Emergency showers are seldom put to use in laboratory settings. Installing showers without drains practically eliminates the chance that someone will actually ever use them so why bother to install them; are they just decorations?
Pardon me for getting cynical but in this day and age of FAKE news maybe the answer lies in just installing FAKE showers. No drain, no water supply, no plumbing whatsoever, just a FAKE installation. Or just a picture of an installation, scotch-taped to the wall. Think about all the money we could save! Of course being the professionals that we are we would have to FAKE our due diligence by way of:
FAKE testing and inspections
FAKE tags
FAKE signage
FAKE safety training
FAKE safety policy and protocols
And lastly, FAKE safety officers to pretend to do all this work
And please disregard this message, it is a genuine FAKE.
W.
Wayne Wood | Director, Environmental Health and Safety - Directeur, Sante´, securite´ et environnement| McGill University | 3610 rue McTavish Street, 4th floor | Montreal, Quebec, Canada, H3A 1Y2 | Tel: (514) 398-2391
There are always so many questions about safety showers and eye washes. I think that we need to have a symposium on them-.I will have to remember this for Orlando
Melissa,
Push for the drains! Show the cost over time of having testing performed at the recommended frequency without them vs. having them. My experience has shown when the drains were removed due to initial installation costs (proposed as "value engineering"), it wasn't too long after that they were screaming about the frequency of performing flushing/testing. If memory serves, I provided a CDC reference about the eye-damaging bacteria that reproduce in stagnant pipes with the presence of chlorine. The architects and accountants were not available later to justify or defend their "value engineering" decisions, but the initial construction cost did save a few dollars. My recommendation is to push for the drains or define accountability standards to apply later, e.g., is installation cost v. recovery in 1-yr or 5-yr?
BruceV
Hi Melissa,
We are in the process of designing a new science bldg and was told that we can't have drains for the safety showers and the eyewashes. Our architects state the reason is that the size of the drains would have to be very large.....? They also indicate that the cost for plumbing is too great. Have not yet decided if EHS should push for drains or not, or, if it is even possible.
Suzanne
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Greetings Everyone,
We're working with architects right now to plan out chem labs for a new science building. We've asked for drains under the safety showers and were told that wouldn't be possible because in order to be ADA compliant and have drains, the safety showers would take up too much space- has anyone encountered such an argument?
(Note, we're extremely constrained on space due to some very complicated politics I won't go into here, so making the labs bigger is not an option.)
