Category: Safety Blog

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!

Happy Thursday! As we wrap up our month of chemical hygiene, we came across this GHS review guide from Creative Safety. While there are a couple ads here, and we do not endorse one safety company over another, this is a good resource for the pictograms, label requirements, and SDS sheets. This is longer than we usually like to make our snippets but felt some of you may like to keep it on hand for your new folks or just to refresh this topic once in a while. Enjoy your weekend and stay safe.

Happy Friday! We continue with our focus on chemicals and chemical hygiene this month. This snippet is authored by Dr. Ken Roy from Science Safety. While it deals with spills in our chemistry labs, the information can apply to general spills as well. Enjoy your weekend and stay safe.

Good morning and Happy Friday. We are hoping the technical issues have been remedied as we continue to talk about chemical safety this month. This snippet contains several good tips and practices around our chemicals. Enjoy your weekend and Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Be safe out there.

Good morning and happy Friday! One of the items we look for during our fire inspections are Science Storage Areas. These sometime problem areas need to be kept clean, organized (by chemical class and not alphabetically) and monitored for excessive chemicals. We will be sending out emails for the summer chemical disposal, shortly, and we encourage you to reach out to your science and art teachers to see what they can get rid of to help keep a neat, tidy and safe space.

Today’s snippet deals with effects that chemicals have on the body. Over the next couple weeks, we will focus on chemical safety. Enjoy your weekend and stay safe!

Good afternoon and Happy Thursday! We are a little bit early this week due to other commitments tomorrow. This week’s safety snippet involves something we sometimes take for granted when we are in a rush, proper lifting techniques. The task maybe something we do all of the time but all it takes is once to end up with a musculoskeletal injury.

Enjoy your weekend and stay safe!!

Good morning and Happy Friday! As we are close to wrapping up another fire inspection season, we want to thank all of the Directors of Facilities and your staff for your cooperation with us to help make our schools safer. As we tour all the districts, we have been putting together notes on how to make your jobs a little bit easier by getting you answers to sometimes difficult or unclear questions that may come from teachers and administrators.

We are working to develop a quick reference spot, on this site, for items that pertain to fire or other hazards we find during inspections and the interpretations/rulings we get from NYSED or the Department of State (Codes). The first of these are today’s snippets which deal with door hardening, holiday lights, and air fresheners. Enjoy your weekend and thanks again for all of your hard work.

Good morning and Happy Friday!! This topic has come up a lot in the schools as well as those ancillary folks that do work at heights. This is from the Metropolitan Risk Group and is referred to as the “Ladders Last Program.” This coupled with the Ladder Safety Checklist that is archived on our Safety Blog can help build a good ladder safety program. Please remember that if you have out-of-service ladders to indicate that they are out-of-service or dispose of them.

Enjoy your weekend and be safe.