March 2016, Vol. 71, No. 3
Web Exclusive
OSHA Announces New Silica Rules For Utility Construction
By Stephen Barlas, Washington Editor
Many heavy equipment operations involved in utility system construction will be affected by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA) new final rule upgrading requirements for protecting employees from breathable crystalline silica, a byproduct of sand and rock blasting, among other things. In the final rule, the agency creates two categories of businesses which will have to adopt the new rule: general industry and construction. The former includes hydraulic fracturing. The construction half specifically mentions utility work and includes such activities as earth drilling, excavating and jackhammering.
Both general industry and construction jobs where silica is present will have to abide by the new permissible exposure limit (PEL) of 50 micrograms per cubic meter of air (50 μg/m3), averaged over an eight-hour shift.
The construction standard offers two options for complying with air monitoring. In the first, OSHA presents what it calls Table 1, which lists dust control methods that various kinds of operations can chose to follow and, if they do so successfully, they are exempt from meeting the new 50 micrograms standard. Those companies that do not chose to follow the Table 1 controls must measure the amount of silica that workers are exposed to. If it is at or above an action level of 25 μg/m3 (micrograms of silica per cubic meter of air), averaged over an eight-hour day, then they must protect workers from above the permissible exposure limit of 50 μg/m3 by using dust controls to protect or providing respirators to workers when dust controls cannot limit exposures to the PEL.
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