Safety Award: What would you like to see?

[Akash Rastogi]

Originally Posted by Cory

The best thing that could happen to the safety award is for it to go away.
.....

The whole award is a complete sham and does not promote actual safety whatsoever. It's just an opportunity for teams to annoy the living daylights out of everyone else.

Originally Posted by Jon Jack

The award has become a joke. It's turning competitions into something resembling a circus. From kids screaming (with no one even remotely near by) "ROBOT!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ROBOT!!!!!!!!!!!" to every team handing out some kind of flyer that tells me the same information. Seriously, is it really necessary that my team get 50 different flyers on how to be safe in our pit? Do we really need 5 million posters plastered on every wall and bathroom stall reminding you to be safe? After a while, they just become ambient decoration and lose their effect.

Anyways, do you really need an award for being safe? Isn't leaving a competition with all your limbs enough? I know we've never once competed for the 'Safety Award'. We choose to keep our pit clean and safe not because of an award, but because we want a clean pit area that is easy to work in and doesn't pose a safety hazard to our team.

This. The promotion of safety in the work environment should be just that, promotion, not a spectacle of obnoxious behavior.

Very frankly, I see it as silly of an award as spirit. (Silly being the reserved term here)

[sanddrag]

I hadn't even thought of the paper flyers several teams hand out, "promoting" safety. I fully agree, that these paper flyers are more of a hazard than a help. It does no team any good to have 20 pieces of paper they don't want lying around their pit. All it takes is for one to fall down (as mentioned above) to cause an accident. Furthermore, every time someone stops walking to read one (or put one up for that matter), is just one more time someone else yells "ROBOT! coming through!" blowing out another person's ears.

Safety shouldn't be something you have to promote, or market, or sell. It doesn't need silly flyers, buttons, or loud yelling. It needs careful instruction by experienced mentors and professionals, over a period of several months prior to the competition.

I like the idea of the safety award not necessarily being given out at every event. I would enjoy seeing every team stop competing for this award. The award should only be given to deserving teams who have structured their entire year-long program around safe practices, and demonstrate safe practices within their own team without drowning others in propaganda.

I might add one personal experience with safety advisors one year:

We had the robot sitting up on a KOP crate turned upside down, so we could work on it at a more reasonable level. This has been standard practice on our team for years. A safety advisor told us we should not work on it elevated, because it could fall. Alright, we set it down. I gently had a hand on the top of it, while casually overseeing the continuing work. Moments later, I was told not to lean on the robot, as it could roll away and injure someone, and that we should be using wheel chocks any time the robot is parked on the floor.

Would wheel chocks not be a tripping hazard, when the robot is removed (if they are left) ?

A lot of the safety stuff has gone too far, for no real reason at all.

So long as everyone has safety glasses, your pit area is clean, and you aren't trying to rip a sheet of plywood with a circular saw in midair in a 10x10 pit with 10 people in it (yes I've seen it), and you keep your fingers out of powered robots, I think you're being safe, and you shouldn't be hassled any further (for MSDS sheets, and so on).

[Wayne Doenges]

We have won the UL Safety award the last three years and it is because of Gracie Fowler (student).
She implemented a system that required each student to be trained on ALL powered tools before they would be allowed to use said tool by themselves. Each student would carry a card showing what tools they were trained on.
Heaven forbid if you had an accident. She would investigte the accident and write up a report on what happened and how we will try to keep it from happening again.
We don't have robot escorts or pass out flyers. We do keep our pits cleaned. We have safeties made for any potentially hazardous moving part of our robot. Also, our robot cart's wheels are chocked anytime it is not moving.
So those that say they just give out the safety award for no reason, talk to Gracie.

[kristin329]

As a winner of the Star of the Day award at both the regionals my team competed at this season, I have had an overall good experience with the safety advisors..they offered good advice and things to improve on that I found extremely helpful and plan to implement for next season.

As for the yelling at the competitions..our entire pit crew found it obnoxious and annoying, especially since our pit was located right at the entrance to the Georgia Dome at the Championship.

The Safety Award is a great incentive for teams to actually WANT to be safe. It's actually my personal goal for next season, and we strive to do a genuinely good job at fulfilling the safety requirements (PPE, MSDS, fire extinguisher, etc.) without the yelling.

[Katie_UPS]

Let me tell you a story about the safety award:
We won the award in the Midwest Regional in '09. We have no idea why. We'd say loud things when there were people in our way, had First Aid kits, and a fire extinguisher: but that should be standard, right? We also did questionably safe things which added to the confusion.

And I'm going to be honest, while we all had question marks over our heads when we connected the puns, it still felt nice to win something.

So you can take this story three ways: pro-safety award (yay winning something), anti-safety award (being handed out to teams that are not especially outstanding), or pointless (neutral opinions bother you).

[kristin329]

I dunno how awards are selected at your regionals, but at our local SBPLI Long Island regional, the teams are among the best and only the best are chosen for awards.
The team that one the UL Safety Award there this year has their entire team CPR and First Aid certified, as well as an eyewash station, American Red Cross tip cards, burn kit, battery spill kit, fire extinguisher, the works and beyond.

[Cory]

Originally Posted by kristin329

I dunno how awards are selected at your regionals, but at our local SBPLI Long Island regional, the teams are among the best and only the best are chosen for awards.
The team that one the UL Safety Award there this year has their entire team CPR and First Aid certified, as well as an eyewash station, American Red Cross tip cards, burn kit, battery spill kit, fire extinguisher, the works and beyond.

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.

[Karibou]

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.

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.

[Barngirl425]

Being a small team of eight people on a good day some things are a little out of our reach. We have made great improvements with our safety from last year to this year. Being such a small team we dont really have a safety captain, we look to each other for help. When the safety people came around this year to our pit they asked to speak to our safety captain, one of our new members offered to speak to them and the first thing they asked her was what are you doing to promote safety at this competition today, are you handing out flyers ect. He then started getting a little rude with the fact that we werent doing anything

She and I were both a little taken aback at what was happening. He then looked out the six people in the pit saying that if you had six members in the pit you should have enough people in the stands to be handing out flyers, trained in CPR ect. it was then we had to explain that the six people were all that we had this year.

Safety although easier to handle for smaller teams is much more difficult to promote and be showy with than those teams who have enough people to do so. Safety is the most important thing but when teams start getting looked down upon because they dont do the gimmicks but are being safe by themselves should not be looked down upon. I was very shocked with the way our "interview" went this year and I hope next year to not have the same issue.