Proper Eye Wash Locations in Your Facility

Last week I talked about how you perform a Hazard Assessment to determine which chemicals require having an eyewash station nearby. Today I want to help give some guidance on making sure your entire plant has adequate coverage in the event of a splash to the face.

While the most obvious and important aspect is to locate your eye wash within 10 seconds walking distance from the chemical splash hazard, let us look at ALL the criteria involved in the placement decision that ANSI Z358.1-2004 requires:

• Station must be located within 10 seconds of chemical hazard
• Station must be installed on the same level as the hazard (cannot be going up and down stairs with chemical in your eyes!)
• Path of travel from the hazard to the equipment should be straight and free of obstructions    
• When working with particularly strong acids, caustics or other materials that could cause serious eye injuries, emergency equipment should be installed immediately adjacent to the hazard

 Hardware Requirements:

• Station can only have one hand motion to activate flushing stream
• Station must be able to flush eyes/body for minimum of 15 minutes
• Station must be able to flush both eyes simultaneously
• Eye wash stations must deliver fluid at 0.4 gpm (gallons per minute)
• Eye/face wash stations must deliver fluid at 3.0 gpm
• Emergency showers must deliver fluid at 20 gpm
• Flushing fluid must be tepid in temperature. If a plumbed unit is used, a mixing valve should be used to blend hot and cold water to the desired temperature

While this seems like a lot of criteria to decipher, most all eye wash stations are going to be meet the hardware criteria listed above (as long as the product states it is ANSI compliant as an eye wash). While small quart bottles of eye wash solution (personal emergency washes) are common to have at a facility to aid in getting the eye flushed quickly, these products are only meant to compliment a fully ANSI compliant station that can properly flush both eyes for the full 15 minutes (and must still be located within 10 seconds walking distance from the splash hazard).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009 at 7:45 am and is filed under Workplace Compliance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.