Our maintenance yard sits just off North Dupont Highway in Delaware, behind a welding shop. If you've driven that stretch, you've probably seen utility trucks and crews in white coveralls. I'm the person behind the purchase orders.

I'm a procurement manager for a municipal utility contractor with about 40 field employees. I've handled a safety gear budget close to $60,000 a year for six years, negotiated with more than 30 vendors, and logged every purchase in a cost-tracking spreadsheet. Not because I love spreadsheets. Because early orders kept going wrong, and the only way I could find the problem was to put every number in one place.

This checklist is for supervisors, facility maintenance leads, buyers, and anyone else who has to outfit sewer, drainage, or confined-space crews. Seven steps. Do them in order.

  1. Put the hazards on paper before you open a catalog.
  2. Verify your atmospheric detection equipment.
  3. Match the coverall to the real exposure.
  4. Choose work gloves for the task and break them in properly.
  5. Order the full size range, not just the sizes you guess are average.
  6. Compare total cost, not unit price.
  7. Record what you bought and why.

Who shouldn't use this checklist

This list assumes municipal sewer and stormwater maintenance work. It doesn't cover hazmat emergency response or industrial sewers with heavy solvent and acid loads. If your crews wear fully encapsulating suits and SCBA, or if they're dealing with chemicals that require a site-specific exposure assessment, this checklist isn't your starting point. Call an industrial hygienist and build the protection plan before you talk to a supplier.

Step 1: Put the hazards on paper before opening a catalog

Every piece of gear in this article exists because of a hazard. So name the hazard first.

For a typical sewer job, the list looks something like this:

  • oxygen-deficient atmosphere
  • hydrogen sulfide, methane, and other combustible gases
  • splash from contaminated water
  • sewage dust and particulates
  • cuts, punctures, and abrasions from pipe, concrete, and embedded metal

Write those down on a one-page form. If the form is blank, you're not ready to buy anything. If it has hazards you're not sure how to control, that's the moment to bring in help, not the moment to guess.

Step 2: Confirm your sewer gas detector before you touch coveralls

A coverall won't help if a worker goes down a ladder into an oxygen-deficient manhole. So the first purchase order isn't for clothing. It's for gas detection.

Minimum setup for a sewer crew is a four-gas meter: oxygen, lower explosive limit, hydrogen sulfide, and carbon monoxide. That meter is your sewer gas detector. It needs a calibration schedule, not just a charged battery.

Per OSHA's permit-required confined spaces standard (29 CFR 1910.146), the atmosphere must be tested for oxygen content, flammability, and toxic contaminants before entry. Verify the current regulatory text at osha.gov.

Looking back, I should have standardized on one detector model and one calibration schedule in year one. At the time, crews brought whatever meter happened to be charged, and calibrated meant the box wasn't blinking red. We stopped a job for two hours once because nobody could confirm a sensor was trustworthy. The meter was probably fine. But probably isn't a calibration record.

Now every meter has a sticker with a next-calibration date, and the calibration kit is a line item in the annual safety budget. It's not the glamorous purchase. It's the one I'd never cut.

Step 3: Match the coverall to the exposure, not to the name on the box

Once the atmosphere is managed, the next issue is skin and clothing contamination. For dried sewage dust, light splash from non-concentrated wastewater, and general grime, a disposable coverall is the right tool.

For a lot of our maintenance jobs, that tool is the DuPont Tyvek 400 disposable hazmat coverall suit. I order it repeatedly. But I also make sure every supervisor understands its limits.

Tyvek 400 is not a chemical suit. It gives you a barrier against dry particles and light liquid splash. It won't stop concentrated solvents, strong acids, or heavy chemical exposure. That hazmat word on the box can convince a foreman that the suit protects against everything. It doesn't. If someone is going to kneel in a pool of liquid chemical or get splashed with concentrated industrial waste, you need a garment designed for chemical splash, with permeation data for the specific chemical. Don't guess on that one.

Step 4: Pick leather work gloves for handling tasks, then break them in the right way

For the handling side of sewer work—moving pipe, pulling cable, setting steel plates, handling forms—leather work gloves are still my default. They hold up to abrasion, they breathe, and they give better grip than most coated gloves once they're broken in.

But leather has a limit: it absorbs moisture. If the crew is working in wastewater or handling wet corrosive material, don't use leather. Use a nitrile or coated glove designed for wet work, and keep the leather for dry handling tasks.

How to break in leather gloves without ruining them

Here's how to break in leather gloves the slow way that actually works.

  1. Wear the new gloves for 15 to 20 minutes at the end of a shift. Make fists, open your hands, and flex your fingers so the leather starts to move with you.
  2. Apply a small amount of leather conditioner, like neatsfoot oil or mink oil. Massage it into the palm and the back of the hand, not just the fingertips.
  3. Let the gloves dry naturally at room temperature. Keep them away from direct heat, which shrinks and stiffens leather.
  4. Repeat that for two or three days before you send someone out for a full shift.

What I don't recommend is soaking new gloves in hot water. I've seen that soften leather at first, then shrink it into a stiff mess. After that, nobody wants to wear them, and you're back to buying replacements.

Step 5: Order the full size range, not the average size

Safety gear only works when it fits. In my first year, I made the classic specification error: I assumed standard sizing meant the same thing to every vendor and every worker. It didn't.

We ordered a pallet of coveralls in two sizes because the unit price was good. Then a new hire who needed a much larger size split a shoulder seam on the first pull. It wasn't a suit defect. It was a sizing failure. We didn't have a formal fitting process, and the two-hour wait for a replacement cost more than the discount we got on the bad order.

Real talk: if a pair of work gloves doesn't fit, workers won't wear them. And gloves that don't get worn cost more than the comfortable pair you didn't buy.

Now every new hire gets fitted on day one. Coverall sizes and glove sizes go into the employee file. No one gets told that'll stretch. If a specific worker needs a 3XL or an XXL glove, we buy that size, and we keep a small stock of each size in the supply room.

Step 6: Compare total cost, not unit price

This is where a lot of procurement mistakes hide. A distributor can quote a beautiful low unit price and make the money back in freight, handling fees, minimum order quantities, or restocking charges.

In Q2 2024, I compared four quotes for a 240-piece coverall order. The cheapest unit price was about 70 cents per suit less than a local distributor located just off North Dupont Highway. I almost sent the order to the cheaper vendor. Then I added freight and the restocking fee we'd pay if we needed to swap sizes. The local vendor's total cost was actually lower.

I hit approve and immediately second-guessed the unit price. Didn't relax until the invoice arrived with no freight line and the suits showed up the next morning. That's when I remembered the lesson: unit price is a starting point, not a conclusion.

My spreadsheet now includes unit price, freight, handling fees, restocking terms, estimated lead time, and size availability. If a vendor won't put those numbers in writing, they don't get the order.

Step 7: Record what you bought and why

Every order goes into a log. It helps with audits, budgets, and future decisions. After tracking 46 orders over four years, I found that nearly 14 percent of our PPE budget overruns came from expedited shipping. We implemented a minimum stock rule and reviewed it quarterly. The expedite line basically disappeared.

The log doesn't need to be fancy. Order date, vendor, item, sizes, unit cost, total cost, job type, and the hazard that justified it. Six months later, you'll be able to see which purchases were waste and which ones earned their place in the budget.

What usually goes wrong anyway

A few problems show up no matter how good the checklist is. First, someone buys the cheapest unit price without accounting for fit, delivery time, or whether the crew will actually wear the gear. Second, someone treats Tyvek 400 as if it were a chemical barrier suit. Third, gas detector calibration gets postponed until a sensor beeps at the wrong moment. Fourth, someone skips the glove break-in process and declares the gloves useless.

Here's my honest take: no PPE list is universal. I recommend this checklist for typical municipal sewer and confined-space maintenance, but if your situation doesn't fit, don't force it. Tell the supervisor you need a specialist review. A half-day industrial hygiene consultation is cheaper than the gear you might buy by mistake, and a lot cheaper than the alternative.