March is Workplace Eye Health and Safety Month

Let’s take a moment to review eye protection. The estimates vary, but most authorities say there are at least 1,000 eye injuries in American workplaces each day and that number could be low by half.

Workplace eye injuries cost more than $300 million a year in lost productivity, treatment, and compensation, according to OSHA. These injuries range from simple eye strain to trauma, which may lead to permanent damage, vision loss, and blindness.

The most serious injuries occur in construction, manufacturing, and mining, which account for about 40 percent of eye injuries in the workplace.

Craft workers are most at risk for eye injuries. More than a third of injured workers are assemblers, sanders, grinding machine operators and laborers. Almost half are in manufacturing and slightly more than 20 percent in construction.
Flying particles, falling objects, or sparks caused 70 percent of the accidents. Most flying objects were smaller than a pin head and were said to be traveling faster than a hand-thrown object when the accident occurred. Contact with chemicals caused one-fifth of the eye injuries.

Others were caused by objects swinging from an attached position that were pulled into the eye while a worker was using them. Many workers should have been wearing glasses with side eye shields.

A culture of safety that protects workers’ eyes with the right type of protection is the only way to prevent eye injury.