Take lots of breaks and rest in the shade

Tools of the Trade: Summer Safety

At CNL, we care about our workers. Their health and safety is very important. How do we protect our workers when they are working inside old buildings and outdoors during the hot summer months? In addition to the safety tips from the previous page, there are a few cool tools at our disposal.

We give them lots of breaks and if they are outside, we even have air conditioned trailers that they can cool off in.

If it is really hot, we have cooling vests and suits to wear underneath the Tyvek protective suits. Water in the suits is cooled by an ice pack and moves through small pipes inside the vest which keeps the workers cool.

CNL also has strict times and time limits that workers work in hot conditions, and we look at the daily weather forecast and temperatures to create our schedules and set time limits.

But just how hot is too hot?

Our bodies feel heat differently depending on lots of factors. To figure out how best to protect our staff on hot days, the Industrial Hygiene team at CRL conducts a "Wet Bulb Globe Test." This test takes into account the heat from the sun, evaporation, and the movement of air.

Have a thermometer at home? Try this for yourself! You can see how your body will react to the humidity outside by covering a thermometer with a wet cloth. As water evaporates from the cloth, you will see that the thermometer cools down – just like how our bodies cool down with sweat. On less humid days, the water evaporates faster, helping keep you cool.