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HEALTH SAFETY & THE ENVIRONMENT
At the core of this important document were the considered concerns on the possible
hazards and risks to be encountered during arc welding in order to help welding fabricators
to identify counter-measures to minimise risk. In contrast, most ISO standards on health and
safety that had been approved to date were on requirements for testing, including methods
and procedures for the sampling of fumes.
An antidote to delays, and a less arduous route for providing this information to
industry, was through the issue of best practice documents, sometimes called consensus
statements. Some of these documents issued by C-VIII, included:
Exposure and the Need for
Control Measures
;
IIW
Statement on Manganese: Chromium and Manganese in Welding:
Exposure and the Need for Control Mechanisms
;
Health and Safety in Fabrication Repair
of Welded Components: Aspects, Impacts and Compliance to Regulations
; and
Lung Cancer
and Arc Welding of Steels,
all of which were of real importance to the welding industry. The
efficacy of producing best practice documents, such as these, came from the authoritative
views of some of the best experts in the world on health and safety.
Dr Martin Cosgrove (UK) was a significant
contributor on health aspects to C-VIII and his treatise
on
Arc Welding and Airways Diseases
was an excellent
example of the quality of debate and discussion that
were typical of C-VIII meetings. His conclusions, like
McMillan before him, were quite succinct ‘…whilst
it is difficult to come to any firm conclusions on the
basis of the epidemiological evidence as to whether
exposure to welding fumes and gases does or does not
cause an accelerating decline in lung function, it seems
sensible to take a precautionary approach’.
44
Mr David Hisey (Canada) was
another national delegate of C-VIII to provide valuable insight
into such areas as electrical safety hazards in welding
and, more recently, potential health problems involved in
thermite welding.
The statement on
Lung Cancer and Arc Welding of Steels
was a perfect illustration of how such a document could be a
continuing reference work when it was updated to take into account the
latest information when distributed through IIW by C-VIII to IIW’s
membership in 2010.
45
Attention was focused on studies published
since the previous statement that had identified the risk from a
number of metal compounds such as iron, nickel and asbestos,
as well as ionising radiation and ultrafine particles. The studies
David Hisey
Martin Cosgrove