Dust particles are inevitable during construction activities as several factors accelerate them. For instance, cutting materials, transporting materials, or even using certain construction materials are major culprits to dust build-up in your construction site. Before you know how well to minimize fugitive dust, you need to understand how to get rid of dust in the air. Below find important steps to reduce fugitive dust during construction.
Understand What Fugitive Dust Is
The first step in reducing fugitive dust during construction is to understand what exactly fugitive dust is. It’s primarily traces of dust particles that come in the form of particulate matter. Those particles are not safe health-wise and even in a general construction site setting. You need to keep in mind that fugitive dust is not visible particles you can see in the air in the form of soot or dirt particles. It can also be invisible and harbor your construction equipment without your knowledge. Once you understand what fugitive dust is, you can go to the next step in reducing it and companies like BossTek offer help on this.
Know What Causes Fugitive Dust
Before getting the solution to fugitive dust, it’s best to understand where exactly it comes from or what causes it. Since your construction site is a beehive of activities, several factors contribute to fugitive dust. At first, if you’re using truck vehicles to move your materials to the worksite, the soil is disturbed resulting in fugitive dust. Additionally, choosing the wrong size building materials means that you’ll need to trim them to the right sizes. This releases too much dust in the air around your construction area. Also, even bare ground is a big cause of fugitive dust as erosion agents such as water and wind carry away the soil. Most importantly, there are many causes of fugitive dust during construction and the only way to reduce them is to understand them better.
Be Aware of the Dangers of Fugitive Dust
It’s important to understand that fugitive dust is not only a nuisance but a major problem to your construction site. First, it’s detrimental to your worker’s health thanks to the health effects it poses, including skin allergies, breathing issues, and eye infections. Your equipment and machine are also not safe either from fugitive dust. When the small dust particles settle on the nuts and bolts of this equipment, they lower their efficiency. This means that you start incurring repair and regular maintenance costs. Additionally, fugitive dust is also a nuisance to your immediate surroundings. This might bring serious repercussions to your business, including closure by the authorities.
Come Up With Control Measures
The final step is to devise fugitive dust control measures. You want to make your construction site a safe and healthy place to work from. Therefore, coming up with methods to eliminate fugitive dust will support the idea. For instance, you can install dust collection systems to help capture fugitive dust particles during construction. Additionally, you can decide to apply misting water sprays to hold dust particles together, and as a result, keep dust clouds down. Since water is quite a tedious and temporary method, you can supplement it with dust chemicals which offer a more permanent solution. More permanent solutions include setting up barriers and planting vegetation to avoid soil erosion that leads to dust.
Inhaling fugitive dust can cause numerous health complications. To prevent this, construction site owners should use the best fugitive dust control practices to keep workers safe which ensures you complete more projects.