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Grata's Guide:Skull buckets have been protecting noggins for 80 years
Sunday, November 14, 1999 By Joe Grata, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Don't be caught working on a highway, bridge, transit or other construction project without your "skull bucket."
Eh?
A skull bucket is a hard hat, and the hard hat's 80th birthday is this year.
An article in Highway Builder, a quarterly publication of the Associated Pennsylvania Constructors, a trade group, called the hard hat's birthday to my attention.
"Bet you didn't know that," magazine editor/APC official Ron Geist said.
Nope. This hard head didn't know it.
The article sent me searching the Internet for Bullard, the Kentucky-based firm that invented the hard hat. Today, it's one of the world's largest manufacturers of personal protection headgear that also includes police riot shields, firefighter helmets and safety respirators.
Here's a quick history of the hard hat, based on information from Bullard:
The company was started in San Francisco by E.D. Bullard and sold carbide lamps and mining equipment to gold and copper miners.
When Bullard's son returned from World War I, during which he wore a helmet as a "doughboy," he and his father came up with the "hard-boiled hat," so-named because it was manufactured of canvas and glue shaped on a mold, then steamed.
The hat, with a suspension-type head band inside, debuted commercially in 1919 as a way to reduce head injuries.
America's first "hard hat area" was set up in the 1930s at the Golden Gate Bridge construction site in San Francisco. The hats were fabricated of metal, tough enough to deflect falling steel rivets.
In 1938, Bullard came out with relatively lightweight aluminum helmets. You wouldn't want to be wearing one of these just anywhere, because aluminum is a great conductor of electricity.
Three-ribbed, heat-resistant fiberglass replaced aluminum in hard hats in the 1940s. Then came thermoplastic hats. Then came today's hat, produced from polyethylene plastic that makes it lightweight, durable, nonconductive to electricity and easy to mold. Its features include a suspension system to absorb the impact of falling objects and inhibitors to protect against the effects of weather.
Hard hats have saved lives, prevented injuries and lessened the severity of injuries over the years. Nobody knows how many -- but many.
For Pennsylvania Department of Transportation workers, hard hats come in three colors. Supervisors and foremen wear white hats, while rank-and-file maintenance workers wear orange hats. Mechanics at PennDOT garages wear smaller green-colored hard hats, called "bump caps" for the protection they provide workers who service and repair heavy equipment and vehicles in confined spaces amid sharp metal parts.
PennDOT's rank-and-file wore yellow hard hats until about 10 years ago, when they switched to orange.
"The yellow color attracted bees," PennDOT maintenance engineer Bill Sacco said.
The popularity of hard hats reaches farther than you might imagine. When Geist searched "hard hat" on the Internet to prepare his article, he found 5,812 Web pages. One caught his attention, and mine too: www.hardhatbeer.com, home of American Brewing Co.
The Lake Park, Fla., company that brews Hard Hat Beer "for the American workingman" sponsors a Miss Hard Hat competition and sells Boxer Rebellion Hard Hat boxer shorts.
The Hard Hat beer folks and others with hard hat Web pages need to remind their computer visitors that personal protection equipment works only if you wear it.
• • • •
"White hats" meeting. More than 500 PennDOT employees left their white hard hats home Nov. 1 to 5 while they attended meetings at a rustic but plush vacation spot in the Pocono Mountains.
The meetings dealt with topics such as "How To Handle People" and "Improving Listening Skills," PennDOT spokesman Steve Chizmar said. I had him repeat the information, to make sure he didn't say "how to manhandle people," or "in one ear and out the other."
This year's annual Quality Improvement Conference -- a.k.a. PennDOT Retreat -- took place at the 500-acre Split Rock Resort, overlooking Lake Harmony and offering amenities such as an indoor pool, massages, bowling alley, movie theater, 18-hole golf course and fitness center.
Most PennDOT management employees split the week at Split Rock, away from their assigned districts for three days of training and back at work for a day or so. Administrators and speakers stayed all week, serving as the conference staff.
About 40 employees working out of the District 11 office in Bridgeville traveled to the Poconos.
The tab, to be paid out of the Motor License Fund -- your gas taxes -- is still being calculated. It's estimated that lodging, meals and travel will cost about $150,000.
PennDOT has held similar conferences in past years at other quality digs, including Nemacolin Woodlands near Uniontown and Toftrees Resort in State College.
• • • •
Plate du jour. PG copy editor John O'Brien found this Pennsylvania license to be incongruous as the driver sat in a long line of rush-hour traffic on Route 28: SOLIT2D. "That ain't my idea of solitude," O'Brien said. Nor mine.
Factoid. The city of Pittsburgh owns 700 sets of steps, 264 retaining walls, 115 bridges and 3,103 lane-miles of roadway, a lane-mile being one lane of road covering a distance of one mile.
Send your transportation questions, complaints and suggestions to Joe Grata c/o the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, or e-mail him at jgrata@post-gazette.com Please include address and phone number for confirmation.
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