DEAS/Physics/EPS Safety Committee
Wednesday, October 12, 2005
Noon-1:00PM
Lenny Solomon opened the meeting by asking everyone to introduce themselves to the committee. There have been several changes in safety officers this year.
Lenny said he had emailed everyone a document about the duties of the safety officers on our committee. This will be posted on our web site. He gave a brief description of the history and duties of the committee. The DEAS/Physics/EPS Safety Committee meets on the second Wednesday of each month from October through June, and the appointed Safety officers are expected to attend these meetings. Lenny encouraged everyone to visit the Committee's web site at http://www-safety.deas.harvard.edu. All safety reps should take the time to read the online Safety Manual and Chemical Hygiene Plan on the web site, as well as pages dealing with safety training, evacuation plans, and other emergency related items. New members can read some of last year's meeting minutes to get an idea of what we do from month to month.
The Safety Committee tries to be pro-active in identifying safety issues. In addition to its monthly meetings, the Committee performs the following functions:
(a) Lab Inspections - One of the most important functions of this committee is the self-inspection of our labs. Safety officers inspect labs yearly. At the November meeting, Lenny will announce the inspection teams consisting of about 3 to 5 safety officers each. From January through April, the teams will inspect their pre-assigned labs and present their results to the Committee. The inspections will focus on equipment, work space, chemical storage, safety violations, and unsafe lab practices (such as evidence of food or drink in lab areas), etc. The local safety officer for each lab will need to address any issues discovered during the inspections and make a follow-up report to the Committee.
(b) Safety Training
- Safety Seminar Series - Every year from late winter to early spring, the Committee presents a series of live training lectures on a variety of safety issues. These seminars are extremely important for new lab workers or people who need refresher training. A new schedule of the 2005/2006 series will be posted on the web site in the next few months.
- Lab Safety and Hazardous Waste Safety Training - In accordance with EPA regulations, anyone who works with chemicals must be trained by attending a live lecture on laboratory and hazardous waste safety. Charles Lichtenwalner provides these training lectures on the 2nd Wednesday of each month. See the schedule for time and location at the following web page:
http://www-safety.deas.harvard.edu/services/seminars.html#hazardouswaste.
All new staff and grad students MUST attend a Lab Safety Training lecture! Retraining is needed every year; this is accomplished by reading a short online retraining course and answering a few questions on the web site. Hazardous waste retraining can be found at: http://www.uos.harvard.edu/training/training.shtml.(c) Training Database
A database is maintained on the Committee's web site to keep an up-to-date record of the training needs of DEAS, Physics, and EPS personnel and students. Lenny asked all the safety officers to create a username and log on to the online database. They should look for records pertaining to their specific group and notify Lenny Solomon or Rob Stanhope, if any new group members are not in the database, or if anyone in their group needs a particular kind of safety training. This is the only way we can keep the database up-to-date.
The Safety Training is located at http://www-safety.deas.harvard.edu/services/dbintro.html.
Public access outside of the DEAS/Physics/EPS Safety Committee is not permitted, since the information is considered confidential.
Because access is restricted, anyone using the database must first create a user's account (with username and password). This is a simple process which is done online at http://www-safety.deas.harvard.edu/services/dbintro.html.
An online Help/Guide explains how to sort and filter the database. These sorting and filtering features make the Safety Training database particularly useful to find out who has or has not been trained in a specific lab or group. The Guide provides a key to the abbreviations used in the database.
(d) Safety Equipment Testing - Safety showers, hoods, fire extinguishers, etc. are tested annually. Showers are flowed quarterly. Eyewash stations should be flowed weekly for 5 minutes. Safety officers should remember to flow their eye wash stations at least once a week.
(e) Fire Drills / Fire Marshals
- The Safety Committee tries to provide fire drills at least once per year.
- The safety officers are also fire marshals. Safety officers should make sure all their lab workers know where to meet outside of their building in the event of an emergency evacuation (designated meeting place should be at least 100 feet from the building). During an evacuation, safety officers should make sure their all of lab workers get out of the building; however, if the safety officers are at risk, they should leave the building and immediately tell the firemen or rescue workers where people are in your lab.
- Notify Lenny if anyone in your lab is disabled, so that he can register this information with the Operations Center. In an emergency, police and fire department will have this information.
(f) Ph.D. Hit Squad - Graduating doctoral students and departing post-docs must be accountable for the chemicals they ordered during their work at Harvard. A list of these chemicals is maintained by the Safety Committee. All chemicals should be labeled with the student's name, date of purchase, and chemical name.
(g) Hazardous Waste Disposal - Certain safety officers are assigned the task of inspecting their Satellite Accumulation Areas (SAAs). These SAA Monitors need to inspect their SAAs weekly to make sure there are no violations, specifically looking for problems with the hazardous waste labels and containers. Rob will send out periodic inspection reminders. SAA Monitors should view this EH&S web page for help with the hazardous waste labels:
http://www.uos.harvard.edu/ehs/env_hw_label_tool.shtml.
Mike Labosky reported the following:
- Emergency door signs: the Fire Department wants us to develop a good system that all labs will adhere to. EH&S is working on developing a useful door sign for lab areas that will provide information to rescue workers and firemen about contact personnel and the hazardous contents of the labs.
- A machine shop survey was conducted with great success.
- Fire drills are normally conducted in the Harvard residence halls in the evenings by EH&S. EH&S can help us set up and conduct our own fire drills as well.
- There was some discussion about fire extinguishers and fume hoods. Lenny asked safety officers to check their fire extinguishers and fume hoods for inspection tags to make sure they have been inspected within the last year.
- If people want some instruction on how to use a fire extinguisher, Lenny has a training video on it. All our safety videos can be borrowed by contacting Lenny. We can also set up a more formal fire extinguisher training for a lab group if desired.
- NOTE: this meeting went past 1:00pm, so there was no time to discuss hazardous waste training or old business.
| Send comments or suggestions to solomon@huarp.harvard.edu | Last Updated: Thu Nov 3 12:58:41 2005 |
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