Category: Safety Blog

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.

Good morning and Happy Thursday. We apologize for not sending snippets the last couple weeks as we were out of town on training. This snippet is coming early this week as we are out roaming southwestern New York on our Fire Inspection Tour.

This safety snippet comes to us from the University of Maryland and covers a lot of information regarding flammable and combustible liquids. Enjoy the great winter weather and stay safe!

Good morning and happy Friday! We are now in “Fire Inspection Season” so we thought we would do some review on fire protection, prevention and safety. This week’s snippet comes from OSHA and while this snippet is focused on “Roofing Contractors”, there is a lot of good information here.

Regarding fire inspections remember that fire extinguishers are to be visually inspected monthly, serviced annually and hydrostatic tested as required per manufacturer’s guidelines depending on the material they are made from. Ansul systems are visually inspected monthly and serviced biannually. Fire alarm systems are serviced annually, and inspectors will look to see that the alarm panel does not have any trouble codes indicating issues with the system components.

Enjoy your weekend and stay safe!

It appears that we have some potential heavier snow forecasted, in some of our areas this weekend, so we will start off the new year with some snow removal safety tips from the National Safety Council.

Enjoy your weekend and we at Cattaraugus-Allegany BOCES Health and Safety want to wish you a safe and healthy 2024!

Good morning and happy Friday to you all. This is the last “safety snippet” of the year and it is a topic that is consistently in OSHA’s top 5 most common injury causes: slips, trips and falls. This is a quick training outline that you can use to help conduct this type of training.

We hope all of you have enjoyed and gotten some use out of our “safety snippets” and if there were any topics you would like to see in the future, please reach out to Dean or Tim at any time.

In closing, we at Cattaraugus-Allegany BOCES Facilities, Safety and Energy want to wish all of you and your families a healthy and safe holiday season. Take care.

Good morning and happy Friday! The topic for this week is “Hierarchy of Controls.” This topic has come up a few times, over the last couple weeks, from several of our districts. These “controls” play a role when injury reports for the year are submitted to PESH, policies are being revised or written, and safety groups are looking at ways to reduce injuries and improve working conditions in the upcoming year.

This week we added a “Safety Resources Page” which has links to several safety organizations. It is located on the CA BOCES Safety Webpage and here is the address:

External Safety-Related Sites

Enjoy your weekend and stay safe.