Category: Safety Blog

Good morning and Happy Friday!! This week’s safety snippet we are again focusing on chemical safety as it pertains to science labs. This is one area that PESH will be looking for if they inspect your facilities. Each school district is required to have a chemical hygiene plan with a named chemical hygiene officer who is tasked with ensuring chemicals are stored correctly and are rotated out for hazardous waste disposal at regular intervals. Chemicals that should not be in science labs, but we are still finding, are: Nitric Acid, Methanol, Mercury, Picric Acid, and formaldehyde. If you want us to come out and take a look at your school’s science labs and chemical hygiene plans, please reach out to John Hanbach or Tim Richardson, your CA BOCES Safety Technicians, to schedule a visit.

Enjoy your weekend and stay safe!

Good morning and Happy Friday! We hope everyone has been able to find some relief from the heat at some point during the week. This week’s safety snippet comes from the NYS DOH’s School Environmental Health Program’s “Tools for Schools.” This topic usually gets a lot of attention at our facilities and the Department of Health fields a lot of requests for this topic at their regional and state safety conferences. We figured we would share a couple of their checklists and info sheets regarding Indoor Air Quality and advice to help find the “smell.” Enjoy your weekend and stay safe!

Good morning and Happy Tuesday! With the Head Advisory going into effect, today, we wanted to share NOAA’s Weather Report for the remainder of the week and the CDC’s Heat Related Illness Fact Sheet. Hydrate, take frequent breaks, and find shade when you can. Stay safe and enjoy your week!

Good morning and Happy Friday! As we close down the school year this topic becomes important as we store a lot of “stuff” during the summer. From ergonomics to safely stacking and moving materials this OSHA “Material Handling and Storage” Guidebook gives us some helpful tips to keep ourselves safe and be mindful of how we store materials. Enjoy your weekend and remember to take breaks and hydrate during next week’s warm up.

Good morning and Happy Friday! As we approach the end of the school year many of us have teen summer workers. This link has a lot of resources dealing with their safety and training: https://keepteenworkerssafe.org/.

This week, Cattaraugus-Allegany BOCES Health and Safety Technicians attended the Association of Education Health and Safety Professionals (AESHP) Summer Conference. We are starting to get some of the presenters’ resources from this conference and will get them out to everyone. A couple of hot topics were storing and charging of lithium-ion batteries in the schools, NYS PESH presented tips on how to handle inspections, and a great presentation on safety in science labs that focused on roles/responsibilities of your school’s Chemical Hygiene Officer.

Enjoy your day and have a great weekend!

Good morning and Happy Friday! As we wrap up the month of May we wanted to share some resources on an uncomfortable topic, Mental Health. In this packet of resources is a reminder of the new Suicide Prevention and Crisis Hotline, 988, as well as some tips on dealing with employees and co-workers who seem to be struggling.

Stay safe and enjoy your weekend.

Good morning and Happy Friday. This week’s safety snippets were handed out at Monday’s School Environmental Health Program, and we felt they were important to share with everyone. While most presenters were from NYS DOH, Regina Clinton from Cornell University’s Integrated Pest Management discussed their services and here is a link to their website: https://cals.cornell.edu/new-york-state-integrated-pest-management.

We at Cattaraugus-Allegany BOCES Health and Safety want to wish everyone a safe and enjoyable Memorial Day weekend!

Good afternoon and happy Friday! Sorry we are a little late, had some technical issues this morning. May, amongst other things, is “Electrical Safety Month.” We have a couple safety snippets from OSHA and NFPA that give some quick tips to refresh on. We also thought we would share two resources that deal with various parts of electrical safety. The first link is for the Electrical Safety Foundation’s website that contains general electric safety information, including lithium battery safety. The second website is Safety Culture’s landing page for Arc Flash Safety:

https://www.esfi.org/national-electrical-safety-month-2024/
https://safetyculture.com/topics/arc-flash/

Stay safe and enjoy your weekend!

Good morning and Happy Friday! Next week is National Safety Stand-down Week which focuses national attention on minimizing falls in the workplace. In 2002, 865 workers were killed, and hundreds of thousands were injured badly enough to require days off of work from falls. While most people focus on falls from elevation, 144 workers were killed in falls occurring on the same level. This week’s safety snippet is a resource packet for fall prevention training.

Always remember to maintain three points of contact when climbing and plan your work at heights with safety in mind. Also, if ladders are not fit for service, please be sure they cannot be used, i.e. destroy/discard them and place out-of-service/do not use sign on them until they are disposed of.

Be safe and enjoy your weekend!

Good morning and happy Friday!! As we look ahead in the weather forecast, we are seeing our possible first 80-degree day. While this snippet may seem a little premature, quite often heat emergencies occur in the first few days of warm weather as we are not yet acclimated to these temperatures. Here’s to wishful thinking on the warmer temperatures and enjoy your weekend. Stay safe and stay well!

Good morning and Happy Friday!! This week’s safety snippet comes to us from the National Association of Landscape Professionals. It covers common hand-powered tools and mower safety points. Enjoy your weekend and stay safe.

Good morning and happy Friday! The week’s safety snippet comes from the CDC and involves ticks and Lyme Disease, which is prevalent in our region. Lyme Disease is sometimes called the “great mimicker” because if you do not see the tick that infects you or you do not get the “bullseye” rash, the symptoms of Lyme Disease present like many other common ailments leading to a prolonged time between diagnosis and treatment which can worsen your condition.

On another note, if there is anything you folks want to see or us to research for you in the realm of a “safety snippet” please feel free to reach out to us at any time, we would be glad to help (dean_mcknight@caboces.orgcreate new email; timothy_richardson@caboces.orgcreate new email). Stay safe and enjoy your weekend!