Simple Solutions for Reduced Fish Farm Hazards

ABSTRACT

Aquaculture poses emerging challenges for agricultural safety and health. Fish farming has many of the same hazards as other types of farming, but it also poses additional hazards associated with water impoundments and night-time work. In a multidisciplinary approach, researchers from four universities are identifying occupational hazards in fish farming and identifying no-cost or low-cost “simple solutions” to reduce or eliminate them. Simple solutions are discovered through farm visits so as to understand the countermeasures that individual stakeholders have taken to protect their workforce, and these countermeasures are documented and photographed to inform other farmers of these solutions. Equipping tractors with rollover protective structures is a standard practice to protect operators from serious injury in the event of an overturn. Other solutions identified include eliminating the need to climb feed bins to open and close the hatch for feed delivery by using a pull-cable at ground level. This simple technology eliminates the exposure to falling from an elevation, a risk that accounts for at least one reported death of a worker on a fish farm. Another solution is to replace metal paddles on a hatchery trough with plastic paddles that if and when entangled in a worker's hair or clothing slip on the rotating drive shaft and thus reduce laceration and entanglement injuries. Another simple solution to prevent entanglements in large pond aerators, used to mechanically dissolve oxygen into the water, that are operated by farm tractor power take-off shafts is to use electrically powered aerators. Bubble-type aerators are safer than electrically powered paddle aerators because workers are shielded from moving parts. Many additional simple solutions have been identified for a range of tasks in this environment.

KEYWORDS:

• Aquaculture
• fish
• fish farm
• hazards
• safety

The authors are also grateful to Robert Durborow and Tiffany Ogunsanya of Kentucky State University, Terry Hanson of Auburn University, Gregg Ibendahl and Walt Stevens of Mississippi State University, and Ken Lacroix, a safety consultant in British Columbia, for their contribution as field investigators. The authors also appreciate the editorial assistance of Teresa Donovan of the University of Kentucky, College of Public Health.

Notes

NIOSH funded this research through Cooperative Agreement 2 U50 OH007547-07. The University of Kentucky Office of Research Integrity provided review and approval of the human subjects' aspects of this project under IRB protocol 06-0564-P2G.