Primary publication: TIEFBAU January 2009

The article is for civil engineers and safety engineers who have to take the Vibrations Directive into account:

What hazards are to be expected from whole body and hand-arm vibrations?

What impact will the tightening measures of the EU Directive have on contractors?

Summary: Workers can be exposed to a wide variety of risks arising from physical agents at their workplaces such as, for example, noise, vibration, electromagnetic fields and artificial optical radiation; the physical agents that occur most often in the construction industry are noise and whole-body and hand-arm vibration. To deal with these two potential health hazards at the workplace, the European Union (EU) issued the two EC directives regarding the exposure of workers to risks arising from noise and vibration in 2002 and 2003 and published them in the Official Journal of the European Union.