The Scene Just had a report that one of our workforce has been hit in the eye by a small molten globule of solder whilst de-soldering a wire from a circuit board. LEV present but no PPE specs. Question Before I throw a knee jerk reaction of saying everyone MUST wear safety glasses, ( this is the first of such recorded incidents in the 6 years with this company), I wondered what the forum thoughts were? Should they become the norm - yes or no? Badger

Hi ya, You need to look more in depth into this and discuss with the workforce, and the site PPE requirements. I know from past working with guys doing such works, the glasses just caused more issues, (depending on the glasses), as the cheap ones fogged up, scratched easly, and distorted their vision, they also found it hard wearing gloves as the items they were working on were small ( I know this has nothing to do with your Q, but it was another issue raised)....But on that site the Client specified eye protection as a blanket enforcement across site anyway. But I do agree that this can happend again and something needs to be done. What was the outcome of that IP's eye injury, and what part of the eye received the injury? You do only have one pair of eyes, and perhaps that IP was luck.

Barrie, I've experienced this type of injury in the past and can assure you, this is likely to happen again! As previously said, cropping legs from components is another likely cause of eye injury but another one, which left an employee with sight in only one eye was a result of using snipe nose pliers. The employee took off his glasses to pull a small component with the pliers. The pliers slipped whilst he was up close to the work-piece and left him with a detached retina and damaged cornea!