Excerpts from the ChicagoTribune.com:
During 38 years as a Chicago firefighter, George Beary regularly heard the emergency sirens as he rode on the back of the firetruck. Since his retirement in 2005, Beary, the chairman of a committee of retired Chicago firefighters, said he suffers from tinnitus, a condition that causes ringing or buzzing in the ears.
Beary, former vice president of Chicago Firefighters Union Local 2, is among about 4,400 current and former firefighters nationwide who are suing Federal Signal, an Oak Brook-based company that makes sirens, claiming it didn’t do enough to make them safer for those on firetrucks. Since 1999, Beary said he and about 700 Chicago firefighters have filed suit. Some have been settled or ruled on, but the vast majority, about 500, are still open.
Firefighters contend the company could have designed sirens in a way that directs the volume away from areas where firefighters sit in the engines, shielding them from sound blasts that lawyers say reach 120 decibels, roughly equivalent to a rock concert.
Federal Signal argues that directing the sound defeats one of the main purposes of a siren — to warn motorists and pedestrians that a truck is coming. And it says it has long supported what many departments have advised their firefighters to do: wear ear protection.
David Duffy, attorney for Federal Signal, said studies measuring the level of noise firefighters are exposed to during their work shifts, including sirens, is on average below 85 decibels.
The lawsuits, which began surfacing more than a decade ago, have been in places such as New York, Philadelphia, Boston, New Jersey and the Chicago area, said attorney Marc Bern, who’s leading all of them. In documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company said juries have decided in favor of Federal Signal in most of the half-dozen or so suits that have gone to trial.
The company also has settled in some cases without admitting any wrongdoing. The largest settlement, reached in 2011, required the company to pay $3.6 million to 1,069 firefighters for cases filed in Philadelphia.
Federal standards take into account the intensity of the sound and the duration. The higher the decibel level, the shorter the time workers can be exposed to it. Rick Neitzel, who studies noise and other exposures at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, said the standards are geared to traditional jobs like manufacturing, not firefighting, where shifts can last longer and the exposure is intermittent but intense.
thanks Dan
