Tips for controlling dust on your jobsite

Construction and demolition sites generate a lot of unwelcome dust that, if left unchecked, can cause several problems for those on-site and nearby. These airborne particles must be contained and suppressed to mitigate the impact on the crew, the company and the community.

Dust often will contain more than just dirt. Jobsites can contain harmful particles generated from the materials on-site that could spread into the wind. Prolonged exposure to these particles can cause long-term respiratory problems and allergic reactions. The company itself can face liability issues if it fails to use proper dust-suppression measures.

“As soon as you start wrecking a building, obviously you have a lot of larger concerns when you start making dust because you’re creating airborne hazards from these items,” says Daniel Charles, corporate safety manager at Elmhurst, Illinois-based Brandenburg.

Suppression tactics

Charles has been with Brandenburg for about 20 years, specializing in environmental, health and safety. He’s held his current role for 10 years, and his credentials include certifications from the Board of Certified Safety Professionals and the Board for Global EHS Credentialing as an industrial hygienist.

“You never know exactly what’s in the dust,” Charles says. “Dust can have many different constituents in it, one being silica, which causes silicosis after years of chronic exposure to dust. You inhale those particles, and they get trapped in your lungs. It’s a type of pneumoconiosis that gives you restrictive breathing later in life, and it’s one of the biggest hazards from dust exposure.

“There also could be hazardous constituents in the dust that could be lead fumes or cadmium, arsenic, hexavalent chromium [or] a mixture of those items as well, which complicates any health exposures. Dust looks just like dirt, but there’s a lot of different things that mix into it.”

Water is a tried-and-true method for combating dust on a construction and demolition jobsite. Charles says wetting everything down beforehand is effective, but it isn’t always possible. For instance, if it’s too cold outside or if the project must work around electrical hazards, the water could create a greater hazard than the one it’s preventing.

It’s also possible the jobsite isn’t close to a water line, meaning the crew would have to haul in water using trucks, which might not be possible given the location.

Protective equipment

Charles says companies can take other proactive steps to help protect workers. Brandenburg’s heavy equipment includes a filtered closed cabin, so keeping the doors shut with the windows closed naturally controls exposure for the equipment operator. Those on the ground should rely on personal protective equipment, like respirators, to filter potential dust exposure.

It’s also important to maintain a clean jobsite and cover products like sand, dirt and gravel to prevent them from getting swept into the air during the project, especially while transporting the materials. On the jobsite, maintaining slow traveling speeds will help reduce the amount of dust kicked up by tires.

Companies can deploy tools to monitor fence-line dust emissions, delivering real-time data to crews regarding how much dust is in the air. This allows decision-makers to adjust workflow and alter suppression tactics as conditions change.

“You have quantitative numbers that you can fall back on to know what those concentrations are,” Charles says of such monitoring tools. “The feeds give you text or email notifications if you exceed the predetermined national ambient air quality standards. If you hit that threshold, or a threshold that you set even lower than that, then the supervisor, the safety person and the project manager will get an instant notification that there’s elevated dust. We could stop work and reassess our dust-suppression methods before we move on. It’s a really good tool that companies can use to monitor how much dust is there.”

Working ahead

A proper engineering survey is key to identifying preexisting hazards on the jobsite, including areas that could lead to asbestos, lead, cadmium or fly ash exposure. Identifying these areas and isolating or removing them will help prevent them from getting mixed in with the dust.

“You have to do pretty good assessment prior to starting the job to make sure those hazards aren’t present,” Charles emphasizes. “And if they are in high concentrations, maybe you need to get rid of those before you start the wrecking job because you don’t want to expose your employees or the public to any potential hazards.”

Crews can get ahead of dust exposure by designing a work plan to control its flow. For example, if the winds are coming from the west, Charles says the crew will save the east wall of a project for last to create a natural windbreak on the jobsite. This helps stop the dust from migrating off-site.

Brandenburg also uses screens on fencing and other suppression products to contain the dust. Additionally, the company uses large water cannons that blow a fine layer of mist across a very broad area. Prior to a large implosion or demolition, it sets up several of those cannons to prewet the site and makes sure there’s a lot of mist in the air.

“It’s always a challenge when we do implosions [or] where we do large events where we’re taking down large sections of buildings or any kind of industrial facility,” Charles says. “Anytime you do that, you have potentially a massive amount of dust release at a single event. Anytime you want to do that, you really want to do a lot of preplanning to get as much dust suppression in place before that event as you can.”

The author is the managing editor of Construction & Demolition Recycling and can be contacted at chsweeney@gie.net.