Category: Safety Blog

Heat Safety

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!

Lawn Care Tool Safety

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.

Ticks and Lyme Disease

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!

Global Harmonizing System Review

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.

Chemical Spills

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.

Chemical Safety

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.

Chemical Safety

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!

Lifting Safety

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!!

Fire Inspection Handouts

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.

Ladders Last Program

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.

Flammable Liquids

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!

Fire Protection Systems

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!