Associate Professor of Environmental Health and Safety Engineering
John and Willie Leone Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering
College of Earth and Mineral Sciences
The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA
Although Texas rejects heat safety regulation for workers, they have put a system in place for children in schools: https://bit.ly/3TXuo2B. This is great. Just realize that everyone’s safety should be a public concern.
Excited to be piloting a new course this Fall semester studying how AI models and Human Beings are similar or different when asked to make a risk-related engineering decision. This is one of the most pressing current issues in our field and could affect how we manage AI use in the future.
Students will develop and run an experiment, collecting real, original data, and present something new, that no one has seen before. I can’t wait!
The press commentary on permanent daylight saving time (DST) in the US is really confusing the point and misleading people when they need to be ready to advocate for themselves and not expect whatever happens in Congress to be the end of the story. So, here’s the deal (from a safety and health perspective):
– Having nearly the entire country of 340 million people suddenly change schedules by a whole hour causes more accidents as people lose sleep (Spring) or stay out late anticipating getting more sleep (Fall) or have to go out or return home in darkness when that had not been true the day before. Stopping this change would be an improvement. – There’s nothing that forces us to start work or school at 8:30am or 7:47am or any other time. That is a decision entirely under control of each school board or workplace management team. Also, that time does not have to be consistent throughout the entire year. It could change depending on season as many businesses already do in the summer. We could start work at 9:00am in the winter and 8:00am during the rest of the year for instance, if that makes sense for our community. – There are health benefits to having work or school start at a certain time relative to when the sun rises. What time the sun rises depends on the season, how far north or south you are, and your relative east-west position in your time zone. There is an “ideal” time to wake up for most people related to the time of dawn/sun rise, not some arbitrary number on the clock. This is true for both adults and children, and for children this time varies with age. DST fixes this for some locations and disrupts it for others.
So, what should we do? Get the data on when the sun rises and sets in your location throughout the year. Discuss school start times with your school board or work management: ideally 1-2 hours after sunrise for elementary school students, for example. See when the chosen start time goes outside the ideal range and then consider adjusting the time for those weeks or months. For communities in the southern US, no adjustments may be needed, but those in northern states may want to set a winter schedule to optimize safety and learning.
Some places would still be changing time then? Yes, but only those where the safety and health benefits of the change outweigh the harms and disruption of the change. Some may not change at all, and others only change their start times by 30 min.
And, by the way, if we keep the biannual DST adjustment, we can still do this. If a community doesn’t need the 1-hour DST clock adjustment, they can change their start times to counteract that time change and maintain their start time relative to sunrise. Back when we started this, we didn’t know what we know now about the science of circadian rhythms, learning potential, accidents, and health impacts. We do now, and we need to take it into account to make work and school as beneficial as possible including optimizing how we set start times.
Low cost air quality sensors are an excellent tool for capturing trends in pollutant concentrations in an area, but they are not without certain limitations as this article describes: https://bit.ly/4tJA2BJThese limitations can be partially overcome with calibration (possible in certain laboratories like ours) and model corrections. But, since not everyone is able to do that, here’s what you should know about the results you get from these sensors: they are generally right on trends (if they say concentrations are increasing, they probably are) but not necessarily right on reported levels (if the sensor reads 20 micrograms per cubic meter, it might really be 15 or 12 or 25). The sensors are impacted by humidity as well as the characteristics of the particulate matter being measured (particle size distribution, shape, composition, etc.). These are a valuable tool for deciding where we need to collect more careful data.
As we clean up large sources of toxic air pollutant exposure in our environment, we are able to find things like this: a study linking exposure to particulate matter and NO2 to cognitive decline: https://bit.ly/43hIzRw
The mean exposure in this study was 6.9 micrograms of particulate matter per cubic meter, and 12.9 parts per billion of nitrogen dioxide, both of which are considerably lower than the US National Air Quality Standards for these pollutants of 15 mcg/m3 for PM2.5 and 53 ppb for NO2.
Nuclear power is generally safe, reliable, and has a lower environmental impact than alternatives, but faces general public distrust and fear. Changes to NRC directives recently reported on < https://n.pr/4kfQqXG> that reduce safety requirements without public review run counter to nuclear power’s main impediment to growth. Many of these changes don’t even seem to reduce cost, so their utility to anyone is in question.
The safety of AI in medical devices is another version of a question being faced in many different industries right now, but is not an entirely new kind of problem. AI is just elaborate code and algebra, too lengthy and complex for review by a human being, but still quantifiable. The question of how much review and testing is necessary to determine safety is what we need to figure out how to answer. Testing for safety still has value however, and resigning ourselves to constantly changing operational parameters that may occasionally result in disastrous consequences is not something we have to do.
I remain unclear on what the administration means by this announcement: https://n.pr/4bCWOpr. Cost effectiveness analysis is a way to quantify the cost of health benefits without putting a dollar amount on the value of those benefits directly in the way benefit-cost analysis does. But the health costs of exposure to pollutants or contaminants in treating the resulting cancer, cardiopulmonary disease, and other issues is significant. Nearly all pollution and contaminant exposure regulations are justified on the basis of offsetting these significant health costs. If we do not consider reduced health costs in the calculation, all regulations from limiting lead in food and water, to reducing toxic chemicals in the air might not be justifiable and would look oddly expensive. It may be hard to notice clarifications on this in the future given but the legal basis for all regulation might be at stake.
The most significant Halloween safety risk for most participants is auto-pedestrian crashes. Large numbers of pedestrians present in places where they are not normally at night and wearing strange clothes that can impede their own and others’ visibility. These studies found a 43% higher risk on Halloween in the US: https://bit.ly/4ntKQ3W, and 34% higher in the UK: https://bit.ly/47dcJs6.
Wear bright visible costumes (they manufacture black reflective tape and fabric now, in case you don’t want to go looking like a safety worker), go in groups with a designated lookout, adult supervision is essential for small children, and don’t trick-or-treat under the influence.
Capturing carbon dioxide from pre-combustion natural gas (https://politi.co/47gbJSE) does not have the same co-benefits for reduced health-related effects from emissions as capturing CO2 from exhaust gasses. I’m not for the perfect being the enemy of the good, but maybe public investment should encourage more exhaust capture since this will have immediate health-related benefits and similar climate mitigation to this pre-combustion capture. This seems to be a carbon permit finance-related low-hanging-fruit-type project in CA.
In one of the most resounding safety victories of the past 40 years, firefighters spend less time fighting fires, and people and buildings are less likely to be lost to fire (50% fewer deaths according to Vox: https://bit.ly/4pKALBJ). There was no magic bullet. It was a long series of unexciting improvements in warning devices, building codes, regulations, reduced indoor smoking, and safer electrical systems. This isn’t automatic. It takes investment, effort, research, and good decision making, but when we agree on the objective, this kind of result is achievable.
New data on the air quality impacts of 3D printers in classrooms from UL shows these are of minimal concern, at least with proper ventilation in the school (https://bit.ly/4999W4j).Short lived increases in ultrafine particles and VOCs were observed. And since printers are unlikely to be operating continuously, the type of low temperature polymer 3D printers used in schools appear to be low risk. While not all studied printers have previously been so “clean”. 3D printing in general likely holds promise to significantly reduce exposures to operators from more traditional milling and welding processes as the technology continues to develop.
Tunisian violent protest over air quality and pollution concerns https://bit.ly/48yDXul. People have little control over the air they breathe. Wherever we live, we need some independent authority to manage emissions to the air whether that’s from major industries like this case, or from households burning fuel for heat and cooking. It can’t be “anything goes”. In this case, people express their anger at a long running issue that has not been resolved. There exist solutions to mitigate these emissions. It is only a matter of investment and attention.
This is an interesting air pollution visualization tool: https://bit.ly/47kfo32.I’m still trying to work out the details of how the ‘puffs’ of particulate matter fade/disperse. This only include major emitters, so many local sources, especially numerous ones like vehicle traffic and home heating, are not included. It is a useful way to visualize how pollution disperses across an area from a single origin point, but it is not a complete picture of exposure.
New paper links trichloroethylene (TCE) exposure to Parkinson’s disease (https://bit.ly/3L9rof6). TCE is a degreasing agent, has previously been used in dry cleaning and coffee decaffeination, and helps produce other chemicals. Using EPA national air toxics assessment has some uncertainty when applied to low concentration chemicals like TCE and come correlated exposure may in fact be more responsible, but identifying the locations to test this idea is a valuable step. The reported increase in risk from TCE exposure is about 10%. It is important to note that the reason we can identify effects of this magnitude from exposure concentrations 2-3 orders of magnitude below the OSHA permissible exposure limit is partly due to the improvements in environmental quality that have been achieved over the past few decades. (https://bit.ly/4o2q77N )
Managing air quality in warm sunny places is challenging as this experience in Texas shows (https://bit.ly/42oYsWr). The photochemical effects make the same emissions more harmful than they would be in a colder, cloudier place. But this isn’t new; the methods for improving air quality are mostly well understood, and lessons from other cities show that rapid progress can be made. The public health burden of ozone and other pollutants is considerable as it results in additional asthma, cardiovascular disease, and premature death. Individuals can’t really control their exposure to air pollution by themselves, but upgrading technology and changing practices can collectively have incredibly positive impact.
New study from American Lung Assocation suggests that replacing industrial boilers with heat pumps by 2050 would prevent 77,200 premature deaths and 204,000 asthma cases (https://bit.ly/46HchSF). Electrifying building and some process heat doesn’t eliminate all emissions as most are transferred back to the power plants on the local grid, but power plants are more efficient, better maintained, and produce fewer pollutants per unit of energy than small scale installations like oil or natural gas boilers for individual buildings. This amounts to 6 prevented cases of asthma and 2.3 prevented fatalities per replaced boiler. Most of this technology is ready today and helping people breathe easier is an immense benefit to quality of life and productivity.
We really need rapid response risk maps available to media in the event of major pollution events like the refinery fire in El Segundo, CA this past Thursday (https://bit.ly/4gZEcke). In the same way as we do with hurricanes, people need to know if they are in a region of concern or not at a glance, and maps work better than text descriptions now that most have smartphones. Knowing current wind patterns, adding data from sensor networks where available, and previous similar events (fires, releases, spills, etc.) can be enough to make quick predictions in minutes of where people need to take action or not. The EPA or NWS could do this, and it would be invaluable to emergency management. Like this case, many of these will not be major exposure events, but we should have the ability to show people to engender trust as to why they were not at significant risk.
We usually think of indoor air quality and temperature as primarily a comfort issue, a modern convenience that we should be able to do without, but that’s not the whole story. When it’s too hot, we make worse decisions (http://bit.ly/4gWaqNg) and take risks (http://bit.ly/48cICSy). We don’t perform as well on cognitive tests when there’s more fine particulate matter in the air (https://bit.ly/4nxaFAN) or elevated carbon dioxide (https://bit.ly/3VLVkQF), a sign of poor ventilation. And these aren’t the only relevant factors. Impacts on chronic disease also occur. Having clean, comfortable indoor air is a health and safety issue and we pay a cost when it isn’t provided in more human error.
This is my favorite International Space Station safety requirement. I sat in far too many meetings discussing what the objective of this was and what was sufficient rationale, if any existed, to waive it (we did in fact, waive it for the ARED weight machine, after a design change that limited the hole in question to a depth of about half an inch). Is a half-inch deep feature still a hole?
