There is something here I do not understand. If there are extractor units, what is being used to replace the extracted air?

Is the hood sealed, or is it one of these devices that delivers air past the breathing zone and into his environment?

We use breathing apparatus (Hoods) at our place of work, we insist that staff are fit for duty which means they are able to don these hoods to deal with any tasks that require them.

I am in the process now of reviewing this with the RP due to several staff having 'trendy' facial hair and not to discriminate but i am not sure what they can do if they continue to have large beards, espcially if we need them in an emergency.
The hood we use requires a full seal around the nose and mouth and neck line which if staff have excessive facilar hair will allow potentially, smoke, fumes to breach causing obvious problems.

Do you not have a written policy for this task, if so enforce it and look at possible discipliary if staff continue to disobey. again not into the law on this part (discrimination), but surely this is simliar to a taxi driver losing their license, they couldn't drive, therefore can't do the job which is what they are paid for.

It is a touchy subject and again not fully up with the law, but surely if you can't do jobs asked, because you fail to wear PPE due to not following policies there must be something the employer can do!?

What about looking at Fit testing every day?, expensive and timely but surely common sense should come into play. Good luck

Can the hood system not fitted with a portable backup supply which can be switched with the feed line? This would provide an emergency supply in the event of a failure and potentially reduce risk to the rescue crew.

As for that crew, I think its reasonable to insist that anyone on emergency cover should be clean shaven if it is necessary to use the face fit equipment.

I think you need to worry less about whether your rescue team is unshaven and more about the potential for total disaster and how to avert the need for the rescue team in the first place.

You need to ensure that the oxygen supply will failsafe and this should not be manually controlled as the operator might not notice until too late. Therefore, any oxygen supply should be electronically monitored for flow and in the event that flow is blocked, it sends a visible and audible warning to the operator and the operator can then switch to a secondary, completely integrated,
standalone system running on bottled oxygen which has been made available in the area.

This way, the operator has time to shut down the operation and get himself out of the danger zone without putting anyone else at risk.

Then, once the failsafes have been put in place, issue hoods with positive airfed BA to your rescue team staff which are not impeded by beards.

Your rescue team, however, good, have other jobs to do and it may take more time that the operator has for them to arrive at the emergency point, get kitted up and get in to save him. You need to enable him to save himself first.

Hilary's points are very important - the hierarchy of control points in this direction.

However, so is Bleve's point. If this is a gluing operation and it is so harmful, have you not thought about using something like a glove box?

Unless we know what chemicals are being used for the gluing, the method of application and the overall control measures, we are simply guessing.

There are self-contained rescue sets in the market, although for normal air supply failure scenario to the hood, I presume that there should be adequate time to escape???

http://www.escapeset.com...HEAD10-Escape-Set-DS.pdf