I should probably start a new thread for this, but I am increasingly convinced that the "safety inspectors" at competition are not actually interested in team safety, and moreover a few of them seem to actively enjoy making students feel uncomfortable by asking questions that have little to do with safety, or nitpicking answers in ways that has little to do with safety. I observed several interactions like this this year, and it was disheartening.
To be frank, a lot of the safety standards FIRST puts emphasis on are completely orthogonal to effective safety, and a lot of FIRST's own practices at regionals are rather unsafe.
The safety inspectors repeatedly make a stink about maintaining an MSDS folder - can anyone think of a single time that a MSDS has actually been needed in FRC? For sure, in some work environments they are important. This is not really one of them.
I have not once heard a safety inspector ask a question that was particularly relevant to pragmatic pit safety. They ask about your fire extinguisher and your procedure for dealing with battery spills (and, as I mentioned, some of them seem to delight in finding students who can't list off precisely the steps they're looking for for dealing with a spilled battery, in precisely the right order
), which are marginal concerns, at best. What is
actually relevant to pit safety at competition is keeping your pit clear, organized, and not over-crowded; having a good system of communication so people working in the pit know what everyone else around them is doing (
especially when power tools are being turned on); ensuring that the robot is
never enabled while people's hands are in it (by far, this is the one that I think is easiest to overlook and most dangerous). These are all things that can and do cause injuries at FRC events.
These are not things you can gauge by asking a few questions off a list - these are only things that can be gauged by observing a team working in the pits and seeing what their actual practices are. What's more, often the atmosphere at FRC events is actively detrimental to safety - by far the most important thing to pit safety, in my mind, is communication. People must know what the other people around them are doing. This is difficult to do when the ambient volume is loud enough to cause hearing loss (it has been, at some regionals I've been to, though thankfully it was somewhat better this year).
I would very much like to see FIRST take some steps towards rectifying this, because right now a lot of their "safety" culture seems to be mostly safety theater with little regard to actually preventing injuries.