Laboratory Safety
The National Library of Medicine (NLM) Specialized Information Services(SIS) recently released a new Enviro-Health Links page, “Laboratory Safety” (http://sis.nlm.nih.gov/enviro/labsafety.html) which offers links to information for clinical, academic and school laboratories, including resources for handling chemical, biological and nanotechnology safely.

Also included are links to regulations and policy, hazard analysis, MSDS, waste management, and pre-formulated TOXNET and PubMed searches

Example: 
Creating Safety Cultures in Academic Institutions: A Report of the Safety Culture Task Force of the ACS Committee on Chemical Safety, 2012 (PDF, 1.3 MB)  Committee on Chemical Safety, American Chemical Society

Successful Strategies for Creating a Culture of Laboratory Safety
by Bryan Connors, M.S., C.I.H., H.E.M.

Felony charges have been filed against the University of California and a University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) chemistry professor in connection with a laboratory fire that killed a staff research assistant three years ago. The L.A. County district attorney’s office has filed criminal charges against the chemistry professor responsible for the training and supervision of the research assistant, and the regents of the University of California with three counts each of willfully violating occupational health and safety standards, resulting in the research assistant’s death. 

This tragedy has prompted universities and biotech facilities across the nation to scrutinize their own laboratory safety programs to ensure that they are adequately protecting employees from injury. EH&E manages environmental health and safety (EH&S) programs for several large research institutions in Boston and Cambridge, MA and understands these concerns. Similar incidents reported by the media have driven our staff to conduct internal reviews of our own programs to identify vulnerabilities and make improvements. This article offers insights from our internal reviews and resulting efforts on strategies we’ve found to be successful at improving safety program performance...

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Environmental Health and Engineering Webinar

Best Practice Strategies for Laboratory Safety Programs 

2/7/12 EST   Pice: $0.00

Learn best practices and proven strategies for implementing, maximizing, and tracking the effectiveness of lab safety management programs. 

More information

Registration Deadline:  2/7/2012 10:00:00 AM 


Register Online

 

Rules really are monuments, gravestones...

James Kaufman, founder of Laboratory Safety Institute, emphasizes the importance of schools teaching safety and teaching safely. Those who enforce safety rules not only avoid accidents in school but they give their students the skills and attitudes necessary to safeguard their future families and co-workers and "to live safer healthier longer lives."  

In a 2005 interview for Lessons of the 1937 Texas School Explosion, Kaufman emphasized that safety rules and regulations are the lessons we learn from other people’s mistakes and short cuts.  

“What rules really are, are monuments; they are gravestones,” he said. “It’s not that safety people sit up late trying to figure out how to make it take longer and cost more money and irritate the living daylights out of their colleagues. It’s that -- as night follows day --  if you do what those people did, sooner or later, you are going to get the same result.”   Kaufman said his father once asked him, “Jim, what’s the difference between school and life?  Well, in life the test comes first and the lesson comes afterwards.”

A Guide to Prudent Chemical Management

Chemical Laboratory Safety and Security: A Guide to Prudent Chemical Management

Good safety and security procedures can lead to greater productivity, efficiency, savings, and most importantly, greater sophistication and cooperation. Improving safety and security is mistakenly seen as inhibitory, because of lack of understanding of safety and security procedures, cultural barriers, lack of skills, and financial constraints. 

Chemical Laboratory Safety and Security A Guide to Prudent Chemical Management and accompanying toolkit will assist chemists in developing countries to overcome the barriers they face and increase the level of safety and security in their labs through improved chemicals management and following the best laboratory practices possible.

English
Reference book
• Reference book, Chemical Laboratory Safety and Security: A Guide to Prudent Chemical Management
Toolkit Items
• Quick guide for laboratory managers (brochure format)
• Quick guide for laboratory managers (page-by-page format)
• Executive summary to share with institutional leaders (brochure format)
• Executive summary to share with institutional leaders (page-by-page format)
• Instructor’s guide, forms, and signs to photocopy and distribute• Preplanning reference cards to distribute to laboratory personnel
• Helpful reminder signs for posting in the laboratory 


For more information contact bcst@nas.edu

Guidance and Tools for Schools

Safeguard Against Chemicals in Your School: EPA’s Schools Chemical Cleanout Campaign (SC3)

From school maintenance closets to high school chemistry labs to vocational school classrooms, schools house a variety of chemicals. These chemicals can have many useful applications: they help keep school areas clean, demonstrate chemistry lessons and teach students new mechanical skills. But when these chemicals are mismanaged, they can put students and school staff at risk from spills, fires and other accidental exposures — incidents that may result in lost school days and require millions of dollars to mitigate.

The Schools Chemical Cleanout Campaign (SC3) gives K-12 schools the guidance and tools they need to responsibly manage chemicals, thus reducing the risks and hazards posed by mismanagement. The goals of SC3 are to bring together administrators, teachers, maintenance staff...

 

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What is Responsible Chemical Management?

Responsible chemical management involves taking steps to ensure chemicals in schools do not endanger students and school personnel.

– Evaluating chemicals for need, quantity, and appropriateness;
– Properly labeling,storing,and securing chemicals; and
– Safely disposing of waste and/or excess chemicals.

from Healthy Schools School Chemical Cleanout Webinar -
Matthew Langenfeld USEPA Region 8 303-312-6284
http://peakstoprairies.org/library/webinars/2010_healthy-safe-schools/SchoolChemicalCleanoutWebinarJan12.pdf

Ensure that no one is ever injured...

Two years after retiring from active laboratory safety activities and upon leaving the lab safety discussion list, Dave Andrews wrote the following reminder to his colleagues:

"Fellow laboratory safety specialists: As we part company, I feel I must, for one final time, remind each of you in an academic setting that the lessons that you teach in your classes and your labs will be the habits that your charges will carry forward into industry.

If you teach safety and then allow other than 100% compliance with safe work practices in your laboratory spaces, your charges will go forth from your classes and routinely bypass safety rules and you may, one day, wonder why one of your smartest students died in a laboratory accident.

Make sure every rule in your laboratory is based on sound science and then enforce them 100% of the time for every student – and, most important, for your own work in the laboratory.

Make sure your students know that laboratory clothing and safety equipment makes no fashion statement, but is required for entrance into the lab.  Do not allow any laboratory activity to proceed without a procedure.  Remember that legal requirements are the absolute minimum you must do in your lab – the rules in your lab must be based on what is necessary to ensure that no one is ever injured by the activities conducted in your laboratories and that no one outside your laboratories has any exposure to any of the chemicals within your labs."

(Dave's response to my request for permission to reprint his words:  “Of course!  My goal is now, and has been, doing whatever is necessary to protect the American worker – especially when working with hazardous chemicals.  If these words will save one burnt finger, then they are well worth posting.  You have my permission to use them in any way you determine to be useful." Dave Andrews, 3/13/09)

Addition words of wisdom from Dave:

·         If your management cannot/will not support safety in your lab – QUIT – the job is not worth the potential grief and guilt that awaits you!

·         If you knew an employee (student) was going to have an accident in the lab tomorrow, would you be willing to fire them(remove them) today?

·         Students entering a laboratory training program should have an entrance project to research rule, prudent practices, and injury reports and develop a set of safety rules for the lab – this will grant ownership of the rules to the students.  This is not an easy job for you!

·         Safety glasses are for when no activities are going on in the laboratory – when chemicals are being used, goggles are a minimum – face shields are not eye protection – safety glasses or goggles must be worn when using a face shield.

·         Personal protective clothing is not impervious to hazardous chemicals – their only intended function is to provide reaction time – If you get splashed with chemicals , the job stops, the PPC comes off, and corrective measure begin.

·         All severely hazardous chemical splashes require use of the safety shower and removal of affected clothing – No she cannot go down to the locker room and shower there!!!

·         Compliance with applicable regulations cannot be a goal – they are a requirement for operations – the absolute minimum necessary.  You must evaluate ALL the hazards and select protective measure that will always protect the student.

·         Every injury, splash(even if no injury) or other incident in the laboratory requires evaluation and either changing the rules, increasing the frequency and intensity of training or discipline.  (Oh, and discipline is not the real answer – as all incidents are a direct result of inadequate management!)

-- Dave Andrews, CHMM (now expired)

• Radiation Safety Officer and manager safety, health and Environment at one of the largest contract non-clinical laboratories in the world.  
• Consultant/Instructor, Environmental & Occupational Consulting and Training, Inc
• Instructor, Chemistry, Safety, Radiation Safety, and Environmental at a Nuclear Electric Generation plant
• All of that without so much as a formal semester of college training, though I did take and pass (3.5) a post graduate level Toxicology class.

Hazardous Materials in Schools:  A Hidden Problem

Excerpt from the article, Impediments to Implementing P2 in the Public Schools by Marina M. Brock

Environmental, health, and safety hazards in public schools are often serious — and difficult to address.

While interviewing a local fire prevention officer from one of our communities, I discovered that his major community concern regarding hazardous material was not what I believed it to be.  He removed from his cabinet a file that was about eight inches thick, and told me it was a written history of safety issues from our regional high school.  The file represented five years of effort to improve conditions that he felt were a problem.

Blinded by my own assumptions regarding our educational institutions, I didn’t believe him — but I humored him, wanting to get into his good graces.  We arranged an on-site interview at the high school, where I was sure I would be able to point out that the facility was not as much of a problem as his “untrained eye” could see.

Our first on-site interview was with the science supervisor, a 20-year veteran of high school science teaching.  While we were in his classroom discussing hazardous material management issues, a janitor worked quietly in the rear of the classroom sweeping the floor.  The science supervisor was pleased to tell us that he had been disposing of his “heavy metal acids” for years using the “Flynn Method,” by inerting them and pouring them into the sink, which connected to the “tight tank” outside his classroom.

I remember thinking to myself that the designers of the high school must have been incredible visionaries to have the forethought to install a tight tank in the early 1970s, when the facility was constructed.  Before I could ask about this, however, the heretofore silent janitor sheepishly mentioned that they didn’t have a “tight tank” at their school.  Obviously embarrassed, we all remained silent.  The “tight tank” mistake eventually resulted in a $55,000 environmental cleanup.

I soon discovered that my initial assumptions regarding the conditions at this school were grossly in error.  I was astounded at the lack of even a basic understanding regarding simple concepts of health, safety, and environmental compliance....

For the complete article go to Impediments to Implementing P2 in the Public Schools 

Marina M. Brock is a senior environmental specialist with the Barnstable County Department of Health and the Environment (BCDHE).  

Heroes 2005
Dr. James Kaufman, Laboratory Safety Institute Christopher Erzinger, Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment Monona Rossol, Arts, Crafts and Theatre Safety On the anniversary of the March 18, 1937 New London School Explosion, I salute safety experts who specialize in helping schools understand the explosives and other hazardous materials in their schools. They work to promote the safety standards, safety plans and staff training necessary to promote health and safety in every aspect of school activities. These "Healthy Schools Heroes" are champions of school safety and security. They serve as environmental health resources and mentors to the school community, setting up in-house systems for community participation, health surveillance, and ongoing hazard identification and control. Schools need these heroes because too many school communities overlook opportunities to act when conditions in the school are making people sick or where there is a high risk of explosion, fire, and chemical spills -- from either accidental or intentional acts. Dr. James Kaufman is the founder and President of the Laboratory Safety Institute, a national non-profit network and resource center for safety in science education. He is a safety consultant dedicated to making health and safety an integral and important part of science education, work and life. LSI's lectures, training programs, AV lending library and publications help academic institutions throughout the world. LSI publishes "Speaking of Safety," a newsletter of information, inspiration and motivation to raise the standard of science education and school safety. LSI has recently published "Safety is Elementary: The New Standard for Safety in the Elementary Science Classroom." Christopher Erzinger, is one of three employees of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment's Hazardous Materials and Waste Management Division and a Denver attorney honored by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for helping to remove hazardous chemicals from Colorado schools. They worked with Colorado school districts; fire departments; the Colorado State Patrol; law enforcement agencies; local health departments; and county public health nursing services over the past five years to remove old, deteriorated and unsafe chemicals from school and college storerooms used by chemistry classes throughout Colorado. Erzinger is the Hazardous Materials Compliance Officer for the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. His educational Powerpoint presentation "When Good Chemicals Go Bad" dramatically documents the school hazards and the work of first responders and bomb squads who conducted the clean outs and disposals including detonations of explosives that makes it possible to imagine what could happen to schools that do not act to remove hazards. Monona Rossol, is the founder of Arts, Crafts and Theater Safety, a not-for-profit corporation providing a variety of health and safety services. She is a chemist, artist, author, industrial hygienist and an international consultant on safety and risk reduction for schools, individuals, organizations and institutions. She travels the world promoting safety in a wide range of school activities and for a wide range of students including the youngest and most vulnerable. Her book The Artists ' Complete Health and Safety Guide (Allworth Press) provides the basic concepts and vocabulary necessary for understanding the acute and chronic health hazards posed by a variety of chemicals and environmental pollutants. She also describes the practical steps necessary to control them. Written for artists and teachers in the arts, the book is useful reading for anyone interested in healthier schools. The chapter, "Classroom Hazards," discusses teacher qualifications, emergency planning, sanitation, cleanup, choosing safe materials and activities, and the importance of obtaining information on students' special needs. There is a table on products and materials to avoid and safer options. ACTS FACTS is the monthly 4-page newsletter that provides information about occupational health hazards and safety research, regulations and standards affecting people in the arts, especially teachers, students, and those with allergies and other sensitivities. THERE IS A HERO IN YOUR AREA It could be you. In response to the growing number of accidents such as mercury spills and lab injuries, many states have created resources and programs to help schools conduct chemical clean-outs and to provide training to staff. They can be allies and partners to anyone who takes leadership for school safety. Today, there is a website and a New London Museum dedicated to remember the "lost generation" and educating people of all ages about safety and the aftermath of the School Explosion across generations. Make March 18 Healthy Schools Heroes Day In Your School ****************** No permission needed to forward or reprint, whole or in part, if text is unedited and proper credits are included.