Many of our locations use parking garages and one hazard that can occur in all parking garages is Carbon Monoxide Poisoning. CO is a clear, odorless gas which is created by inefficient combustion emissions. The most common source of CO that Minuteman Parking Company Team Members encounter is from vehicles that we park for visitors to our facilities.

Carbon Monoxide kills by binding up the hemoglobin in the blood. CO has an affinity for hemoglobin that is several times greater than that of oxygen. This means it only takes small amount of CO to bind up a large amount of oxygen delivered to the tissues.

Without the oxygen you will slowly suffocate to death.

What does this mean to you as a Minuteman Parking Company Team Member?  How does Carbon Monoxide affect you?

Here are some signs of Carbon Monoxide poisoning.

• Slight Headache and Dizziness
• Nausea
• Drowsiness and a euphoric feeling
• Unconsciousness
• Death

OSHA has mandated the level of CO that you as employee are allowed to be in for an 8 hour day. The OSHA mandated level is 50 parts per million. This is a very small amount of CO. If you took a million ice cubes and placed them into a room. Then you removed only 50 of those ice cubes. The 50 ice cubes you removed would be the maximum amount of CO OSHA would allow you to be exposed to in an 8 hour day.

Many of our Parking Garages have CO sensors. If you hear the sensors going off in the garage notify your Manager. The sensor alarm means that the CO Levels in the Garage are starting to become unsafe and you will need to take extra precautions in the garage. When the CO sensors start to go off it means that the level of CO in the garage has just hit 50 parts per million. The sensor will get louder and go off more frequently the higher the lever CO gets in the garage.

If the CO sensors start to go off in your garage make sure that you open all stairwells so that air can flow through the garage. This will help push the CO out of the parking garage.  If you need to pull or park a vehicle while the CO Sensors are going off then you need to make sure that you are wearing a mask or have a towel over your mouth and nose so you do not breathe in CO. Make sure you notify all of your fellow team members that the CO sensors are going off and that they need to take extra precaution when parking and pulling vehicles.

Be aware of your surroundings and take your health and the health and safety of others seriously.

Tags: carbon monoxide, CO, OSHA, Safety

This entry was posted on Friday, July 24th, 2009 at 8:14 am and is filed under Safety. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.