Jamie: Hello, and a warm welcome to everybody. We would like to wish everyone a good morning, a good afternoon, or a good evening depending on where you are in the world today. My name is Jamie and I’m one of the co-founders of Safeopedia.
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Today, we’re proud to present CR/FR Clothing: Are you really protected? You’d be Surprised. This Safeopedia webinar has been made possible by DuPont™ Personal Protection, a preferred supplier/member of SafetyNetwork. SafetyNetwork demands excellence, so demand SafetyNetwork. It is now my great pleasure to introduce to you today’s presenter, Dan Bowen. Dan has worked for DuPont™ since 1990 and has held many positions, including product manager, sales and research and development across a variety of business units. He is currently a technical marketing specialist for DuPont™ Safety & Construction. In this role, he helps educate the safety industry about standards, hazards and protective materials used to protect industrial workers and first responders against chemical and fire hazards. I now invite you to sit back, relax, and enjoy the presentation. With that, Dan, please take it away.
Dan: Thank you, Jamie. I’d like to start by thanking everybody for taking time out of their busy day to spend with us. I know a lot of folks on the phone are very focused on keeping people safe, and it’s a time commitment to be away from that job. I very much appreciate the time you’re going to spend with us. At the end of this webinar will be a slide with my email address at the bottom of it. We have a relatively short period of time here today. Being a technical specialist that focuses on this particular subject matter, I can talk incessantly for hours about it. I would urge you to please, if you have follow-up questions or want to have a deeper dialogue after this webinar, please feel free to reach out to me at that email address at the bottom, and it will be given again at the tail end of the presentation.
Here’s what we’re going to talk about today. We’re going to talk a little bit about hazards in the workplace, specifically chemical and flame hazards, talk a little bit about some of the places where you might run into those scenarios. We’re going to talk a little bit about burn injury. We’re then going to get down into the weeds around what does CR/FR really mean, how is it measured, how is it tested, what’s primary, what’s secondary. We’ll talk a little bit about chemical protective clothing as well because these are intertwined. I’ll spend a few minutes on the different standards that are tossed around in the industry that are used sometimes correctly, sometimes incorrectly for evaluating garments – do a little bit of summary on all that. Then, I’ll show a couple of videos on how these garments are actually tested in the lab. At the very end, I’ll show you a few of the options that we offer in that arena.
I like to always start every presentation with this particular slide. This is the OSHA Mandated Hierarchy of Exposure Controls. The message that I like to try and get across is that, as safety professionals, job #1 is always to try and eliminate the hazard. PPE is the last line of defense. It’s not a solution to the problem. When we conduct our hazard analysis, we may find that we’ve got some extreme hazard scenarios or extreme hazard environments in our workplace that, rather than send our workers into harm’s way and throw PPE at the problem, we really need to try and figure out is there a way to either, ideally, completely eliminate the hazard, you know, lower the energy, do it well, do work on an off shift, put other controls in place, use motor-actuated valves instead of a manually actuated valve.
We want to try and if we can’t eliminate the hazard at least reduce it, so we’re minimizing the potential of injury to our workers. In some cases, that’s not possible and that’s where PPE does come in, but I always want to make sure I remind people that it is the last line of defense. You really need to take a step back, and think hard about the hazards you’ve got and if there’s a way to really change what you’re doing or change the equipment you’re using, change the schedule, to make it safe so that people don’t even need to wear PPE.
Let’s talk about chemical heat or flame hazards. A lot of these scenarios do come up more and more every day. If we think about some of the usual suspects, if you will, certainly think about laboratory environments where you might have a research chemist working with pyrophoric materials or flammable solvents. Acetone is used like water in a lot of chemistry labs, right? Acetone is not just a hazardous chemical, but it’s also highly flammable. Think about maintenance operations, hazmat teams that respond to hydrocarbons.
Semiconductor manufacturing, that’s a unique one. There are an awful lot of very exotic gases that are used in the manufacturing of semiconductors. Many of those gases are extremely flammable. The law enforcement community faces this. The crystal meth situation in the United States, a number of years back, saw crystal meth labs, people using the one-pot method, popping up all over the country. The challenge with that particular—and I’ll use the term very loosely—manufacturing process, is that not only are there some fairly caustic chemicals involved, but the solvents that the armchair drug chemists usually utilize for the one-pot meth are going to be highly volatile, flammable solvents as well.
Of course, oil and gas, no surprise there. You go to any refinery, they’re going to use staggering amounts of sulphuric acids, of hydrofluoric acids. Of course, there’s a fire hazard everywhere as soon as you walk through the gates of a refinery. When we look at the industrial community, research community, manufacturing community in America, there are certainly many places where we’ve got multiple hazards that need to be addressed by the safety professional. We take a look at those environments. The first thing that we always have to do is conduct hazard analysis. OSHA, here in the States, mandates that you protect workers, but they don’t always get involve in exactly how you do that, so it’s the safety professional’s responsibility to conduct a hazard analysis, document it and protect your people accordingly. That always starts with the risk assessment. You’re looking at what are the fuels we’re dealing with, what are the materials, what are the hazardous chemicals.
There’re two questions I ask when I’m trying to help people through this process. The first is: what are you working with? We want to understand what is the chemical hazard, or cut hazard, thermal, or whatever it happens to be. What is the hazard you’re working with? The answer to that question leads us to a range of materials that may provide protection from that particular hazard.
The second question is: what are you doing? What are you doing in that environment? What are you doing with that material? What are you doing with that flammable stuff? What are you doing with that hazardous chemical? What are you doing with that high heat environment? That question is what leads us to what kind of garment configuration or PPE configuration is going to be the most appropriate.
A couple of things to think about is when we’re dealing with chemical protective apparel, most of the materials that we think of is traditional HAZMAT suits or chemical protective apparel, aprons, whatever it happens to be, the vast majority of those are made of materials that are flammable polymers. For the lack of a better term, we’ll call them plastics or elastomers.
They are synthetic materials that resemble things like plastic, and they will burn vigorously once they get started. While they may provide a high level of chemical protection, they may offer little to no thermal protection. Worse, in the event that they are exposed to a flame hazard and they ignited, they actually become fuel and have the potential to increase burn injury for workers that got exposed to that.
The last bullet item on this slide is also a big no-no that I run into all the time. I find a lot of people that are wearing—let’s say they’re wearing—it’s an industrial plant, they’re wearing a Nomex coverall, right? Or it’s a first responder and he’s got a turnout gear, bunker gear, you know, a traditional firefighter’s jacket and a bib or pants-style lower body covering.
A lot of times, people will put a chemical protective clothing on over that in a flammable environment and they believe that, “Oh, okay. It’s alright. I’ve got my Nomex on underneath. I’m just going to put this suit on over the top of it.” As I just said, the problem with that is most of those materials, they’re not just flammable, they’re fuel. Because of the nature of them being elastomers or polymers, when they ignite, they’re going to make a bad matter much worse. There are certainly many scenarios—I don’t care how much Nomex you’re wearing underneath it, it’s going to run a pretty significant risk of additional burn injury to the worker. The solution to that is dual hazard garments, chemical-resistant and flame-resisting garments. There are a number of them on the market. I need to spend a minute discussing what these terms mean.
When we talk about flame-resistant garments, these things aren’t necessarily things that are designed to let people walk in fire. What they are is material that, by definition, when the heat source is removed, they don’t continue to burn. As soon as somebody is out of the flames per se, the garment isn’t going to continue to burn. There are a couple of other tests that most of these materials have to pass shortly after the flame or, in other words, after the flame has been removed, how long does that material continue to show visible flame before it extinguishes.
The materials can’t melt or drip. Obviously, it doesn’t help a whole lot if you have a material that turns to liquid that’s really, really hot and now stick to your skin, so these materials shouldn’t melt or drip. There is also a vertical flammability test where the materials are hung in a chamber with a Bunsen burner underneath it. After the Bunsen burner is turned off or the flame is removed, the amount of material, the length of the char is measured. These materials will have a specification of the maximum char length as well. That’s what we mean by flame-resistant garments.
When it comes to chemical protective clothing, there’s a wide range of materials that provide a degree of protection. The materials you need to protect from run a pretty wide gamut. Obviously, it’s got non-hazardous, dirty job type scenarios where the stuff is more of a nuisance. However, if you’re looking at chemical-protective apparel, probably you’re dealing with either hazardous particle, hazardous liquid, or hazardous gas or vapor. When we’re doing that, once again, the bottom half of the slide, what are you working with and what are you doing with that job, and that’s going to lead us to the most appropriate PPE configuration to protect workers from, not just that material but that material doing the job that they’re going to do.
I’ll give you a really good example of where the job that they’re going to do might have an impact. Most of our chemical protective fabrics will hold out acids and bases or caustics at full strength for 8 hours. The vast majority of our materials will do that. We have lighter weight, lower-cost materials and heavier weight, higher-cost materials. The challenges with the lighter weight materials is, well, they may provide the chemical protection necessary, the job somebody is doing, they might need a more physically durable garment to keep that garment from degrading.
If it’s a lab worker standing at a chemical hood that might get a couple of drops on them, an apron is a low-cost material or a lightweight material might work fine. If you’ve got a worker that’s going to be crawling on concrete, or blacktop or working with very abrasive surfaces, that lighter weight material, while it provides chemical protection, it may not have the physical durability to stand up to the test being performed. That’s why that second question is always so important. What are you doing with it? That’s going to lead us to an informed decision on the PPE configuration.
When we talk about chemical PPE, there are a few different ways that manufacturers will talk about materials and what it does. These are the 3 different tests or evaluations that you’ll see referred to. The first is degradation. Degradation is usually going to be more of a visual test where you put the material to be tested in contact with a hazardous chemical and you’re going to see whether it melts, does it burn, does it crack. There’s not a lot of science there; the same thing with penetration.
Penetration is one that frightens me the most because it is an actual ASTM test methodology, but the problem is that there’s no science, is what I’d like to say. Penetration testing is a really, really good test to evaluate your closure systems for liquid tightness. In other words, your zippers, the seams on a garment, the interfaces between a visor and the fabric that the suit is made out of, for example, on a Level A suit. Penetration is great for that. The problem is the visual test where the challenge chemical is put in contact with the material and a lab technician looks at the other side of it to see it they can see the chemical coming through. A lot of the hazardous chemicals that we work with will come through as a vapor or they’ll come through in quantities that aren’t distinguishable to the human eye but they’re, nonetheless, still coming through. That’s where the third test comes in.
Permeation is the chemical resistance test that you should really be looking to for the performance of the gear you’re going to use against chemical hazards. That includes gloves, boots, respirator faces pieces, certainly the suits, the aprons, whatever you’re going to put on people.
Permeation is the measurement of how much time it takes for the chemical to actually make its way through the material being tested. The material is put in direct contact with the fabric—the hazardous chemical is put in direct contact with the fabric or the material to be tested. On the other side of the fabric, there’s a sensor placed against it. That sensor—a stopwatch is started as soon as the hazardous material is in contact. The sensor is looking for, here in the United States or North America, the amount of time it takes for 10th of a microgram per square centimeter per minute to come through that material. Once it reaches that level, the stopwatch is stopped and that’s what gets published in the permeation database.
A true scientific test where we’re looking to see whether that material is really holding that or how long that material is really holding that material chemical out for. So when it comes to chemical protective apparel, the very first place you should be going is the permeation database. Penetration, degradation, yeah, they might be interesting, but they have no place in evaluating chemical protective materials for workers.
Once you know the chemical that you’re working with and the thermal hazard you’re going to face, the next challenge is, okay, what kind of garment design? Like I said, we’ve got everything from sleeves and aprons, to fully encapsulated Level A suits. Many of them are available with different types of seams, different closure systems. You can get everything from snaps, lightweight zippers, hook and look fasteners to a vapor-tight, liquid-tight, Level A-type suit. Of course, the material made need to be more chemical and FR. That’s where the topic of this discussion comes in. We’ve got all of these scenarios where you’re going to need both chemical resistance and flame resistance.
The chemical resistance, we’ve talked about. You want to go to a permeation database, make sure you got the data that supports using that material for the chemical you’re working with. What about flame resistance?
So there are 2 different types of FR garments that we use in the workplace: primary and secondary. The definition of primary FR is it will provide the correct level of thermal protection for workers in the exposure scenario that they might face to minimize their burn injury and provide escape time. It actually is a thermal, insulating material.
The way the process works is a safety professional is supposed to quantify the hazards, the thermal hazard they’ve got in the workplace. Let’s take an example, right? You’ve got hydrogen. Hydrogen is the fuel that you’re potentially working with and you need to quantify it: number one, what temperature does it burn at? Number two, what pressure is it under? What size is the best? Where’s our cut-off relief? Where’s our pressure release valve? If we had a hydrogen leak and it found an ignition source, how long is employee X in manufacturing unit Y potentially going to be exposed to how much thermal energy? With that information, we then try and develop a PPE system, a thermal barrier system for that worker to wear that will provide the level of protection necessary to keep their burn injury in the absolute minimum if, God forbid, they got caught in that scenario. Primary FR does that function.
Think about arc flash. We do an arc flash and net hazard analysis at our manufacturing site, we’ve got switchgear. The engineer that came and did the analysis confirmed that, okay, if this switchgear fails, there’s 13.8 cal hazard for the worker. So what do we do? We make sure that we put garment systems on our electrical workers or people that have to operate that switchgear that’s rated for 13.8 calories or better.
Thermal hazards in the workplace are no different than arc flash. The safety professionals actually are supposed to be quantifying the thermal energy and the duration and then figure out what garment system, what fabric weight or layers of fabrics would provide that level of thermal barrier. That’s primary FR. It keeps the workers safe.
Secondary FR. The sole purpose for secondary FR is to keep the primary FR clean. Think about coal-fired power plant where workers are in an environment that, with coal dust, there may be the potential for a flash fire, so they wear primary FR, they wear Nomex coveralls. Now they’ve got to do a dirty job, they’ve got to grease all the bearings on the conveyor that brings the coal dust in. Well, that’s going to be a dirty job and they don’t want to trash their FR coveralls, so they put something on over the top of them.
That’s where secondary FR comes in. It’s not designed to provide a high degree of thermal barrier. That’s not its job. If you have a thermal hazard in the workplace, workers got to be wearing primary FR rated for it. Secondary FR is usually there to protect the primary FR. If a fire was to happen, number one, it needs to be FR, right? It needs to self-extinguish; number two, it can’t contribute to burn injury. It can’t make the bad matter worse.
This is an area where—I visit a lot of manufacturing sites, right? When people got to do a dirty job and they’re wearing Nomex coveralls as their primary workwear, they usually will grab a Tyvek® coverall, for example. The problem is, Tyvek® is high-density polyethene. It’s fuel. It’s not an FR material. They should be grabbing something that’s secondary FR rated.
The topic of this particular chat was CR/FR combinations. There are some unique environments out there and unique materials that have to do both. So, our primary FR, Nomex coveralls, that doesn’t do anything for chemical hazards, but we may actually have to work with a liquid material that we now need chemical protection for, so we’re going to put something on over the top of that. Most chemical-protective apparel, as I said earlier, is made of flammable materials. That’s not going to cut it. We need a material that we’re going to put on over our primary FR that’s going to provide both chemical protection, so we’re going to go to permeation database, as well as have the ability to self-extinguish when the heat source is removed. Technically, it’s got to be FR but not primary FR. That’s where these garments come in.
So, this particular photograph shows two garments. They look pretty similar, right? They both look like a polymer or a plastic-type suit or an elastomer-based suit. The difference between those two is the one on the left, it’s a heavier fabric weight for one thing, but the other thing that’s unique about it is that’s a dual material or multi-layer garment. The inside of that garment is Nomex. The outside of the garment is a broad spectrum chemical-protective material, that orange material you see on the outside. The broad spectrum chemical-protective material that has an additive in it to make it FR, so as soon as that garment is removed from the heat source, it will indeed self-extinguish. By the way, there’s enough Nomex underneath that, that, that could be worn as primary FR. That worker could be wearing that over absolutely nothing underneath it and would be protected from a pretty decent level of thermal exposure.
Garment on the right looks similar, different color. The difference is, that’s a way thinner, lightweight garment. That garment would have to be worn over primary FR. The worker would have to wear, for example, a Nomex coverall, underneath that particular garment configuration. The other thing to consider in looking at both of those garments is, well, if they’re in an environment that requires them to wear an SCBA with a harness, we better make sure that we’re utilizing breathing apparatus that has some degree of fire resistance or thermal performance test data for it as well.
We’ll change gears a little bit about NFPA standards that exist for FR-type garments. There are a number of NFPA standards out there. Some of these are well understood, some of them are not. NFPA 1991, that’s a hazmat standard. It basically pertains to a Level A suit. There is an optional flash fire escape certification that you can get, which you take a Level A suit and expose it an actual flashover type test, and that’s what’s involved in NFPA 1991. There are garments available, fully encapsulated Level A that would offer not just the chemical holdout, but flash fire escape options as well.
Where does something like that come in? Well, obviously, if you had a flammable atmosphere with a hazardous chemical. A good example of that would be ammonia. Ammonia is widely used as a refrigerant at cold storage facilities, food manufacturing plants all over the world. Ammonia is interesting. If you look at the DOT ERG guide, it’ll tell you that it’s not a flammable material. However, if you get it in a confined space, you can actually get enough of a concentration of ammonia gas that it actually becomes flammable. So folks who are dealing with an ammonia hazard really need to quantify, if they had a leak, is it possible that we would ever get a concentration where the ammonia now becomes a flammable material. That’s wear NFPA 1991 flash fire escape option suit comes in.
NFPA 1992, to the best of my knowledge, there’s not too many of those in the market. ’92 is really more of a liquid test. It’s a shower test. It’s a great test to confirm that the design of your garment keeps liquid out, but there is no permeation testing done in NFPA 1992. So in NFPA 1992, a flash fire option may not give you enough protection. You probably need to do more research and understand what options really exist out there.
2112 and 2113, those are the 2 standards that safety professionals turn to for FR clothing. NFPA 2112, this is one of the most misunderstood standards out there. NFPA 2112, everybody thinks I’ll buy a 2112-compliant garment and I’ve protected my workers. Nothing could be further from the truth. NFPA 2112 is pass/fail standard for garment manufacturers to make a claim that something is FR. It has nothing to do with protecting workers. That’s what 2113 is. You can have up to 50% body burn and pass NFPA 2112. There are probably very few safety professionals on this phone that would accept one of their workers getting 50% body burn. You’d like to have a much lower threshold than that.
2113 is the standard that should be used. By the way, if you send OSHA a letter and ask them for clarification, they will tell you this: you should follow 2113. 2113 is a standard that tells you, you have to conduct a hazard assessment, you’ve got to quantify your thermal hazard and you’ve got to protect your workers accordingly. It also talks about the care, the maintenance, the training, etc., associated with an FR clothing program for your workers. So, people who think they can buy a 2112-compliant garment and they've done their job as a responsible safety person, couldn’t be more wrong. Get 2113 and spend a little bit of time reading it and understanding the ins and the outs of this.
Once again, primary FR, designed to reduce burn injury, increase escape time and—this stuff also, I need to remind people, when we’re talking about primary FR, we’re not putting FR on people and letting them walk in fire. We’re putting FR on people that, God forbid, a flash fire happened at their workplace, we’re going to minimize their burn injury and give them a few extra seconds of escape time to get out of harm’s way.
Not all NFPA standards relate to protective clothing. This one is one of my pet peeves. You will find this particular NFPA standard cited all over the place, especially with rainwear manufacturers and some of the secondary FR manufacturers as well.
NFPA 701 is a standard test method for materials that are going to be used as textile and films so think about draperies, wall coverings, carpeting, those types of materials. It has nothing to do with PPE. It has nothing to do with clothing. By the way, most of the people that will put this on their label also certify it to the 1989 edition, which is way, way not allowed by the NFPA. This standard has nothing to do with a garment.
If you have workers that are wearing rainwear, for example, that the rainwear manufacturer certified that it’s FR based on their ability to pass NFPA 701, you probably ought to, at some point, try and burn that stuff on a mannequin and see what it does because I think you would probably be horrified to see the way a lot of these materials perform. It is not a standard that has anything to do with PPE, and it should not be used to assess the performance of primary or secondary FR clothing for workers.
In summarizing the chemical and flame exposure PPE, you’ve got to go to the permeation database, make sure you’ve got the chemical resistance you need. When it comes to the thermal performance, you’ve got to decide whether they need primary or secondary FR, and then take a look at the options you’ve got and choose accordingly.
This is a little flow chart that takes you through that. You need only chemical protection? Well, then you go to a chemical-resistant material. You need only thermal protection, you can go to a flame or arc flash protection. If you get into the scenario on the right side where you need both chemical and thermal, first question is, well, are your workers wearing primary FR?
Let’s think about integrated circuit chip manufacture. The scenario there, as I said earlier, is a lot of exotic gases are used that happen to be highly flammable. Well, there’s no exposure to those gases. They come in a tiny little cylinder the size of a small home fire extinguisher. The exposure scenario that people have is once a month we change out a cylinder. We’re not likely to put that worker or the people at work in that integrated circuit chip manufacturing plant in primary FR because there isn’t an ongoing thermal hazard. But when they change that tank out, they’ve got both a really nasty chemical, a really aggressive chemical that happens to be highly flammable. In that scenario, they might need a garment that serves primary FR as well as chemical protection.
Contrast that with the people that are wearing primary FR because they work at a refinery. There’s a fire hazard every minute of every day at a refinery. Now, every so often, they’ve got to do a job with a hazardous material. We talked about sulfuric acid being widely used at a refinery, right? Well, they’re going to potentially want to put on a secondary garment that’s going to provide that protection from sulfuric acid, but oh, by the way, if, God forbid, there’s a fire, it’s not going to increase their burn injury.
I talked about how these different garments—I talked about permeation testing for chemicals. When it comes to thermal evaluation, a lot of the testing is done on a thermal mannequin. What is a thermal mannequin? It is a jet fire exposure chamber. There are 12 propane jets that surround a fire-proof mannequin. There are 122 sensors all over the mannequin. What we do is we dress the mannequin in different garment systems and engulf it in a fireball. We can change the duration of the fireball, how many seconds the propane is on for. What we’re doing is we’re measuring how much thermal energy comes through the clothing system and reaches the mannequin skin.
This was a test method that was developed back in the 1970s. The United States was engaged in warfare in Vietnam and we had a lot of helicopter pilots that would survive a helicopter crash, but they would not survive the ensuing fire. The military was looking for a way to evaluate flight suits made of varying materials to understand what flight suit, what material, what fabric weight, etc., would provide a level of protection necessary for our pilot who survived the crash not to become a fatality because of the fire.
There are three facilities in North America that do this testing. There’s one in Richmond, Virginia, there’s one in NC State, there’s one up in Canada at the University of Alberta. This is what is used for the NFPA 2112 test. That’s what the mannequin looks like. Those little dots you see on them are the calorimeters or the sensors. Basically, it’s a fancy name for a thermometer. That’s what we use to measure the thermal energy that comes through. Then software is used to evaluate how bad a person’s burn injury would be if they were in the particular garment system given that millisecond of exposure.
So the garment goes on the mannequin. The mannequin’s dressed up, gets exposed to a fire. After the fire, we take a look at a couple of different things. We look at wear on the human body, second and third-degree—or in the mannequin’s body, second and third-degree burn would have happened. We total it up so that we know how much the total body burn injury is.
We take a look at where, over time, the burn happens. This one is interesting. This chart kind of looks like it was primary FR workwear. Imagine somebody that was wearing Nomex coverall working at a refinery. It’s a rainy day, and now they’re going to put on that NFPA 701 rain suit that isn’t really FR. What’s going to happen in that particular burn, in that middle chart, what you’d see is during the burn, when the propane jets are on, there’s a lot of material covering that mannequin. There’s going to be no burn injury whatsoever for the 4, or 5, or 6, maybe even 8 seconds. However, once the plastic or PVC in that rain suit gets to burning, that’s where the burn injuries go skyrocket. So the burn injury timeline is interesting. Not so much when you’re doing single-layer primary FR garments but when you get into some of the outer garments, cold weather gear, etc., that people are going to wear and seeing just how long it takes for the thermal energy to get to the mannequin.
Then the last thing we look at is the chances of somebody’s survival given that amount of total body burn, it’s grouped by age, 20 to 29, 30 to 39, 40 to 49, 50 to 59. Obviously, the older we get, the less ability our body has to heal itself and the greater the burn injury, the less you’re chance of survival. That’s really what brings this chart up. If you take a look, 25% body burn, younger age group. Older age group, there’s a little fall off in that radical. When you get up in that 50% or 75% body burn injury, boy, the older you get, the less ability your body has to heal itself.
Of course, burns are catastrophic to the human being, many times they’re disfiguring. Depending upon the extent of the burn, they can also have an impact on internal organs; infection is a big deal; months and months in the burn unit, etc. So whenever possible, we want to make sure that we’re giving our people the right level of protection to eliminate or, at the very least, minimize the potential for burn injury.
This is a video that shows the way this testing goes. This particular video has 3 different shirt-pant combos. The one in the left is Nomex, the one in the middle is 100% cotton, the one in the right is cotton/polyester. Lots and lots of people wear cotton/polyester blends because the polyester makes it wash and wear, right? It gets rid of all the wrinkles. The problem is, as you can see on the right-hand side, that, that polyester, once again, is a synthetic material. When it gets burning, it melts, it drips, it makes a much more vigorous fire.
This video really shows you why we put workers in primary FR, because the fire is going to continue until either one of 2 things happen: either a co-worker puts them out or until the fuel is gone. Obviously, that second scenario—people talk about “stop, drop and roll,” well, if you look at that cotton/polyester fire, chances are real good “stop, drop and roll” isn’t going to do a whole lot to put out vigorously burning plastic like that. It’s going to just continue.
So that’s an illustration of the thermal mannequin unit with primary FR. This is the “what not to do moment,” right? I talked earlier about the fact that a lot of people will think, “Oh, I’m wearing Nomex underneath, so it’s okay, I can put on a chemical suit over that.” This particular video shows the difference between 3 different garments.
The one on the left is on over Nomex. It’s a primary FR, Nomex underneath with a non-FR chemical suit on the top. The middle one, there’s no Nomex underneath that. That’s the orange suit we saw earlier. The one on the right is also a non-FR chemical suit. The difference between the one on the left and the one on the right is fabric weight. The one on the left is a very lightweight chemical suit. The one on the right, it’s a broader spectrum chemical suit. You’ll notice, at the bottom, the burn injury goes up significantly the more fuel is there. God forbid that was a Level A that was non-FR, there would be a staggering amount of fuel to continue burning there.
That’s, as I said, a very brief primer on CR/FR. What resources do you have available to you? One of the things I do like to point out is DuPont™ has some certified industrial hygienists on staff that would help you through the process of hazard assessment where we could actually come in and help your safety people go through a job hazard assessment to quantify the hazard and understand what the options are to protect your workers at the appropriate level, to minimize burn injury. That is a service that we do offer. Once again, CIH is—number one, you can always call us on the telephone. We’re always more than happy to provide whatever technical support we can at the other end of the phone line. But if you have some unique environments that would require an on-site visit, that’s also an option as well, the job hazard assessment.
When it comes to our offering, we do actually have a range of suits. The ProShield 6 SFR, that’s a dirty job suit that happens to be FR. It provides 0 chemical resistance, but that guy that’s got to grease the bearings on the coal conveyor, put that on your Nomex coverall, you’re going to keep that Nomex coverall from getting trashed.
The next one is the Tychem 2000 SFR. That one actually has both chemical resistance as well as being a secondary FR garment. Self-extinguishes very quickly when the heat source is removed, but it does provide a protection against a number of hazardous chemicals as well as giving you 100% hold out of hazardous particles.
The Tychem 6000 FR, that was the orange suit that you saw in the middle of that last video and the one that you saw on the previous slide, side by side. Then, at the bottom, is Tychem 10000 FR, that’s our NFPA 1991 that has a flash fire escape option and liquefied gas option certifications.
With that, I’m going to wrap it up. Once again, that’s my name. That’s my email address. We will open this up to questions. But in the coming days, if anybody wants to do a deeper dive or wants to spend some time getting into a little bit more in-depth discussions on this, please don’t hesitate to reach out to myself or us at DuPont™. I’m more than happy to help. With that, I think I’ll pass it back to Jamie to open the floor for questions.
Jamie: Fantastic. Thank you, Dan. Well, you’ve answered everybody’s questions so, unfortunately—just kidding. We’ve got a few that have come in here, but incredible presentation, excellent deep dive. Just a reminder to everybody, we will be sending out a link to the recording as well as the presentation slides in just a few days.
With that, we’ll start it. Ryan here has a question. Can FR clothing be washed at home or is that a bad idea?
Dan: That’s a pretty good question. There’s a range of materials that you’ll find in FR clothing. The materials are going to fall into one or two categories. There are fabric technologies that are inherently flame-resistant and there are fabrics that are chemically treated. For example, let’s go back here. That top garment you see there? That’s actually a wood pulp fiber-type material. It’s a disposable garment that—wood pulp burns, right? The way that, that garment is made FR is it’s got a chemical additive to it.
When it comes to workwear, the two main technology groups are: inherently flame-resistant and treated materials. An inherently flame-resistant material, there’s really nothing you can do to them to make them non-FR. If you’ll give me just a minute, I’ll do a little bit deeper discussion on that.
I like to use the example of paper burning. To understand the way these different FR materials work, you’ve got to understand what combustion is from a chemistry perspective. If I take a lighter and I put it to a piece of paper, everybody on the phone, and if I ask, they would say, “Yeah, the paper’s burning.” Well, that’s not technically accurate. What’s actually burning is the flammable gases that are the by-products of the thermal decomposition of the paper. The lighter puts thermal energy on the paper, excites the molecules, chemical bonds get broken. Some of the chemicals that make up paper are flammable gases. So in the presence of oxygen, a heat source and that flammable gas, those 3 things, make up combustion. Combustion’s a tripod. As soon as you knock one leg out of a tripod, it falls over.
So if you look at inherently flame-resistant materials, the way they do what they do is they don’t make flammable gases. When you heat Nomex or Kevlar up, you get it really up, it’s not making flammable gases. So as soon as the heat source is removed, there’s no fuel, there’s nothing to burn. That’s what makes them flame-retardant or flame-resistant. It’s not a chemical additive. In the DNA of those fibers, they just don’t burn.
Some of the things you’ll run into, you’ll modacrylics or FR rayon. Those materials are usually used as blending products. Where you’ll find them not blended, often times, in things like children’s pajamas, right? They’re really soft. They’re really comfortable fibres or fabric made out of those materials. Unfortunately, they don’t make very durable workwear. They make great pyjamas though, right? Some of those materials are inherently flame-resistant, and when you heat them up, they just don’t make fuel.
The other category is the chemically-treated materials. Those you do have to have a little bit of caution when you launder them. The way that those are made is they’re predominantly going to be made out of cotton, and then a chemical is added, surface-treated to the cotton. That material will undergo a phase change, goes from a solid to a gaseous phase, when it gets hot enough, and that’s what the FR mechanism is.
The challenges with a lot of those materials is you do have to be somewhat cautious with your laundry. Any oxidizing agent, so bleach or peroxide, color-safe bleaches, any oxidizing agent has a potential to remove those materials or potentially cause them to react. If you’re going to home launder your FR clothing, you want to make sure that the person that’s filling the washing machine isn’t using bleach, isn’t using Tide with color-safe bleach in it. You can’t use any oxidizing agents.
The other thing that’s come to light in recent years is if you were to launder with hard water, it’s also possible for the minerals in the hard water to replace the chemical that makes the garments FR. So after X number of washings, it’s no longer an FR cotton garment, it’s just a cotton garment. So there is that concern.
Most industrial launderers have got this pretty well under control. They do understand the laundry requirements for FR treated fabrics. If you’re using an Aramark or Cintas, there are many other ones. I’m not picking anybody on purpose, right? Most of the professional laundry services that service the industrial base have got this pretty well under control, but home laundering, you need to make sure your workers really, really understand that they need to treat this stuff a little differently than their jeans and their t-shirts. Good question.
Jamie: Great. Thanks, Dan. Let’s see. Question from Michael here. Excellent training video showing FR suit protection versus no protection. How and where can we get the videos? Are they on YouTube?
Dan: Yes. DuPont™ has a YouTube channel. We also have a software website called SafeSPEC. SafeSPEC is where you’ll find information on, really, all our products. Chemical-protective suits, we’ve got a website there. Thermal-industrial, which is the Nomex piece. There’s also a cut-resistant portion and controlled environments.
So, if you go to the web and do a search on “DuPont™ SafeSPEC,” that website has a wealth of information including a lot of videos of various different materials being burned. So our YouTube channel and our SafeSPEC website are great places to go to see all kinds of educational videos.
Jamie: Great. Thanks, Dan. Here’s a question from Raymond. Speaking from Canada, does HRC Arc 2 8 cal imply also NFPA 2112 compliance or are these mutually exclusive?
Dan: That’s also a really good question. When you are talking about arc flash-rated garments versus fire-rated garments, it is true that all arc flash-rated garments are FR. It is not true that all FR garments are arc flash-rated. The challenge is free radically different amounts of thermal energy.
A fire in an industrial site—I showed the videos, right? We use propane. At sea level, propane burns at just under 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. A lot of our fuels, gasoline, isopropyl alcohol, they all burn at a particular temperature and it’s going to be down that kind of 1000s range.
The problem with arc flash is twofold: number one, extremely high incident energy. People have attempted to measure the temperature of the core of the plasma cloud during an arc flash and estimates range from 10,000 to 35,000 degrees Fahrenheit, so it’s really, really hot.
The other thing that happens in an arc flash is that temperature and the violence of an arc flash also, usually, results in concussive forces. This is the thing that’s not really apparent to people. When you have an arc fault in whatever equipment it is, usually metal, and I’ll use that term as a generic, copper, aluminum, steel, whatever, some metal is going to become vaporized. When metal vaporizes, it expands in volume radically. Copper expands 40,000 times. It really, really gets big. Well, that energy of all that metal expanding has to go somewhere.
Arc flash-rated garments, the testing is very different. The videos you saw are how we rate primary FR garments for workers for industrial fires. Arc flash testing is a whole different animal where the material to be tested is clamped in front of a calorimeter, so the same sensor we use on the mannequin, but next to that piece of fabric, exposed out in the open, is another calorimeter. About a foot away from those panels of fabric, I think it’s 15 inches, there is a plasma cloud generated. There’s an arc flash created.
Arc flash-rated clothing, there’s two things that we look at. The first is the calorimeter behind the fabric, how much energy, how much heat came through. Then the calorimeter sitting out there open, just exposed, naked, bare to that arc flash measures how much thermal incident energy was there. We might measure 13 cals worth of energy in that blast, then what we’re looking for in that sensor that’s behind the fabric is how much of that heat, how much of those 13 calories actually got through to the mannequin or through to the sensor.
The thing you need to be careful with arc flash-rated clothing—I’m sorry. Let me back up before I make that statement. We’re looking at two things. The first we look at is how much thermal energy comes through, but the second thing is that fabric can’t break open. That’s why I was talking about the concussive forces, the metal expanding kind of like a bomb going off in an arc flash. Not only does the fabric have to provide thermal protection, it can’t break open. If it breaks open from the explosion, now the skin or your flammable undergarments might be exposed. Arc flash-rated gear, those are the 2 things that we look at.
The caution that I make sure that anybody that’s doing NFPA 70E arc flash analysis work is aware of is that number. Let’s say I’ve got a 13 cal shirt or an 8 cal shirt. Raymond asked a question about, “I’ve got an 8 cal shirt, what does that mean?” That fabric, that shirt, the 8 cals, the number that gets reported is the amount of energy that you’ve got a 50% chance of getting burnt. If you’re wearing an 8 cal shirt, you get exposed to an 8 cal event, doesn’t mean you’re getting no burn. The number that gets reported, the 8 cals that you see on the label is the thermal energy at which you have a 50% chance of getting burned.
Why is that important? Well, I like to make sure if I’m dealing with a group of workers that are wearing arc flash-rated clothing that they understand that, “You know what? Maybe it’s safer to err on the side of caution and go with a little heavier garment,” or I’ll at least make sure you’re wearing some undergarment. Wear a long sleeve cotton t-shirt underneath your long-sleeved arc flash-rated shirt because that extra air that capture underneath there provides a lot of extra insulation.
Or, if you’ve got that 13 cal set of switch gears sitting in the power distribution room and you’re guys are wearing 13 cal or 14 cal-rated garments, you know what, why don’t we get a couple of lightweight 4.5 lbs Nomex coveralls that have an arc flash rating on them, let’s hang them on a hook. Before we operate that switchgear, you know what? I’m going to put just a little thin extra layer of protection on top. I’m going to up my protection to 18, or 19 or 20 cals. Because God forbid that thing ever does let go, I’m wearing a 13-cal suit, I get hit with a 13-cal blast, it doesn’t mean I’m walking away completely unharmed.
Jamie: Excellent. Thank you, Dan. Actually, we’ve gotten quite a few questions. I’ll try to hit them all. There’s Jan, Dan, Lavonia and a number of others that are asking about the lifespan of FRC. What factors can shorten the lifespan? How do I know what the lifespan of my particular garment is? If you can talk a little bit about that.
Dan: If you’re dealing with aramid fibers—DuPont™’s not the only company in the world that makes aramid fibers, you know, Twaron, there are a lot of other aramid fiber manufacturers. If you’re dealing with an inherently flame-resistant engineered polymer, something like Nomex, something like Kevlar, there’s nothing you can do to make it non-FR. Ten, fifteen years down the road, you’re going to beat that garment up way before—you’ll never make it non-FR. There’s nothing you can do to wash out or damage the FR properties. In the DNA of those fibres, when you heat them up, they don’t make fuel. That’s what makes them FR.
The treated garments—the other thing that you’ll find is that years back, the chemical that’s used to make cotton FR was invented back in the late 40s. It was a chemical called PROBAN, or it still is called PROBAN, here are other trade names out there. It’s a phosphorous-based material and early treated cotton garments, the stuff didn’t stick very well to the cotton. You get 20, 30 laundering out of it and it wouldn’t hold up for much longer because it wasn’t really sticking to the cotton as well as it could.
Today’s modern FR-treated cotton fabrics, the way the manufacturing process works to make those is the cotton is actually swelled slightly, chemically swelled before the chemical FR is added to it. That makes that FR treatment stick to the cotton a whole lot better. What I find is as long as you launder them carefully, in terms of not putting oxidizing agents on them, those garments are physically going to wear out before you wash that stuff out.
The other challenge of it is when they swell the cotton fibers to make the FR stuff stick really good, which is effective, it does work, what I generally find is that, by the time you’ve laundered those garments 20, 30 times, they are beat. They’re becoming threadbare, all the stitching, the pockets—they’re starting to look pretty ratty and beat up. The process of making that cotton hold on to that FR chemical better really shortens the physical lifecycle of the material.
Now as far as testing, there’s nothing you can do, right? There’s no liquid drops or litmus paper you can put on to confirm that, oh, yeah, this stuff still FR on here. You can burn it, right? You can take that garment and put it on the thermal mannequin, but once you burned it, you can’t use that garment anymore. There’s really no good way to test whether your FRCs still actually have any FR properties, which is part of the value proposition of aramid fiber-based materials. As long as the garment is still intact, it’s still FR.
I routinely—we’ve got that test mannequin that I showed you the videos of. We’ve got a field-deployable version of that, that we travel all over the country with called Thermo-Man; all over North America, really. We take it up to Canada as well.
It’s very common when we’ve got that demonstration unit in the parking lot of a refinery, for example, for somebody to come up to me and say, “Hey, I’ve got a 12-year-old Nomex coverall that I’ve worn forever? I want to see if it’s still FR.” I love burning those because they still perform exactly as they were when they were new. In fact, in some cases, maybe a little better if they’ve shrunk a little bit and the fibers are a little tighter. That’s the value proposition of aramid fiber garments. They last for a long time.
It kind of makes sense, right? Everybody knows Kevlar and Nomex are tough fibres. You make fabric out of a tough fiber, you make a garment out of that fabric, you’re going to have a garment that lasts a lot longer than organic fiber-based material. You get a lot more duty cycle life out of aramid fiber-based coverall than you ever will out of any organic fiber like cotton. Yeah, it costs a little more up front, but it’s going to last you 3, 4, 5 times longer.
Jamie: Thanks, Dan. Great. Jason has a question here. Will the Tychem 6000 FR lose its FR after being contaminated with hydrocarbons such as bunker fuel oil?
Dan: Our recommendation on all of our chemical protective apparel is—we use the word “MUSE,” multiple use, single exposure. A lot of times, people are wearing these garments in case they happen to get exposed. The problem with permeation is there’s no magical way to stop it. Our guidance says if you get the hazardous chemical that you’re worried about on the surface of these garments, you should dispose of them afterwards. There’s no real safe way to decon them and make sure you’ve got all the stuff off. That’s our official policy on it.
I will tell you, anecdotally, once again, because I travel around with the burn rig, I burn a lot of things. The other thing that’s really common for me to run into, especially if I was out—I spend a lot of time with the oil and gas exploration boom that happened in this country in the last few years. It’s very common, not only for people to bring me a 12-year-old Nomex cover all, but, “Hey, I’ve got this nasty coverall that is just covered with grease and grime because I work on a drilling rig. This thing is filthy. I want to know whether these hydrocarbons are going to contribute to my burn injury.”
What I usually find when I burn contaminated garments like that is, during that thermal exposure, most of those hydrocarbons flash off and don’t have a huge effect or any effect on the performance of the primary FR abilities of those garments. Now the exception, I think, if I rolled in a tub of actual grease, you know, I had that level of grease on a garment, okay, that might change things, but most industrial workers, guys on drilling rigs, they’re not rolling in tubs of actual grease. They get a smear here, a spot there. They wipe their hands underneath here and there. That level of contamination does not appreciably increase burn injury.
Do we recommend wearing dirty stuff? No, absolutely not. But the 6000 FR, I would expect to be similar in that light degree of thermal contamination, most of that is going to burn off during the initial exposure. I don’t recommend it and, of course, if you end up with a hydrocarbon on there that gets down in the membrane of that material because you’ve used it 3, 4, 5 days and got it covered with those hydrocarbons, all bets are off. If that stuff is down in the membrane, absolutely, that could radically change your burn injury potential. So multiple use, single exposure.
Jamie: Great. Thanks, Dan. Lee has a question here. What is your opinion on wearing rain suits that are made to NFPA 701 standard over top of a Nomex 3A?
Dan: I have burned lots of 701 garments. If you are thinking about doing that, you ought to send us that rain suit and let us burn it in a lab because you will probably be horrified at the results. The reason they’re testing to 701 is they can’t pass a real FR standard for rain gear. Yeah, they’re going to be cheap. They’re going to cost a whole lot less, but NFPA 701, 1989 edition, the reason they’re testing to that standard is they can’t pass a legitimate FR standard, and it is really, really scary when you burn some of these because they don’t self-extinguish, they just keep burning. They burn in a giant, black cloud of evil-looking smoke. It’s really eye-opening. That is one of my favorite burns to do.
As I said, I spend a lot of time with the petrochem industry both on the exploration side and the refining side. Refineries, most of the stuff’s outside, right? You’ve got workers outside. That is one of the most common aha! moment burns that I do. “Hey, bring me the rainwear you guys are wearing that has a little FR on the label, and let’s see what it really does.” It is horrific when you see how some of these so-called FR garments burn that have only been tested to 701. Don’t do it.
Do your research. Burn test it or take a look at some of the other rainwear manufacturers that do actually test. I think 7933 is actually a test standard for rainwear. There does, indeed, exist a meaningful standard for rainwear. That’s the one you should be looking at. If anybody’s testing to 701, they’re doing it for a reason. It’s because they can’t pass a real rainwear standard burn test.
Jamie: So that’s a firm no, I would say.
Dan: Sorry, I’ll get off my soapbox.
Jamie: No, that’s fantastic. Great question. If there’s anybody looking for clarity, absolutely, the answer is do not do that.
We’re right at the hour mark. Dan, we’ve got many, many more questions. Maybe we can ask just a couple more? Really appreciate everybody hanging around as well. Again, if you have to jump off, we really appreciate your time. All the questions will be on the recording, so if you have to jump off but don’t want to miss the remaining questions, absolutely, they’ll be on the recording as well. If we don’t get your question, we can have Dan follow up with you and answer your questions directly. With that, a couple more.
Doreen has a question here. We have been using the Tychem 2000 SFR for benzene vapor levels that are between 0.25 parts per million to 25 parts per million. Does this provide the required protection? The data available was penetration and no permeation data. Workers change out every 2 hours. It is also worn over ProShield 6 FR.
Dan: So the 2000 SFR, we have permeation data for a number of materials. If we don’t have it for that benzene—now that’s a relatively low concentration of the material. Reach out to us. We will do some testing at request, but you really, really, really only trust permeation data. Penetration is really meaningless for chemical protection.
Jamie: Alright. Thanks, Dan. Shaquille has a question. What garment/fabric is suitable for using in tropical regions? Is there any difference that have FR and CR properties? Looking for the breathability with both properties.
Dan: Yeah. So, the holy grail is highly breathable, chemically-resistant material. The problem is that the holy grail does not exist, at least the ones for chemical suits. There may be people seeking another holy grail, but the breathable chemical material, the problem with all of these PPE, I don’t care what it is, is every single thing you put on is going to increase the heat burn.
There are a few different manufacturers out there that offer breathables, that’s kind of the generic term, the scientific term is semi-permeable membranes, those are all based upon microscopically perforated, polytetrafluoroethylene or Teflon, whatever you want to call it. The challenge with those is, number one, they’re not real lightweight and, technically, they do let some water vapor pass through, but they’re certainly far from tropical-weight-comfortable type clothing.
The other thing you need to be cautious about with those materials is if water can find its way to through, other little tiny molecules will be able to find their way through as well, especially things that might be soluble in water. You really need to, once again, do your homework with those materials in terms of permeation testing of the different chemicals you’re working with and confirm whether it really will hold them out. Oh, by the way, what if we get water mixed in? Does that change it?
Heat stress is a big—it’s a problem. There’s no good solution other than hydration and fitness level for your people. There’s been a lot of research done the last few years on heat stress. The heat stress, it runs a gamut. Any time you put anything on, any kind of PPE, you’re increase the heat burn on the human being inside, so there’s certainly been a lot of focus on the industrial side.
The other thing that’s coming to light is the incident rate of first responders with heart attacks, with cancers, etc. Firefighters wearing that heavy gear all the time, the heat burn that they’re facing is also a big deal in terms of the potential long-term health impacts. The research has come back and the 2 things that have the biggest impact on a person’s ability to deal with heat stress are hydration and fitness level.
If you’re dealing with a tropical environment—when we say tropical environment, let’s go to Mississippi in August. That’s a tropical environment, right? It doesn’t get more humid than that. If you’ve got workers that are going to be using PPE in those environments, limit their work time, make sure they’re hydrated, pay a lot of attention to medical monitoring. The holy grail does not exist yet in terms of the highly-breathable broad spectrum chemical protective materials.
Jamie: Great. Thanks, Dan. Well, looks like we’ll do one last question and that is awarded to Nathan. Nathan asks, “Are the garments that have been exposed to heat or high heat but not necessarily direct flame, can they be reused or are they considered a single exposure garment at this point?”
Dan: That’s an interesting question. Let me give you a real-life example where this one comes up. What you’ll generally find, like a Nomex coverall or a firefighter’s turnout gear is the material will still be FR, it depends on how hot you’ve got it. If you get it really, really hot, the dye will flash out of it, the dye will burn off. So a dark blue coverall will become tan.
If you get it really hot, that material will become brittle when it cools down. So as long as the fabric hasn’t become embrittled, it’s still okay. Where I see this commonly is—go to a fire academy. We’ve all driven by it. All over North America, fire departments have got those cement buildings with stairs on them that they do training in. Inside those buildings, what they do is for firefighters that are training, structural firefighter training, they’ll burn pallets or they’ll burn straw and there’s going to be firefighters that work at the academy that are stoking those fires.
It’s very common—let’s say they’re wearing a set of turnout gear, you know, firefighter’s jacket and pants made by vendor X and it’s black or it’s really, really dark blue. Well after they’ve worked in that fire tower for a while, the sleeve—let’s say they’re right-handed and they’re shovelling, and their left hand is in front of the shovel and is always posed towards the fire, that sleeve will start to discolor. It will start to change from being black or dark blue to a golden or a tan type color. That’s exactly what’s happening. The dye has been burned off, but the fabric is still intact.
If you get exposed to high heat, it may discolor some, as long as the fabric is still supple and feels like fabric, it’s still going to be FR material.
Nomex will embrittle. If you get it really, really hot and then cool it down—if you’ve got it hot enough to make it stiff and brittle, don’t use it. It’ll literally crack. It can get hard enough that you can crack it if you really, really get it hot. But low to moderate level exposure that may cause a little bit of discoloring, as long as they haven’t changed the physical feel of that fabric, they’ll still provide thermal protection.
Jamie: Perfect. Good test case. That’s really a great question by Nathan.
Alright well, looks like we’re at the end. I apologize if we didn’t get to your questions. Thank you so much for submitting them. We definitely will follow up with you directly.
With that, Dan, do you have any final words?
Dan: I’m just going to thank everybody again for hanging with me. Very, very grateful to have the opportunity to talk to folks today. Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule and your busy days. Please, you’ve got my email address, reach out if we can be of any help. Once again, go to SafeSPEC, poke around there. There’s great technical information on that website as well.
Jamie: Awesome. Thank you, Dan. Great presentation, very educational as always.
Special thanks to DuPont™ Personal Protection. Really, really large thank you for sponsoring the webinar. We really appreciate it.
Most importantly, thank you to the audience. Without the audience, none of this would be happening. We understand that you have valuable time and a choice of where to spend it, and we’re extremely grateful that you’re spending some of it with us.
Thanks to all of the folks behind the scenes here at Safeopedia and safety network. We know how hard you work so very, very large thank you to everyone there as well. Small reminder, we will be sending out the recording in just a few days.
With that, thanks again to everyone. Take care and stay safe.
Dan: Thanks, everyone.