PPE hazard assessment and selection field guide for crews

What a PPE hazard assessment is, and why it comes last

A PPE hazard assessment is a structured walk of the task to find what can hurt each part of the worker, then a decision about what certified gear blocks that hazard. You go body part by body part. Eyes and face, head, hands, feet, hearing, lungs, the torso, and anything exposed to a fall or to traffic. For each one you name the hazard, name the gear, and write it down.

The order matters as much as the list. PPE is the last line of defense, not the plan. It does nothing to the hazard itself. It sits between the hazard and the body and hopes to hold. A guard that removes the pinch point protects everyone who walks up to the machine for the next ten years. A pair of gloves protects one person, on one day, only if that person remembered to put them on and they were the right gloves. That is the whole argument for why PPE is at the bottom of the controls and the hazard assessment is the part that decides whether you needed it at all.

OSHA treats this as an employer duty, not a suggestion. The general industry rule at 1910.132 and the construction rules in 1926 Subpart E both require you to assess the workplace, provide the protective equipment, and make sure it gets used and maintained. The general industry standard goes further and requires the assessment be documented. The exact section numbers and the documentation expectation shift between general industry and construction and between code editions, so confirm what applies with OSHA and the authority having jurisdiction.

Why PPE is the last line, not the first move

Reaching for PPE first is the most common way a safety program goes wrong while looking busy. Somebody gets a face full of grinding dust, so the answer is glasses for everyone, and the open grinding station that throws the dust in the first place never changes. The injury rate barely moves, because PPE only works while it is worn, fits, and matches the hazard. Miss any of those and the protection is theater.

The failures are predictable. The wrong glove for the hazard, clear glasses against a chemical splash, a dust mask standing in for a respirator, a hard hat hung on a nail because it never fit right. Each one reads as compliance on paper and fails the moment the hazard arrives. That is why the assessment is the real work and the gear is the consequence of it.

Be blunt about the stakes. An eye injury is permanent. A struck-by to an unprotected head can end a career or a life. Hearing loss does not come back. The reason PPE is required at all is that some hazards cannot be designed out, and on those the gear is the only thing left standing between the worker and the harm. Treat it that seriously and it earns its place at the bottom of the list. Treat it as the first answer and you have skipped every control that actually works.

The hierarchy of controls, and where PPE sits

The hierarchy of controls ranks the ways to deal with a hazard from most effective to least, and PPE is dead last. Eliminate the hazard. If you cannot, substitute something less dangerous. If you cannot, engineer a control that contains it. If you cannot, use administrative controls like procedure and training. Only then, PPE. The framework is the one OSHA and NIOSH both teach, and the logic is simple: the controls near the top remove the hazard or contain it for everyone, while PPE only protects the one person wearing it correctly.

Work it from the top, every time. Can the energized work be avoided by establishing an electrically safe work condition, so there is no shock or arc hazard to dress for? That is elimination, and it beats any glove or hood. The lockout/tagout guide covers how that work condition is created and proven. Can a quieter tool, a less toxic solvent, or a pre-cut material substitute out the noise, the fumes, or the cut? Can a machine guard, local exhaust, or a barricade engineer the hazard away from the worker? Each rung you climb protects more people more reliably than the rung below it.

PPE earns its spot because some residual hazard almost always remains after the higher controls are in place. You still wear glasses near the guarded grinder. You still wear arc-rated gear for the energized task that genuinely cannot be de-energized. The point is not that PPE is worthless. The point is that it is the floor, not the foundation, and the hazard assessment is where you prove you climbed the ladder before you landed on it.

How do you do a PPE hazard assessment?

You do a PPE hazard assessment by walking the actual task and asking, for each body part, what can reach it. Not the job in the abstract. The task as it is performed, in the place it is performed, with the tools and materials that are really there. A panel changeout in a clean shop and the same changeout in a flooded crawlspace produce different assessments.

Go in order so nothing gets skipped. Eyes and face: impact, dust, chemical splash, molten metal, light radiation, arc. Head: falling and flying objects, fixed objects to walk into, electrical contact. Hands and arms: cut, abrasion, puncture, chemical, heat, electrical shock. Feet and legs: crushing, puncture, slip, electrical, falling objects. Hearing: noise level and duration. Lungs: dust, fume, vapor, oxygen level. Torso and whole body: fall exposure, traffic, heat, visibility. For each hazard you find, decide whether a higher control removes it, and if not, name the certified PPE that addresses it.

Then you document it. The general industry standard, 1910.132, calls for a written certification of the hazard assessment that identifies the workplace evaluated, the person certifying it, the date, and that the document is a hazard assessment certification. That is the minimum content, not a suggested format. Construction under 1926 Subpart E requires the assessment and the PPE but is written differently on the documentation, and OSHA has continued to update the construction PPE rules, including on fit, so confirm the current requirement and the documentation expectation with OSHA and the AHJ. The defensible move on any site is to write it down by body part and sign it, regardless of which standard you are working under.

Eye and face protection

Eye and face protection matches the form of the hazard, not the job title. Safety glasses with side protection handle flying particles and general impact. Goggles seal against dust and chemical splash where glasses leave a gap. A face shield protects the full face for grinding, cutting, and splash, but it is a secondary layer worn over glasses or goggles, never alone, because the shield can lift or shatter. Get the hazard wrong and the gear is the wrong shape for it.

The certification to look for is ANSI/ISEA Z87.1. Compliant eyewear is marked Z87 on the frame and lens, and high-impact rated product carries Z87+. That marking is the difference between rated protection and a pair of tinted lenses that will become shrapnel on the first impact. Gas-station sunglasses are not eye protection, no matter how dark they are.

Electrical work adds a hazard glasses do not address. An arc flash throws intense light, heat, and pressure, and that needs arc-rated face protection selected against the incident energy, not ordinary safety glasses. That selection is its own assessment, covered in the arc flash PPE guide. The exact edition of the eye-protection standard your jurisdiction enforces can vary, so confirm the marking requirement with OSHA and the AHJ, and follow the manufacturer's stated use for the specific product.

Head protection

Head protection is required wherever there is a danger of head injury from impact, falling or flying objects, or electrical contact. The governing consensus standard is ANSI/ISEA Z89.1, and it sorts head protection two ways that both matter on an electrical job. Type covers the direction of impact. Type I is rated for top impact only. Type II adds lateral protection from front, back, and side impacts, which is why it shows up on sites worried about swinging loads and falls, not just dropped tools.

Class covers electrical contact, and this is the one electricians cannot get wrong. Class G, general, is tested to roughly 2,200 volts. Class E, electrical, is tested to roughly 20,000 volts and is the one for electrical work. Class C, conductive, offers no electrical protection at all and has no place near energized conductors. The test voltage is a proof test, not a rating to work live against, so treat the class as a qualifier for the environment, never as insulation you rely on.

The trade is shifting from the traditional cap-style hard hat toward the Type II safety helmet with a chin strap, driven by the fact that a hard hat without a retention strap leaves the head the moment a worker falls or bends. The helmet stays on and protects against the side impact that a fall actually produces. It is not yet universal and the requirement depends on the company and the project, so confirm what the site and the AHJ accept, and match the type and class to the assessment.

Hand protection

There is no all-purpose glove, and treating one glove as the answer for every task is how hands get hurt. You select the glove against the dominant hazard for the task: cut, abrasion, puncture, chemical, heat, or electrical shock. A cut-resistant glove does nothing against a solvent. A chemical glove offers no cut protection. The assessment names the hazard so the glove can match it.

For cut, the rating system is ANSI/ISEA 105, which scores cut resistance from A1 at the low end to A9 at the high end. Light handling lives around A1 to A3. Construction, sheet metal, and glass handling commonly land in the A4 to A6 range. Heavy blade and forceful cutting work pushes into A7 to A9. Match the level to the edge you are actually handling, because over-gloving costs dexterity and an A9 glove nobody can work in gets taken off.

Electrical shock is a separate world. Rubber insulating gloves rated by voltage class, with leather protectors over them, are the gloves for energized work, and they carry their own testing, inspection, and field air-test routine. That is covered in the arc flash PPE guide and tied to the de-energization work in the lockout/tagout guide, so it is not repeated here. The short version: an ordinary work glove is not shock protection, and shock protection is selected and tested under a different standard than cut gloves. Confirm the glove class against the voltage and the manufacturer's marking, and verify the test currency before each use.

Foot protection

Foot protection is rated under ASTM F2413, and the marking inside the boot tells you what it is actually rated for. The base rating covers impact and compression at the toe, for dropped and rolling loads. From there the protection is built up by hazard with added designations, and you read those designations against the assessment instead of assuming a safety toe covers everything.

The one electricians watch for is EH, electrical hazard, which provides a measure of secondary protection against contact with an energized conductor on a dry surface. It is a backup, degraded by wear and moisture, not a substitute for de-energizing. PR adds puncture resistance under the foot for nail-strike sites. MT adds metatarsal protection across the top of the foot for heavy-impact work. SD, static dissipative, and CD, conductive, address static and are selected for specific environments like electronics or fueling. Some of those, conductive footwear in particular, are wrong for general electrical work, so read the designation against the actual hazard.

Match the boot to the floor, too. A safety toe does nothing about a slip, and slip-and-fall is one of the most common injuries on a site, so a slip-resistant outsole earns its place on wet and oily surfaces. Confirm the required ASTM designations against the project and the AHJ, and check that the boot still carries its rating after it has been worn hard, because a cracked sole or a worn-through EH boot has lost the protection it was bought for.

Hearing protection

Hearing protection enters the assessment when noise crosses the action level, commonly an 8-hour time-weighted average of 85 dBA. At and above that exposure, OSHA expects hearing protection to be available and a hearing conservation program in place. The trades that get people there are obvious once you listen: a circular saw, an angle grinder, a jackhammer, a powder-actuated tool, and a generator running all shift.

Selection is about attenuation, and the number on the package is the Noise Reduction Rating, the NRR. The catch is that the NRR is a laboratory figure and real-world protection is lower. A common practical method is to derate it: take the NRR, subtract 7, and use roughly half of what remains as the effective reduction in dBA. So a 33 NRR plug does not buy you 33 dB on the job. Plan around the derated number, not the box.

Fit decides whether any of it works. A foam plug rolled down and seated correctly outperforms an expensive muff worn over a thick cap with a broken seal. For very high or impact noise, doubling up plugs and muffs adds protection, but not by simply summing the two ratings. The exposure threshold and program details follow the OSHA noise standard, and the specifics vary, so confirm the trigger level and the program requirement with OSHA and the AHJ.

Respiratory protection

Respiratory protection is the one piece of PPE that is never just a piece of PPE. If the assessment finds a dust, fume, vapor, or oxygen-deficiency hazard the higher controls did not remove, a respirator requires a full written respiratory protection program behind it. That means hazard exposure assessment, medical evaluation before a worker wears one, fit testing for tight-fitting respirators, cartridge selection matched to the contaminant, and training. A respirator handed out without that program is not compliant and may not protect.

Be clear on the line between a dust mask and a respirator. A loose paper mask is not respiratory protection against a real airborne hazard, and an N95 used as a respirator pulls in the program requirements too. Silica from cutting masonry, lead from old coatings, welding fume, and solvent vapor each call for the right class of respirator and cartridge, selected under the respiratory standard. The full program is its own scope and its own guide, so the assessment's job here is narrow: identify the inhalation hazard, send it up the hierarchy first, and if a respirator is the answer, hand it to the respiratory program rather than dropping a mask in someone's hand.

Fall protection

When the assessment finds a fall exposure the higher controls did not eliminate, the personal fall arrest system, harness, lanyard or self-retracting device, and an anchor, becomes PPE in its own category with its own rules. Guardrails and hole covers come first because they remove the exposure for everyone. Where they cannot, the fall arrest system catches the one worker tied to it, which is exactly the PPE pattern: last line, one person, only if worn and connected.

Fall protection carries its own selection, inspection, and rescue planning that go well past pointing at a harness, including anchor strength, clearance below the work, and getting a suspended worker down quickly. That depth lives in the fall protection material. For the PPE hazard assessment, the task is to flag the fall exposure by body part and route it to the fall protection program with the same discipline you give every other hazard. Confirm the trigger heights and system requirements with OSHA and the AHJ, because they differ between general industry and construction.

High-visibility apparel

High-visibility apparel goes in the assessment wherever a worker is exposed to moving vehicles or equipment, and being seen is the protection. The standard is ANSI/ISEA 107, which sets classes by how much visible material the garment carries and how well it defines the human form. Class 2 is the common requirement around vehicle traffic and equipment. Class 3, with sleeves and the most retroreflective material, is for high-speed roadways, low light, and complex backgrounds where a vest alone would disappear.

Pick the class against the speed and the environment, not habit. A worker spotting equipment in a busy yard, a crew near live traffic, and a flagger on a highway are not the same exposure, and a Class 2 vest that is fine in the yard is not enough at highway speed. The garment also has to stay visible, which means it gets retired when it is faded, torn, or so coated in grime that the reflective material no longer returns light. Roadway work that falls under a highway agency may carry its own apparel requirement, so confirm the class and any roadway rule with the project and the AHJ.

Arc-rated PPE is its own assessment

Arc-rated PPE deserves a flag in any electrical PPE assessment, with a clear handoff. Energized electrical work that cannot be avoided exposes the worker to an arc flash, and the gear for it, arc-rated clothing, balaclava, hood, gloves, and face protection, is selected against the incident energy at the working distance, measured in calories per square centimeter. That is a different selection method than every other body part in this guide, because it is driven by an engineering value, not by a hazard category.

Do not improvise it here. The incident-energy study or the table method, the arc rating that has to meet or exceed it, the categories, and the layering rules are the subject of the arc flash PPE guide, and shock protection ties to the lockout/tagout guide. The hazard assessment's role for electrical work is to recognize that energized work triggers a separate arc-flash and shock assessment under NFPA 70E and to route it there, rather than dressing for an arc flash with general-purpose gear. Establishing an electrically safe work condition removes the hazard entirely and is the control that beats any rating, so it is the first question, not the last.

PPE has to be certified, not just look the part

Selecting the right type of gear is half the job. The other half is that the specific item actually carries the certification for the hazard, and you can see it. Eye protection marked Z87. A hard hat with the Z89.1 type and class molded inside the shell. Boots stamped with the ASTM F2413 designations. Gloves labeled with the ANSI cut level. Hi-vis with the ANSI 107 class on the label. No marking, no protection you can stand behind.

This is where cheap substitution does real damage. Tinted lenses that are not Z87 rated, a bump cap worn where a hard hat is required, a glove bought on cut resistance that turns out to be unrated, a faded vest with no class label. Each one looks like PPE and fails the test that matters, which is whether an independent standard says it stops the hazard. On an inspection, the marking is the first thing checked, because it is the only thing that proves the gear is what the assessment called for.

Buy to the marking and keep it legible. A boot stamp worn smooth or a hard hat label sanded off by years of use leaves you unable to prove the rating, and unable to know when the product was made or whether it is past its service life. The exact edition of each consensus standard your jurisdiction enforces can lag the latest published version, so confirm the required edition with OSHA and the AHJ and follow the manufacturer's listed use for the product.

Fit and comfort decide whether PPE gets worn

PPE that does not fit gets taken off, and PPE that is off protects nobody. That is not a comfort nicety, it is the failure mode behind a large share of injuries to workers who were issued the right gear. Glasses that pinch get pushed up on the forehead. A respirator that cannot seal on a given face does not filter. Gloves two sizes too big lose the dexterity that keeps a hand out of the blade. Boots that hurt get swapped for sneakers on the quiet days.

Fit is also where one-size-fits-all programs quietly exclude part of the crew. Standard-issue PPE has long been sized to an average male body, which leaves smaller workers and many women in gear that does not seal, does not stay on, and does not protect. OSHA has moved to make properly fitting PPE explicit in construction, and the practical answer is to stock a real range of sizes, including women's cuts where the work calls for them, and to fit the respirator and the harness to the person rather than the person to the stock.

Test the fit against the work, not the showroom. Have the worker bend, reach, grip, and look up in the gear before it is accepted. A face shield that hits the chest on a look-up, a harness that rides wrong, a glove that bunches at the palm, those are caught in a two-minute check and fixed cheaply, or they are discovered the hard way later. Comfort is compliance, and compliance is the only thing that makes the rest of this work.

Does the employer have to pay for PPE?

In almost every case, yes. OSHA's payment rule, at 1910.132(h), requires the employer to provide the PPE used to comply with the standards at no cost to the employee. That covers the gear that does the protecting: hard hats, the eye and face protection, most gloves, hearing protection, hi-vis, fall arrest equipment, and specialty footwear. The default is the employer pays, and the burden does not get pushed onto the worker.

There are narrow exceptions, and they are narrow on purpose. The employer is not required to pay for non-specialty safety-toe footwear or non-specialty prescription safety eyewear, provided the worker is allowed to wear those items off the job. Ordinary weather gear, raincoats, winter coats, ordinary sunglasses, and sunscreen are not PPE under the rule. Everyday clothing is not covered. Outside those exceptions, the protective equipment the assessment requires is on the employer's tab.

Replacement is part of payment. When required PPE wears out or is damaged in normal use, the replacement is on the employer too, with the usual exception for an employee who loses or intentionally destroys their gear. The exact list of exceptions and how a jurisdiction reads them can vary, so confirm the payment obligation against the current OSHA rule and the AHJ before treating any item as the worker's expense.

Training on the PPE, not just handing it out

Issuing PPE is not the same as training on it, and OSHA requires the training. Under 1910.132(f) each worker who must use PPE has to be trained to know when PPE is necessary, what PPE is necessary, how to put it on, take it off, adjust, and wear it, the limitations of the PPE, and how to care for, maintain, and dispose of it. The worker then has to demonstrate they understand and can use it before doing the work, not just sign that they attended.

The limitations piece is the one that gets skipped and it is the one that gets people hurt. A worker who thinks EH boots make energized contact safe, or that a Class E hard hat is insulation to work against, or that a respirator filters a gas it was never rated for, is wearing the gear and trusting it past its rating. Training has to teach what each item does not do as clearly as what it does.

Retraining is triggered, not scheduled by habit. When the workplace changes, when the PPE changes, or when a worker shows they have not retained it, the training is done again. The construction rules carry their own training expectations in 1926 Subpart E. Keep the content matched to the actual gear and tasks, and confirm the specific training and retraining requirements against OSHA and the AHJ.

Inspect and replace damaged PPE

PPE wears out, and damaged PPE often protects worse than no PPE because the worker trusts it. The assessment's job does not end at selection. It sets the expectation that gear is inspected before use and pulled when it is compromised. A cracked or deeply scratched lens has lost impact strength and clouds vision. A hard hat that took a real impact, or one with a cracked shell or a chalky, sun-degraded surface, is done even if it looks usable.

The dated and tested items are the ones to watch hardest. Rubber insulating gloves carry a test interval and have to be air-tested before each use and pulled at the first sign of a defect, which the arc flash PPE guide details. Fall arrest harnesses and lanyards get inspected before every use and retired after an arrest event. Respirator cartridges have service limits and change-out schedules. A hard hat suspension and shell have a service life the manufacturer states. None of those are judgment calls you win by squinting at worn gear and deciding it is probably fine.

Build the inspection into the day rather than into an annual binder. The before-use check by the worker catches the cracked lens and the frayed lanyard that a quarterly audit would miss by months. Follow the manufacturer's inspection criteria and service life for each item, and replace on the standard rather than on the budget.

PPE by task, tied to the JHA

The hazard assessment lives at the task level, and the cleanest way to carry it is on the job hazard analysis for that task. A worker grinding does not need a generic PPE list. They need the gear for grinding: safety glasses plus a face shield for the fragments, hearing protection for the noise, gloves for the abrasion, and respiratory protection if the material and ventilation call for it. That stack comes straight out of walking the grinding task by body part.

Building it per task is what keeps PPE honest. A site-wide rule of glasses and hard hats covers the baseline but misses the grinding station, the chemical transfer, the overhead drilling, and the energized work, each of which adds gear the baseline does not. Tie the PPE selection to the JHA for the task and the right gear shows up with the right job, instead of a worker guessing at the gang box.

This also makes the assessment usable instead of a binder nobody opens. When the PPE for a task is written next to the steps of that task, the crew sees it in the pre-task briefing, the foreman can check it at a glance, and a change to the task forces a look at the PPE. The JHA ties the hazard, the step, and the gear together, which is exactly where the hazard assessment needs to land to do any good.

Enforcement and the culture that wears it

PPE only works when it is worn, and worn correctly, which makes enforcement part of the protection, not an afterthought. The assessment can be perfect and the gear can be certified and fitted, and a crew that takes the glasses off the moment the foreman walks away is back to an unprotected eye. Consistent enforcement is what converts a program on paper into protection on the body.

It starts at the top of the crew. A foreman who wears the gear, every task, sets the floor for what is normal far more than a poster does. The opposite is just as true: the supervisor who skips the glasses for a quick cut has told the crew the rule is optional. Lead by example is not a slogan here, it is the mechanism. Workers wear what the people they respect wear.

Pair that with making the right choice the easy choice. Gear that fits and is stocked in the right sizes, kept at hand instead of locked in a trailer, and matched to the task so it is not a guess, gets worn without a fight. Enforcement against gear nobody can comfortably wear breeds resentment and workarounds. Enforcement of gear that fits and makes sense holds. The blunt version: if your crew hates the PPE, fix the PPE before you write up the crew.

Reassess when the task or the hazard changes

A hazard assessment is a snapshot of a task as it was when you walked it, and the moment the task changes the snapshot is stale. New equipment, a new process, a new material, a different location, a change in how the work is sequenced, any of those can introduce a hazard the original assessment never saw. The trigger to reassess is the change, not the calendar.

The common miss is reusing last year's assessment for this year's different job. The crew that switches from a low-noise tool to a jackhammer, or from a water solvent to a flammable one, or from ground-level work to overhead, has changed the hazard to several body parts and needs the assessment updated to match. Make a task change a prompt to look again, and document the new version so the record matches the work being done now, not the work that was done when the binder was first filled.

What to document and keep

Document the assessment by body part, and keep the record where it can be produced. The written hazard assessment certification under the general industry rule identifies the workplace evaluated, who performed the assessment, the date, and that it is a hazard assessment. The useful version goes further and lists, for each task, the body part, the hazard found, and the certified PPE selected against it, so the record reads like the decision instead of a checkbox.

Keep the assessment paired with the training records and the inspection logs, because together they answer the question an inspector or an attorney asks after an incident: did you find the hazard, pick the right gear, train the worker on it, and maintain it. A signed assessment with no training record is half a defense. The records are also what survive turnover, so the next foreman inherits the reasoning, not a gap. A field tool like FieldOS that holds the per-task assessment, the signatures, the training completion, and the inspection dates in one place keeps the paper from being the weak link, but a clean binder works too. What does not work is an assessment nobody can find when it is needed.

The table below is the shape of a usable assessment line. One row per body part for the task, the hazard, and the gear that addresses it.

Common mistakes

• No documented hazard assessment, so there is no record of what was found or why the gear was chosen.
• Reaching for PPE first instead of eliminating, substituting, engineering, or administering the hazard out.
• Uncertified gear, tinted lenses that are not Z87 or boots with no ASTM stamp, standing in for rated PPE.
• The wrong glove or glasses for the hazard, clear glasses against a chemical splash, a cut glove against a solvent.
• Poor fit, so the glasses ride on the forehead and the respirator never seals, and the gear comes off.
• No training on use, care, and the limitations of the gear, so workers trust PPE past its rating.
• Treating an EH boot or a Class E hard hat as insulation to work energized against, instead of de-energizing.
• Reusing a stale assessment after the task, tool, or material changed the hazard.

Field checklist

Standards and references

OSHA is where the duty lives. General industry PPE sits in 29 CFR 1910 Subpart I, with the general requirement, the hazard assessment, the written certification, and the payment and training rules in 1910.132, and the equipment-specific rules for eye and face, head, foot, hand, hearing, and respiratory protection in the sections that follow it. Construction PPE sits in 29 CFR 1926 Subpart E, which requires the assessment and the protective equipment and is written differently on documentation and on fit. OSHA has continued to update the construction PPE rules, so the documentation and fit expectations should be confirmed against the current rule and the AHJ.

OSHA points to consensus standards for the equipment itself, and those are the markings the assessment relies on. Eye and face protection follows ANSI/ISEA Z87.1. Head protection follows ANSI/ISEA Z89.1, with the Type and Class system covered above. Foot protection follows ASTM F2413. Cut-resistant gloves are rated under ANSI/ISEA 105, A1 through A9. High-visibility apparel follows ANSI/ISEA 107, by class. Hearing protection carries an NRR under the federal labeling rule, applied against the OSHA noise standard. Each of these has multiple editions, and the edition a jurisdiction enforces can lag the latest published version, so confirm the required edition with OSHA and the AHJ.

Two electrical hazards run on their own track. Arc flash and shock PPE selection follows NFPA 70E and is the subject of the arc flash PPE guide, and de-energization to remove the hazard follows the lockout/tagout work in that guide. Respiratory protection runs under the OSHA respiratory standard with a full written program, and fall protection under the OSHA fall protection rules. Across all of it, the manufacturer's listed use for the specific product governs how it is worn and maintained, and where a project specification or the AHJ is stricter than the consensus standard, the stricter requirement controls.

Units, terms, and abbreviations

PPE selection carries its own shorthand, and the same hazard reads differently across a spec, a label, and a standard. These are the terms that show up most on the assessment and the gear.

Hazard exposure for noise is given as a time-weighted average in A-weighted decibels, dBA, against an action level commonly set at an 85 dBA 8-hour TWA. Arc-flash exposure is given as incident energy in calories per square centimeter. Cut resistance is an ANSI 105 letter level, A1 to A9. Head protection is a Z89.1 Type, I or II, and Class, G, E, or C. Foot protection is a set of ASTM F2413 designations. Hi-vis is an ANSI 107 Class, 1, 2, or 3.

Hazard assessment

The walk of a task to find the hazard to each body part and select PPE against it, required and, in general industry, documented

Hierarchy of controls

Eliminate, substitute, engineer, administer, then PPE, ranked most to least effective

TWA / dBA

Time-weighted average noise exposure in A-weighted decibels, the basis for the 85 dBA action level

NRR

Noise Reduction Rating on hearing protection, a lab figure that is derated for real-world use

ANSI cut level (A1 to A9)

ANSI/ISEA 105 rating of glove cut resistance, A1 lowest to A9 highest

Type and Class (hard hat)

Z89.1 Type I or II for impact direction, Class G, E, or C for electrical contact

EH / PR / MT

ASTM F2413 footwear add-ons: electrical hazard, puncture resistance, metatarsal protection

Incident energy

Arc-flash thermal exposure in calories per square centimeter, the basis for arc-rated PPE selection

Related tools

Calculators and readiness checks for this work

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