Page 1563 - Xmo Strata - Bulletin Archive

HSSE Bulletin No 586

21 September 2017

The Hearing Loss Risk Curve

At this year’s Xmo Strata safety week, we made several commitments to our employees regarding their
welfare, health and fitness and one of them was to employ an Occupational Health Practitioner to
monitor noise levels on a site we are working on and if necessary generate an action plan to manage the
noise as effectively and reasonably practicably as we can.

Following the on-site assessment that was conducted by our environmental services partner using Rion
Analysers, we attended three IOSH Noise Workshops which illustrated the damage that noise can do in
a very effective way. The graph below is shared with the express permission of Industrial Noise &
Vibration Centre, whom we are pleased to credit as the information source.

This graph depicts the effect of noise on peoples hearing over various exposure times and you will note
that the longer the exposure time, the more hearing loss is sustained. The percentage of the population
affected is measured as the percentage with moderate or severe hearing loss.

The bottom line indicates that typically, 5% of the population will suffer from significant hearing loss in
old age. The top line shows that after exposure to 110dB of noise for 10 years, more than 40% of people
will suffer significant hearing loss and more than 90% will after 50 year’s exposure.