Category: Safety Blog

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.

Good morning and happy Friday. With the Holiday Season comes decorations, lights, items brought in from faculty and staff homes that impact our schools’ readiness for next year’s fire inspections. Here is a quick “hit list” of common violations that we see that if we can “nip it in the bud,” will make things much easier during upcoming fire inspections.

Good morning and happy Friday. As we kick off the holiday season here are a variety of tips from the National Safety Council. Enjoy your weekend and be safe out there.

Happy Friday to you all. It is hard to believe that next week is Thanksgiving which generally kicks off the Holiday Season. Our safety snippet is in regard to Thanksgiving Safety and comes to us from the NFPA. The following link contains a few additional holiday and travel safety tips from the National Safety Council: https://www.nsc.org/community-safety/safety-topics/seasonal-safety/winter-safety/holiday. Enjoy your weekend and Happy Thanksgiving to you and your families.

Good morning, everyone! This week’s “Safety Snippet” is coming to you a little early due to Veterans’ Day. A day that we honor and show our appreciation and gratitude to all the men and women who are currently serving or have served in our armed forces. Thank you for keeping us safe and free!!

This week’s “Safety Snippets” are winter safety and preparedness checklists provided to us from Minnesota’s Department of Public Safety and NOAA.

Happy Friday!! This week’s safety snippet deals with something we sometimes take for granted, machine guarding. These helpful handouts come to us from the Texas Division of Worker’s Compensation and New Jersey State AFL-CIO. Enjoy your weekend and stay safe.