Pavement Preservation Journal, Summer 2015, Vol. 8, No. 2
By Tom Kuennen
At World of Asphalt/AGG1 2015 in March in Baltimore, the road maintenance and pavement preservation community celebrated the release of new industry cold milling guidelines that will provide a reduction in airborne silica particles in the work zone, while forestalling onerous industry regulations. The new guidelines, released in March – Best Practice Engineering Control Guidelines to Control Worker Exposure to Respirable Crystalline Silica during Asphalt Pavement Milling – are the result of a collaboration between federal worker safety agencies, national associations and labor unions, and cold milling equipment manufacturers.
Available as DHHS (NIOSH) Publication No. 2015-105, the document represents more than 10 years of collaborative research by labor, industry and government to reduce respirable crystalline silica exposure during asphalt pavement milling in highway construction.
The collaborative research began when the Silica/Asphalt Milling Machine Partnership was formed at the 2003 National Asphalt Pavement Association annual meeting, and studies on milling machine dust controls began later that year.