I developed a condition where my feet burn when they get wet in anyway. I found that Gold bond foot powder keeps the burning from sweat away. Nothing helps if they really get wet.
I developed a condition where my feet burn when they get wet in anyway. I found that Gold bond foot powder keeps the burning from sweat away. Nothing helps if they really get wet.
I used Rustoleum NeverWet spray treatment on my kart racing suit and shoes and it resists water getting in but still allows my feet to breath. I don't think it would work well enough to just spray some hightops and go to work but you might be able to treat some other article of clothing that would go inside or over your rubber boots. How about using activated charcoal inserts or some baby powder? Could you have 2 or 3 pair of boots that you can rotate through the day?
In reply to bluej:
Yes and yes. After three straight miserable years of being covered in the most intense itchy rash you can imagine everywhere except my face. And being diagnose with everything from scabies to poison ivy in my bloodstream by countless hack doctors, with the ensuing treatments failing to do anything at all to relieve the misery. I finally found a competent doctor who sent to an allergy specialist and it's been pretty much controlled since then. Except for the tops of my feet when I consume too much stuff I'm not supposed to or when my feet sweat and can't breath.
For those curious the two biggies are corn, and all derivatives of corn except corn oil as it's refined enough and oats. Along with several other pretty common things. Sometimes I just crave some Doritos and a MTN DEW and my feet break out almost instantly lol.
Wouldn't Poopshovel have just told you to HTFU? 
You could try some sort of raised grate flooring, like they use in the concentrated livestock operations. I usually see it marketed as "tenderfoot" flooring. Then you would just be up above the water.
Add a couple of movable plexi shields to keep the splashing off you and you should be set for wearing whatever.
Barrier cream and moisture wicking socks with the roomiest boots you can handle
The grated flooring sounds like a great idea. Sure, more complex and potentially building altering but could be effective.
I gotta say, since your earliest posting, i have been thinking that your job sounds like an OSHA nightmare. "I run two electric machines and am left standing in more than puddles and completely wet the whole time!!!"
Add to that, "In these conditions i slip and fall often."
In reply to John Welsh :
It's all designed to be wet. OSHA is on a big push to make all granite shops wet shops. Because the health risks of a dry shop are an order of magnitude worse.
I've got some ideas I'm going to try to see how effective they are over the next couple weeks. I'm sure we can make it better.
The floor only has a one inch barrier around the machines to contain the water and allow it to floods into the trenches which go to the recycling room.
The biggest issue that prevents me wearing a breathable shoe is not the water on the floor, it's the water that splashes off the pieces while I'm moving them or while they are running on the edge profiler. That hits me in my waste, runs down the apron and onto the boots. A raised grate floor won't eliminate any of that.
Can you rig up some shielding to keep more of the water away from you?
In reply to HappyAndy:
Not really as I need access to the pieces to move them.
Corn and oats?!? Ouch 
Interesting. I see where dry dust could be a huge problem in exchange for the wet environment.
Have you considered a different line of work? No offense, but it's the obvious solution.
Would a small compressed air tank be easier than a pump? I'm not sure how long something paintball marker sized would last bleeding down to a couple of psi if it was filled off a regular air compressor, but they make some nice carry rigs for that sized bottle.
What about extending the edges of a metatarsal guard up under the apron and down around the sides of the shoes? Water would run down the front but the entire back side would be open. Come to think of it, the heavy boots they order might be available with a metatarsal guard that would get the rubber up off your feet and give you some breathing room.
I'm gonna echo oldopelguy and say that there really has to be an engineering solution to this. Constant exposure to moisture isn't really a viable way to run a business. Various shields and a raised grate floor would go a long way toward keeping you dry.
But for PPE, I'd look into what fisherman wear. Likely some sort of waders that are pretty loose and allow for air to circulate inside them and out the top, combined with fancy/high tech socks that wick moisture off your skin.
Finally, I'd talk to a dermatologist about a skin barrier that will give you relief of the symptoms.
Good luck man, it sounds miserable.
Have you tried vasoline or other lotion barrier type things?
Hunting gators for your legs would do a fine job. They seal at the top but not the bottom of the boot so that it still breathes.
There are some cool ones that are hydrophobic so the water runs off and they still breath. They are not cheap around 100$ but they last forever and you can use what ever boots you want.
Don't discount the value of good socks. No matter the temperature, I like to wear the thickest woolen socks I can buy at REI. The "Expedition Weight". They're like 1/4" thick merino wool. Then I wear my steel-toed Muck boots. Most comfortable boots I've found that are truly water proof and chemical resistant. My slacks get rolled over the top of the boots to prevent spills in.
Granted, this doesn't get the airflow to keep your feet totally dry, but it does a lot to wick the moisture away from the skin.
You could also try multi-layering your socks with a thin, wicking, synthetic athletic sock under a mid-weight woolen sock.
Don't know if this might help you or be necessary based on your work environment. I need to be in truly waterproof boots (Goretex does not cut it) to protect from hot liquids and hazardous chemical solutions.
It's not an issue with skin contact. The rash is a direct result of my food allergies. I've tried barrier creams but when it coming from inside your body, sealing the outside does nothing. Any topical treatment does absolutely nothing for prevention or helping the itch.
At one of the power plants I worked at there was a mixing hopper for dissolving chemicals in water. It had an aluminum shield @18" tall below where you would open the door to add chemicals or manually mix them. Attached to the inside of that shield was another one with a 2" or so lip on the hopper side at the top, and it could slide up and lock into place a few inches above the bottom of the door opening. Almost nothing that came out the open door made it over the shield, and we would have known with those chemicals, but reaching over the guard for paddle mixing or shutting off the mixer and dropping the guard to load big quantities of chemicals were both super easy.
wearymicrobe wrote: Hunting gators for your legs would do a fine job. They seal at the top but not the bottom of the boot so that it still breathes. There are some cool ones that are hydrophobic so the water runs off and they still breath. They are not cheap around 100$ but they last forever and you can use what ever boots you want.
That's what I'd look into too.
I've taken some pictures so that maybe it'll be a little easier to understand what's going on.
It's very hard to take pictures of water 
First is the saw. This thing shoots a stream of water 15 feet behind it until it gets buried in a piece. It loves to catch you looking away from it and spin around so it can soak your ass while you're not paying attention to it. The table is about a third of the way from my knee to my hip high. Most programs have pauses to allow me to slide pieces out of the way so it can continue cutting without cutting into the piece it just finished. So often I'm bending way over this thing and pulling as hard as I can on a suction cup trying to get a giant piece of rock to move 6". This is where most of the water gets on me. As I slide a piece close to the edge I'm pulling a large amount of water over the edge and directly onto my feet. Can't use a guard because I need to hang them over the edge so I can stand them up.
I was trying to show how much water is here, it's hard to see but it's a lot.
This is looking at the Sasso. Once the pieces are cut they go through here to profile the edges. I use a crane to lay them on the roller table. Then have to push them into the machine which can take some serious effort with the larger pieces. Losing traction would be a bad thing. You can see the water travels from the machine to the floor trench to the left of the photo. 
Smaller pieces that don't over hang the conveyor belt allows the water to flow into this trough which feeds it onto the floor. 
Larger pieces just runs off into the floor.
And into the drain.
The Sasso isn't so bad except walking through that standing water all day will soak through anything that isn't rubber. The pieces come out of the end dripping wet. I push them to the last roller table, spin them around or stand them up. Pick them up with a crane and they either go back through to get another edge or onto a rolling table to go to the hand department. There is a lot of water that drips off while I'm trying to maneuver them.
Anyway hope that clears things up a little.
The PPE provided does a good job of keeping me dry all day. If it wasn't for the feet thing it would be fine.
In reply to MulletTruck:
Perfect!
I am going to show my wife all this and help her understand how much suffering you are going through and it might be best we keep those good, solid, nothing-wrong-with-them 1998 laminate counter tops.
Who needs granite countertops with all this pain going on?
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