Don't inhale...
Petrol workers accident prone on drive home
PETROL station workers are more than twice as likely to have an accident while driving home as on the way to work. This is the first confirmation of a link between low-level exposure to petrol fumes and road accidents.
Even motorists inhaling petrol fumes at a self-service station may be more likely to have a crash, according to Jung-Der Wang at the National Taiwan University, Taipei, who led the study.
His team looked at the number of road accidents experienced by a group of 20,000 workers at the same company. Nearly half worked on petrol station forecourts and had therefore been exposed to petrol fumes, the rest had office jobs or similar and were the control group. There was no demographic difference between the two groups.
The employees had 626 injury-causing road accidents between 1991 and 2000, with the forecourt workers having 61 per cent more accidents than the office workers. But even more telling was the timing of the extra accidents. There was no statistical difference between their accident rates on the drive to work. But on the way home, the accident rate of the forecourt workers was 2.4 times that of the office workers. The study will appear in a future issue of Accident Analysis and Prevention.
“The petrol station workers had 61 per cent more accidents than office workers, most of which happened on the way home”Though the study did not monitor the extent of exposure to petrol fumes, the link was clearly demonstrated by a change in accident rates after 1997. That was when Taiwan's Environmental Protection Administration made it a legal requirement for petrol stations to install vapour recovery systems. These suck petrol vapour back into the storage tank during refuelling, cutting vapour release by 90 per cent. After these devices were installed, the accident rate of forecourt workers dropped to the same level as in the general population.
Vapour recovery devices are mandatory in areas of the US with a local pollution problem. And though they are not yet common in Europe, a European Union directive states that all petrol stations should install them as part of its drive to cut emissions of volatile organic compounds. The UK is not planning to implement the directive until at least 2010.
From issue 2508 of New Scientist magazine, 15 July 2005, page 16
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Originally Posted by Beemer
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