Prescription Safety Glasses
They can be hard to find, but today's safety glasses are as attractive as designer street glasses and offer much better protection.
Synopsis: Wearing safety glasses doesn’t mean you have to be uncomfortable or look like a geek, even if you need prescription lenses. This article describes the variety of safety glasses that are available, and suggests where to get them.
Anybody remember Gump Worsley? He was the last goaltender in the National Hockey League to play his entire career without wearing a mask. Worsley, who retired in 1974, is the perfect symbol of a bygone era: a time before bicycle helmets, child safety seats, shoulder harnesses, air bags and secondhand smoke; a time when lead paint and asbestos were respected building materials. Thankfully, we take personal safety a lot more seriously these days — except when it comes to our eyes.
According to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), 1,000 eye injuries occur every day in American workplaces, almost one-third resulting in some vision loss. Prevent Blindness America, the nation’s leading volunteer eye-health organization, estimates that as many as 90% of these injuries could be prevented with the use of proper eye wear. Some work hazards — chemical handling, spot welding, concrete chipping, for example — require specialized types of eye protection. But for the most part, residential builders just need a good pair of safety glasses with side shields.
Why not street glasses?
A job site is a dangerous place. You never know when an errant nail, a lump of concrete or a dropped pry bar might fly through the air. Cliff Valarose, a health and safety trainer with the United Brotherhood of Carpenters, emphasizes that safety glasses are not something to be worn only when you think your eyes might be at risk. “Safety glasses with side shields must be worn all the time. If you get in the habit of taking them on and off, you’ll get complacent, and that’s when serious eye injuries can occur.”
Builders with 20/20 vision have it relatively easy: They can choose safety glasses from a huge variety of wrap-around styles that look almost as cool as the Oakley sport glasses worn by professional athletes. Of course, they have to get used to wearing glasses all day long. Visually challenged builders like me don’t have that problem. But we have the dork factor to contend with. For years, our eye-protection options were limited to inexpensive but dorky safety specs that we had to wear over our street glasses, or we could choose from a limited number of dorky prescription safety glasses, all of which involved minor variations on the Buddy Holly theme.
Small wonder that many of us convinced ourselves that our street glasses were all we really needed to protect our eyesight on the job. These days, all eyeglass lenses are designed to be shatterproof, so street glasses can provide a modest level of eye protection. But they offer no protection against side impacts or severe frontal impacts. Terry Krug, a construction instructor at OSHA’s Training Institute, warns that a severe impact can shatter a street-glass lens, or worse, he says, “The lens could be driven into the eye and actually scoop out the eyeball.” Yuck.
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