The Importance of Safety Boots at a Work Site

Why is it important? 

Safety boots importance cannot be overemphasized if you’ve ever worked on an active job site. It’s one of the first lessons that you’ll learn when you start, but it’s also something that you might get a little blasé about if you’ve been working for a while.  

After all, you’ve never had an accident before, so maybe it’s not essential to wear those worksite safety boots every single time you head out to the site, right? Wrong.  

At Active Workwear we care about the safety of our clients.  

This is why we’re writing this post about the importance of workwear safety boots. We’ll go over the potential injuries that you might be subjected to if you’re not wearing the right safety equipment in the next section, but for now, let’s look at what might happen on site.  

• You could drop a heavy block or tool on your foot 
• If your shoes don’t have good traction, you could slip and fall 
• Should you be working with live electricity, you could end up being electrocuted 
• You might step on a protruding nail 

At best, these items could all lead to serious injuries that keep you off work. At worst, you could end up dead. 

Ready to put on those safety boots yet? Let’s go through some of the injuries that you might be setting yourself up for if not.  

Injuries that you could get from not wearing safety boots 

• With construction sites especially, there are many heavy items being moved around such as bricks and stones. This is not so much of a problem until they fall on your foot. Think about working a construction site with a cumbersome cast 
• Someone could accidentally drop equipment on your feet or drive over one of them. Again, that’s likely to be a bone-crushing injury without the right protection 
• You could slip and fracture or break a bone without the right safety footwear 
• A small injury, such as a piece of glass or a nail cutting your foot, could put you out of work for a day 

You get the idea. You are looking at broken bones or fractures at the very least. Isn’t it worth a little discomfort to protect your body and prevent serious injury?  

Before you answer that, keep in mind that we’re not talking about a little scratch here that you can stick a plaster on — we’re talking serious bodily harm.  

Basic requirements 

According to the basic ISO certifications, for a boot to be recognized as safety gear, it must be resistant to an impact of at least 200 joules. That means that it must be able to hold up when something relatively heavy is dropped on it.  

Now, if Joe the driver gets careless and rolls over your foot with four-tonne road roller, the shoes aren’t going to do you much good. However, for general impacts, like where someone drops a block on your foot, they’ll save you some serious pain. 

The ISO requirements go into more detail. We’ve covered their guidelines in one of our other posts, but for now, it’s enough to say that you need to find footwear that’s suited to your work conditions. 

So, if you’re working with live electricity, you need insulated footwear. If you’re working on a slippery surface, you need slip-resistant boots. We hope you understand safety boots importance now. Perform a full safety footwear risk assessment and choose the right boots for the conditions.