Quote:
Originally Posted by Cory
This perfectly illustrates my point. Why on earth would a robotics team need to keep a fire extinguisher, battery spill kit, burn kit, and eye wash station in their pits? That's just absurd and pointless.
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For when robots catch fire (I'm not gonna lie - we bought several small fire extinguishers after our programmer managed to cause our 06 robot to produce magic smoke AGAIN, in our shop. Sure, he was being a bit unsafe with it, hence the smoke, but if everyone was 100% safe all the time, we wouldn't really need extinguishers an first aid kits), temporarily taking care of spilled batteries before the appropriate personnel arrives to properly handle the situation, kids who burn their hands from using heat guns in 10'x10' areas, and those who end up with goodness-knows-what in their eyes from trying to quickly fix the robot before their match in two minutes. While it's always a good idea to let professionals handle severe personal injuries/the like, it's never a bad idea if small or not-life-or-death situations are temporarily handled appropriately by students in the pit.
I haven't had any huge issues with the safety judges (who, might I add, are not always from UL - one of our parents volunteered at TC this year, and was a safety judge). They've always been considerate to my team, as far as I know. They (and our neighbors) were also very understanding when we had to expand a little bit in TC because our pit space was unfairly condensed to be about 6 feet wide.
I've always felt that our team has been great safety-wise. We do have an accident report log, along with first aid kits, plenty of extra safety glasses, safety glasses cleaner, fire extinguishers (see above), and gloves to be worn while lifting heavy objects (such as the robot, or giant rolls of carpet). For the past three years, safety has been made our number one priority. We've told this to judges, and they're always impressed with our safety program.
We do well while talking to the safety judges - until they start asking for things such as MSDS sheets (though that's only been asked for once) and AEDs. Really now? We're students. Most toxic and harmful substances and materials aren't allowed on the robots anyways. If we are using something harmful, I'd hope that we would already know how to handle it if it became harmful, and wouldn't need to waste time looking up a solution.
I also pointed out in the lessons learned thread that unless I can read those safety flyers that everyone puts up in the hallways from 10 feet away, they're unsafe. It's unsafe to block passageways because I have to squint from two feet away to read a safety message that's printed in black ink on a dark picture. This has always appeared to be an issue to me at GLR (now MSC) in particular, in the hallway that robots have to travel through to get between the pits in the small gym to the field.
The safety token program is dying. A few years ago, my friend and I were handed safety tokens in the hallway for tying back our hair before entering the pits. I was handed a token for asking people to move out of the way so that we could get to the field. Yelling ROBOTTTTTT is reasonable in some situations, but if there's one or two people in my way, I'm not going to scream it. Nowadays, I've seen tokens given out to teams who threaten the condition of my eardrum, and also to teams who, while showing a few good behaviors, are blatantly unsafe most of the time.