Measures for the Individuation of a New Paradigm for the Evaluation of Impulsive Events in Worker Protection from Noise

In Europe the protection of workers from damage arising from prolonged exposure to sources of noise is assured by Directive 2003/10/EC. This directive defines health and safety requirements and creates a minimum guaranteed level of protection for all European Community workers. Unfortunately, this legislation has a number of shortcomings, which render protection not as effective in respect of its original aims. First, it does not place enough emphasis on impulsive events. These last are characterized by extremely high sound pressure level values (SPLs) but, because of their short temporal duration, cannot influence the daily exposure dose LEX, 8h which is one of the two main parameters used to classify a sound as either harmful or not in the legislation. Second, there is the choice of the C-frequency weighted curve, which strongly and artificially underrates the level of peak sound pressure ppeak. In this paper, through analysis of several data sources, the above mentioned failures will be highlighted and it will be demonstrated how these shortcomings are a serious impediment to achievement of preventive measures for effective health protection of workers. The analyses presented in this paper refer to various working and industrial activities – sampled by the writers during their research - and they aim to identify those values of the physical parameters that could determine the onset of physical damage.