Talk:Occupational hazards of fire debris cleanup

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 17 January 2020 and 16 April 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Beauchcn.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 01:47, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

Proposed deletion

Hello @Elysia (Wiki Ed) and Beauchcn:. I have nominated this article for deletion. The deletion discussion is here. Eric ^talk 15:40, 25 March 2020 (UTC)

Eric, thanks for the ping. Also notifying the instructor of the course TMorata. I generally do not take place in AfD discussions for student work, but I encourage the student and instructor to take steps to improve this article. I've added a couple of references and expanded the scope so that it goes beyond listing chemicals that fire cleanup workers may be exposed to, which is a concern listed at the deletion discussion. Elysia (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:25, 25 March 2020 (UTC)

Hi Elysia- As you can tell, I don't think the topic warrants an encyclopedia article. But if it is kept, as many such articles are, it will want a more suitable title, such as "Hazardous substances in fire debris". Eric ^talk 17:31, 25 March 2020 (UTC)

Eric, my rationale in retitling it to its current title was bringing it in line with similar articles like Occupational hazards in dentistry, Occupational hazards of grain facilities, Occupational hazards of solar panel installation, and Occupational hazards of human nail dust (though now I'm thinking I should have retitled it with "of" instead of "with" fire debris cleanup. By expanding it today with some safety considerations Occupational hazards with fire debris cleanup#Safety hazards I hoped to go beyond hazardous substances. We'll see how the AfD shakes out. Elysia (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:53, 25 March 2020 (UTC)

Oh, please, I wish I didn't know about those other articles. I don't even dare look at them. Stuff like that on Wikipedia makes it challenging for people to take us seriously. In any case, it would be "in" or "associated with" instead of "of" or "with". But the article talks about substances, not "occupational hazards". Eric ^talk 19:46, 25 March 2020 (UTC)

Hello @Elysia (Wiki Ed) and @Eric and User:John P. Sadowski (NIOSH). Thank you for your input. There are many visions of what belongs in an Encyclopedia in 2021. I work in public health, and we want to make sure the public has access to information that can improve their lives. In coordination with WikiMedicine and the WikiProject Occupational Safety and health I have been working in different ways to bring that info into Wikipedia, as described in my user page. Having said that, I do care about Wikipedia being taken seriously. Do I take from your comments that you think it would make more sense to have the information on risks associated with certain professions to be part of the articles on those professions rather stand alone articles? Or can you think of another way to do it? I would appreciate your input TMorata (talk) 15:51, 27 March 2020 (UTC)

sending through pings @Eric and John P. Sadowski (NIOSH):. Elysia (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:11, 27 March 2020 (UTC)

@Eric: Hazardous substances are hazards. John P. Sadowski (NIOSH) (talk) 18:48, 27 March 2020 (UTC)

Silica is not a "hazard". It is a substance that can be hazardous under certain conditions. Maybe just a matter of semantics, but this is an encyclopedia...

Regarding the notion of having an article that proposes to list anything hazardous one might encounter in fire debris: Virtually any substance that has ever existed on Earth might be encountered at the site of a fire. Are we going to list all of them, and the bad things that could possibly happen to a person who is exposed to them? We might just as well create an article called "Bad things you might encounter on a walk down the street", in which we list every potentially hazardous substance ever known to have existed. Eric ^talk 04:12, 28 March 2020 (UTC)

We have reliable sources backed by scientific data giving us the identities and precise concentrations of the substances that are hazardous, and methods to control them. You seem to be characterizing this as flippant, but figuring out these things is a serious scientific and regulatory pursuit, and is definitely worthy of inclusion in an encyclopedia. John P. Sadowski (NIOSH) (talk) 08:21, 28 March 2020 (UTC)

A hazard is an agent which has the potential to cause harm to a vulnerable target. Silica dust or fumes constitute a hazard under this definition and in these circumstances. Big monolithic lumps of it may constitute a different hazard if they are likely to fall on your head in a quarry.

This article could be of value for people working under these conditions, but even without the rationale of possible practical usefulness to the uninformed reader, it is a non-trivial technical field of interest to other people, and that is usually sufficient to justify an article. i.e. It is a notable topic. The subject is sufficiently serious to have legislation and codes of practice covering it. These will vary by jurisdiction, of course, and there may be third world countries which do not legislate or enforce occupational health and safety. The article should be restructured under the present title to cover the classes of hazard rather than listing examples (though some materials are common enough to deserve specific mention), the severity of risks associated with the hazards, and the methods of addressing these risks so that workers can clean up in a reasonably practicable level of safety and with a low risk of long term occupational health problems, and mitigation of the effects of incidents or contamination by harmful materials or hazardous structures. There is scope here for a large and informative article, and Wikipedia does not have to be built in a day. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 15:18, 4 April 2020 (UTC)

Thanks to all for your input. I feel compelled to note that, if I'm not mistaken, most sand is composed primarily of silica. So do we create an article that describes how a face-plant during a beach volleyball match could result in aspiration of silica? Do we create Occupational hazards encountered by arborists, in which we state that one could fall out a tree and be injured while working in its branches? I'm not trying to be difficult, just trying to point out that we could easily go down a long, tortuous rabbit hole attempting to delineate all the hazards X one might encounter engaging in activity Y. And we could end up with many articles having long, ungainly titles that attempt to define the given hazard set. I don't think that would be an improvement to the encyclopedia. Eric ^talk 16:17, 4 April 2020 (UTC)

Eric, You are not mistaken in that a lot of sand is quartz grains, but sand grains are not silica dust, they are too large. Silica dust particles must be small enough to make their way to the alveoli to cause silicosis. Aspiration of beach sand could cause choking or asphyxiation, but not silicosis. Although the encyclopedia is limited to a finite size, it is not currently limited by storage space, and there is still a lot of scope for improvement by expanding the range of health and safety articles, which are unlikely to ever approach the number of articles on living or dead people, sportspeople, films, literature, species of organism, or any of a huge range of other fields that are growing by double figures per day. Providing that notability can be established, reliable sources are available, and that the subject matter is not better treated as part of another article, we do not limit the number of articles in a field of knowledge. As for your example, I have no idea whether there is sufficient material from reliable sources to make an article Occupational hazards encountered by arborists viable, and would have to consider it as and when the problem arises, applying the content policies applicable at the time. Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 19:10, 4 April 2020 (UTC)