Safety Award

[artdutra04]

For the record, I've always told the students on our team to be safe for the sake of being safe, not to win the safety award. So they all always wear safety glasses, and the core pit crew all have Lock Out/Tag Out tags on lanyards they put on the robot after every match, until they each have time to inspect their particular subsystem. When they are done, and all tags removed from robot, only then can the robot be turned on or sent out to the field.

Then again, over the years, I've seen countless teams make claims about doing things in the name of safety that actually aren't safe or put them on shaky legal ground. Then the safety advisors pick up on this, and on one occasion they actually "harassed" (it was quite a tirade) a student on our team (to the point of her nearly crying) about why we weren't doing the same. This incident in question involved a safety judge asking us why only mentors, and not students, were First Aid/CPR trained. Another team had claimed every student was First Aid and CPR trained, when legally you cannot be trained in First Aid or CPR until you are 16 or 17 (our high schools won't train students until they are 17), which excludes many of the students.

Originally Posted by rtfgnow

-have small safety advise sheets, give out to other teams, and tape on the wall. Anyone from Florida will remember "Silverman Says".
-have a battery spill kit that is clearly labeled

Both of these bullet points are of dubious actual safety value.

For the first bullet point, how is handing out flyers about safety all day long actually safe? If anything, they just clutter up the pits and are usually thrown right away to keep our pit clean. Nothing is more annoying that working in the pits, only to have someone interrupt whatever the students are doing to hand them a flyer telling them to wear safety glasses when very clearly they are wearing safety glasses.

As for the second bullet point, the vast majority of chemical spills in industry are made worse when people try to clean them up themselves. The absolute best thing that can happen in a chemical spill is to contain the spill (such as closing a valve to shut off leaking chemical) and then evacuating the area until trained professionals can clean the spill up.

And besides, the lead acid batteries we use are non-spillable gel-cell batteries.