Safety Vests Can Save Lives
Posted on June 6, 2010Normally, a pedestrian is struck by a motor vehicle someplace in the world every 8 minutes. 5,600 people are killed each year by vehicles and another 80,000 are seriously injured – many of them while crossing streets or intersections. Nonetheless, only a small percentage of these cases are people who spend much of their time near moving vehicles: road workers.
And this is credited largely in part to the simple implementation of safety protectors. Safety vests are basically light weight vests worn over normal clothing, with bright fluorescent colors like orange or yellow, and frequently with specially designed reflective strips – all designed to make the wearer as visible to the human eye as humanly possible in as many circumstances and environments as possible.
The first component of safety vests making them visible is merely their color. To get a high level of visibility, it’s clear to go for brighter colors like orange and yellow, but there’s some other reasons behind these choices. The backgrounds in which a wearer operates are crucial. On open highways for instance, the vests worn by road workers are generally a vibrant orange to contrast with the two most primarily abundant colors: the dark green of trees or landscape beside the road, or the blue sky.
Orange in particular is a complimentary color of blue – that is, its exact opposite on the color spectrum, making for the finest contrast in between the two colors, and as a result, the greatest visibility. This is the same purpose why many signs and signals warning of construction or obstructions ahead are painted in the same color. The color yellow, and most of its similar shades and tints are most likely to remain constant between those suffering from various kinds of color blindness. These protection supplies come in all different types, shapes, and of course sizes.
The reflective strips found on safety vests will also be the product of much research. These are constructed of retroreflectors, which reflect light with minimal dispersal back toward their source. However, unlike a mirror, retroreflectors can reflect light back towards the source from an angle of incidence much greater than zero – meaning, the device doesn’t need to be pointed directly at the light source in order to reflect light back toward it, as opposed to a mirror which must be positioned correctly perpendicularly.
This really is typically achieve by arranging three mutually perpendicular mirrors to form a corner, much like three touching sides of a cube. This geometrical alignment enables light to be reflected toward its source from any route. Needless to say in the application of clothing, the “mirrors” in question are unbelievably tiny and made of reflective fibers or scotchlite, a material made of millions of tiny glass beads with a metallic reflective surface painted on one surface.
Together, these two easy applications substantially increase the visibility of those wearing safety vests, subsequently making their presence much more clear and greatly lowering the risk of an incident.
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