Last month’s out of court settlement of fairly high compensation for a number of operatives afflicted with hand and arm vibration syndrome, commonly called white finger, will cause much concern in the tunnelling industry.
Hand tunnelling with pneumatic tools remains one of the bread and butter techniques on most jobs, especially for initial starts, side adits, small awkward irregular areas and the like. It is either impossible or uneconomic to find a machine to do the same job.
But those options will increasingly have to be explored as the industry is faced with cases similar to that in more general construction and industry. Or many more workers will be needed to do the same task because of limits on use of some equipment.
The agreement with North West Water settled sums of several hundred thousand pounds on some of the more seriously afflicted workers and showed, according to industry experts that there is an upwardly rising trend for this kind of compensation.
The North West operatives seem to have been engaged in general direct labour maintenance work and would have used straightforward jackhammers and other vibrating tools for much of their work. But then so do tunnellers.
It is argued by some that construction miners and tunnellers work differently because their use of tools is intermittent and varied – unlike, say, in a factory where vibration continues all through the shift. But the medical profession says damage from vibration is cumulative, much as radiation damage is.
Health and safety requires more stringent controls and rightly so; white finger is a horrible disease, causing, in the very worse cases, loss of fingers.
But controls may have been interpreted very tightly in some situations. In fact the exposure limit set at present of 2.8m³/sec is not an absolute cut off for work but an action threshold. Workers above this level must be regularly and properly monitored for incipient white finger, and moved to other work if necessary.
A special committee of the BTS has been discussing these issues with HSE at present in an effort to find a workable solution; it is hoped they will soon have an answer.
But then another issue arises: noise damage to hearing. This could be even more important for an industry whose workplaces are almost always noise filled.
