Noah Swart

Blog Topic

What is OEL?

OSHA

Mr. Moss

   The American workforce is exposed to many different dangers in just a typical day to day job. This risk increases in industrial work, and chemical management. The government appointed a federal agency to monitor and prevent common work accidents from occurring. This agency is called OSHA Environmental Safety and Health Association, and although there are others that have the same intended purpose OSHA still remains the watchdog for the health of working American.

  When most people think about work related accidents they will probably think about falls, equipment malfunctions, or burns. While these accidents make up a large portion of the work force accidents they don’t account for the management of chemicals or any toxic materials, OSHA although is in charge of managing just these types of dangers. They do this through the use of OEL’s, PEL’s, and TLV’s. To start PEL stands for Permissible Exposure Limit, which is typically the amount of time you can be exposed to a concentration of hazardous materials in workplace air. This prevention method has been around for over sixty years now, and although it almost never gets the necessary exposure limit update it has set the bar for the absolute minimum of time to prevent chemical hazards.

Hazard

   As PEL is OHSA’s definition is the same as OEL’s and TLV’s they all stand for acceptable exposure limits, OEL being Occupational Exposure Limit’s and is usually the most commonly referred to limit. TLV stands for Threshold Limit Value and is the set standard for how much of a certain chemical substance a worker can be exposed to daily for a working lifetime. This limit is set to make sure the worker doesn’t retire just to discover adverse health effects that can exponentially shorten their life. These limits set an important baseline in protecting the health of the American worker, and although most government set limits are viewed as the absolute minimal an employer is required to set, it still shows a slow advancement creep to bettering the safety and health of the working world.