?
Before using an emergency eyewash station, you need to know about the procedure for using them to get prominent results. If you have been exposed to chemical or hazardous materials on your eyes, you need to follow the below steps.
- Go to the nearest emergency eyewash stations
- Push activation handle all the way ON
- Put eyes or other exposed areas on the stream of water
- Begin flushing
- Open eyelids with your fingers
- Roll eyeballs around the water to get maximum irrigation of eyes
- Keep flushing for about 15 minutes
- Follow special Hydrofluoric acid precautions for accidents involving Hydrofluoric Acid.
- If you are alone, call a medical emergency after flushing your eyes for 15 minutes.
- Seek medical attention
- Complete Injury Exposure Report
When you find someone in the lab or space then you can get assistance from them for activating eyewash. You can easily start flushing the eyes with the above procedure.
After completing the flushing procedure, you need to seek medical treatments for complete recovery. You can flush the eyes until the medical emergency team arrives.
How to use emergency showers:
When you have been exposed to hazardous chemicals or materials, then you must not delay access to the safety shower. When corrosive chemicals stay longer in the flesh, they could cause grave injury.
Remove all the clothing and jewelry before entering into the safety shower. Fabrics can be easily saturated using harmful chemicals. These could be keeping them in close contact with skin so it automatically causes the severe injuries.
Removing the clothing is an essential part of the decontamination process. It is also helpful for protecting yourself from any kind of injury. When you get chemical contamination or exposure on the skin, then you need to yell for help to get immediate assistance.
- Go to the nearest emergency shower.
- Pull activation handle
- Remove your clothing
- Stay under a stream of water
- Shower discharge water at a specific rate and volume based on ANSI regulations
- Wash off all chemicals
- Flush away chemical contamination
- Keep flushing for at least 15 minutes
- If you are alone, call a medical emergency after you have finished flushing for 15 minutes.
- Seek medical attention
- Complete an Injury Exposure reporting
Normally, it is advisable to stay under the shower of water as long as possible to remove the complete contaminations. Be careful not to get a stream of water in the eyes. The volume and stream of water ratio will be higher, so it could affect the eyes.
When your eyes are contaminated with hazardous substances then you need to use the eyewash station. Normally, a combination of the emergency shower and emergency eyewash stations need to be used only when both eyes and skin are contaminated.
Stay compliant with emergency shower and eyewash stations:
Emergency eye wash stations are an important safety feature to be installed in the industries in which hazardous substances are used. Emergency shower and emergency eyewash stations offer effective and immediate treatments for workers exposed to dangerous chemicals.
Facilities need to ensure that the workers are protected from any risk associated with handling hazardous materials based on OSHA’s guidelines. Emergency shower and eyewash stations are helpful for getting instant relief when exposed to hazardous chemicals.
Conclusion:
In conclusion, emergency shower and eyewash stations have superior craftsmanship, and they are engineered to provide a low-velocity stream of water. These are helpful for flushing the contaminants from the skin and eyes.
Emergency shower and eyewash stations have spray heads equipped, which are easily maintainable. These also involve flow regulators along self-opening covers for protecting flushing fluid and airborne contaminants.
