Dust is dangerous

[Andy Booth]

I have developed some sensitivity to wood dust. I do not want it to get worse. A deep breath is one of life's pleasures.
I invested in an air quality meter from clearvuecyclones.com to see what is in the air in my shop. It was expensive however as one of the earlier posts state "you can't buy health"
Based on the meter, the air quality in my shop is ok most of the time. It is terrible when I am soldering (Multi use shop!).

I also have a whole shop cleaner and a decent dust collector that uses a truck filter in place of a bag. I am also considering a cyclone. There is a little matter of space, budget and noise.
For now I am investing in a replaceable cartridge dust mask. Next task to teach myself to use it.

Andy

[Peter Aeschliman]

I have developed some sensitivity to wood dust. I do not want it to get worse. A deep breath is one of life's pleasures.

I have a similar story. I've been woodworking for maybe 10 years max, only every other weekend. At first, the dust didn't bother me at all. But after doing a number of big projects with Walnut over the years, my lungs just feel different. Like I can't take as deep of a breath... when I get a cold, my cough lingers for many months after all other symptoms have passed. When I work with walnut now, my face feels warm and I get a rosy cheeks. Nothing terrible. But that didn't used to happen.

So I bought a dylos, bought a couple really nice Wynn Environmental filters and made some air scrubbers out of them, got a 3HP cyclone that I vent to the outside, and I watch the dylos when I work. I don't want to be the guy who assumes I'll be fine and permanently regret it later.

Maybe I'm wrong or i'm being a hypochondriac... but in cases like this, I figure I might as well err on the side of caution. A few thousand bucks for equipment is worth it to me...

[Chris Padilla]

Random orbit sander is big problem for me. The dust bag is really poor and as a result ineffective. Fine dust (fine like fine flour) gets everywhere and I can only imagine gets into my lungs. The particulate size is so small the stuff must go in very deeply. Once its in there, in a moist environment, I can't imagine it coming out very easily at all. I don't wear a facemask but think I will start. Point of use air cleanup makes the most sense to me if you can do it effectively. Maybe a downdraft sanding station?

Would going green (Festool) be worth it to you, Pat? I swear to you that you will not see an iota of dust using Festool sanders coupled with a vacuum (preferably green also).

[David Ragan]

Hi folks,
I don’t mean to dredge up an older thread that might better be left asleep, but I just wanted to add a few sources and points regarding wood dust hazards and other hazards our hobbies may expose us to.

If it matters to you, I have been an Occupational Safety and Health manager and Industrial Hygienist in the construction and maritime industries, and military operations for over 25 years.

Unfortunately, wood dust hazards, whether health hazards or fire hazards, are difficult to identify with precision.

The health hazards are proven and known – the problem is, not everyone with the same exposure gets the same disease. This is typical of any CHRONIC illness caused by chronic exposure; for instance, millions of shipyard workers worked with asbestos and did not develop disease, only a few hundred thousand or a million were unlucky enough through specific exposures and probably their genetics to get sick (10-30 years after exposure). Similarly, many woodworkers in manufacturing or hobbyists will likely go a lifetime without developing illnesses related to wood dust. The problem is, as has been pointed out, if you do develop most chronic illnesses, you’re usually stuck with that disability for the rest of your life.

ACUTE health hazards are rare from “normal” wood dust –these are the immediate allergic or toxic reactions that some woods, especially certain tropical woods, cause during or right after exposure. There are plenty of warnings available online and from lumber suppliers identifying which woods have toxic or allergenic properties.

Explosion hazards exist whenever fine dust is produced from organic materials (coal, wood, walnut shells, flour, etc.), it is enclosed at a specific density in the air, and an ignition source is provided. The video of the creamer is a good example of airborne flammability, but consider what they could have produced if they had contained the dust in a room or tank. Not just a fireball, but a true detonation-style explosion. Fortunately, that sort of thing doesn’t happen often, but you certainly don’t want to be the one woodworker in 100k that it does happen to. It happened in a Domino Sugar packaging plant in Baltimore a few years ago (explosion blew all the windows and caused a fire). I have not personally investigated many incidents involving wood dust in my industries; there was an open-air dust flash due to an unvented sanding operation in an “alcove” off of a main workshop; wood dust in the air was ignited by the arcs inside the sander motor. This singed some hair and scared the hell out of everyone in the shop, but it was one of those things that you could almost never repeat. I’ve also investigated two fatal incidents where workers were using crushed nut shells (walnut and pecan) as abrasive blasting media inside metal storage tanks; static sparks from the blasting nozzle ignited the organic dust and there were true explosions as a result. The biggest common fire hazard posed by wood dust is simply accumulation of combustible materials on hot tool surfaces or inside motors causing fires that spread to all dusty surfaces and eventually to combustible structures.

Some things to consider about woodworking hobbyist dust hazards:
1. The shops are usually smaller than commercial ones, so it would possibly be easier to develop a high airborne concentration (both flammable dust and health hazard).
2. Because normal physicians are generally unfamiliar with woodworking hazards, unless a person is evaluated by a board certified occupational medicine physician, the diagnosis probably wouldn’t identify home wood dust exposure even if a person was sick from it. Besides, few organizations look at chronic home exposures –sometimes CDC, HHS, or CPSC.
3. Many hobby woodworkers, me included, are also hobby home remodelers/ builders, metal workers, engine repairers, etc. One of the main properties that make wood dust, coal, silica, and asbestos long-term hazards is that they cannot be easily dissolved or digested in the lungs, so the body makes a scar around the particles. If you have a number of hobbies and activities that expose you to airborne particles of these here and there, the cumulative effect could be as bad as if you worked in a commercial job with just one of them. Add to that the periodic damage caused by VOCs from finishing, bleach from cleaning, etc. etc....

OK, not trying to be preachy, I just think you should make decisions about your own health from a position of accurate knowledge.

If you want to see statistics for dust-related illnesses by industry, the Bureau of Labor Statistics posts rates every year. They are usually 2 years behind because it takes a while to gather and crunch the data. The rate of illnesses is shown as the number of workers who filed an illness claim out of every 10,000 workers. In 2013, for dust-related lung diseases, Coal miners had a rate of 22.3; wood products manufacturers’ rate was 2.2, and “Other wood products manufacturers”, including millwork was 3.5, while concrete manufacturing was 1.2. Mostindustries are zero. Now this data is not broken down by WHAT dust caused whatdisease, but in these wood manufacturing industries you may assume most of them are wood dust-related. To see the whole report, go to: http://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/osh/os/ostb3969.pdf

Every hobby and commercial woodworker should spend at least as much time on their knowledge of safety and health hazards and precautions as they do researching their tools. Know what personal protective equipment and engineering controls are recommended by manufacturers, OSHA, and NIOSH (in the U.S.), why it is recommended and how to use it properly. If you want to use anything more than a dustmask (unrated white mask from Home Depot), learn to choose and fit it properly.If you want/ need to use a mask with replaceable filters – i.e., a tight-fitting filter respirator – talk to your doctor and see about getting an EKG and pulmonary functions test; better yet, get a referral to an Occ Doc and tell them you want a respirator use evaluation. Read the instructions and learn how to use it correctly. Two of the worst things that can happen with respirators (and I’ve seen plenty of both);people thinking they are protected when they aren’t, either from using the wrong respirator or not using the right one correctly, therefore getting exposed to the hazard AND people hyperventilating and passing out or having heart attacks because their lungs couldn’t handle breathing through a filter respirator - even in training scenarios.

I’m not saying “be paranoid and sell your tools and hide under a rock”, but ignorance is the greatest hazard, followed closely by complacency.

Regards,
Karl

Great summary, Kurt. All that I was thinking, but don't want to expend the energy to post.

IH is a great career. Too bad there really isn't a degree in it. Or maybe that is good; brings more engineering and safety and toxicology folks in.

I tell young folks from time to time to look into it. Travel, be your own boss. SCIENCE. Intellectual challenge. New stuff being discovered all the time.

Yes, what's really bad about toxins, etc is when the threshold for harm is below, for instance, the olfactory threshold. Meaning, the level that will hurt you is below what you can smell. that is why the chemical (I forget the name) is put into natural gas....so you'll smell it.

What I did not say is that I (my personal opinion) in that there will not really be too much growth in IH/Occ Med in the future because (1) I was the last of the docs to grandfather in w/o a formal residency (2)and the last to get lifetime BC in OM it is a really tough exam. I would not want to repeat it every few years. (3) There is really not much money in it for Big Healthcare. Not any referrals except for the occasional orthopedic, maybe a neurologist for post concussive syndrome, ophthalmologist for corneal stuff, etc, etc.

Besides all the vanilla stuff, I did have a TDI exposure here near the Ford plant in Hapeville, GA about 20 years ago. Was a mom and pop outfit that made the foam rubber seating.....As we know all too well, it is the mom and pop places where folks really get hurt/sick. Precisely because of no folks like you are hired to come around. This young man was lost to follow up-but I suspect that he had permanent acquired airway Dz from his job.

The big companies have IH folks consulting---RNs on site a lot of times. No really harm done to employees there.

I learned when touring a plant not to remark about unsafe stuff. That is not why I was there. Odd trait of human behavior only desire opinions that match our own. I have it too.

So, thanks for posting all that.

Oh.......Kurt, can you recommend a good air partcle/quality meter, or at least the parameters to ask about for all this in the home shop?

(Above is my personal opinion, not necessarily that of my employer.)

[Chris Hachet]

You would be amazed at how many shops will spend tens of thousands of dollars for for a sliding panel saw or edgebander, then run the cheapest dust collection they can find. In my experience, hobbyists and home guys always pay more attention to this sort of thing. "Gotta' get the job out the door!..."

Erik Loza
Minimax

I would agree a hundred percent, I have seen exactly what you are talking about.

[Chris Hachet]

Would going green (Festool) be worth it to you, Pat? I swear to you that you will not see an iota of dust using Festool sanders coupled with a vacuum (preferably green also).

I plan on buying some Festool for that very reason...although 95 percent of my surfacing is done with planes and scrapers.

[Andrew Joiner]

Also from the report you linked (all respiratory values):

Construction, .7
Construction of buildings, .5.
General merchandise stores, 2.1
Warehouse clubs, 3.1
Education services (College, universities, and professional schools), 2.4

In order to assume that those for the woodworking-related categories are wood-dust related, there would have to be corresponding occupational illnesses for the other categories, right? After all, the report is titled "Incidence rates1 of nonfatal occupational illness, by industry and category of illness, 2013."

So for "Educational services," is that some communicable disease like pneumonia or something?

What about "General merchandise stores" and "Warehouse clubs?"

General medical and surgical hospitals are 5.1 for respiratory conditions. Much higher than woodworking.