Greetings Chief Delphi,
8 Safety Captains (Including myself) at the San Diego Regional worked to innovate and help make safety more visible in the pit. Many of the captains discovered it is difficult to find emergency equipment when you are in need of them in the pits. So as a team they worked together to make the locations more easy to find. They had two methods for accomplishing this
STICKER METHOD:
A roll of blank stickers was used and had characters drawn on them. Then captains went around and interviewed other safety captains in the pits. If said team had a Piece of emergency equipment a sticker was placed on the team number sign. This sign is given to each team and is used by judges for stickers as well. This sign was also likely posted near the front of the pits and is easy to find. Here is an example of the Stickers. (Pardon the blurry picture, the markers faded a bit) See image Below
This is a cheap option (you can find a roll of blank stickers for about 6$ on amazon and said roll can be used for lots of comps as at max you will need about 150 stickers per comp)
Other Method
PAPER SIGNS
Team 4160s safety captain brough printed signs to help you locate the nearest safety item at a glance. The signs featured a spot to get basic team info (Team name, number, safety captain) as well as 4 spots that were filled out. Another group of safety captains went around as asked the captains in the pits if they knew the nearest safety item locations. (At the time the battery spill kit was missing). See images Below for papers that were used and the updated version
Issues We Discovered:
When filling out the paper signs it was easy if a team had that item however if a team did not have that item (Totally Fine) it was difficult to put where the nearest item would be as we had not gotten through everyone. Having to backtrack and find the nearest location of the item can be hard and take more time.
Other Issues:
The AED, although hopefully not used, was not put in an area that was easily known. At the event there were only 2 AEDs, one at the First Aid Station (Will Refer to as EMT Station) and one hiding in the arena. The issue was that the safety captains were only informed in the late morning of the Qualifications day. So this is where the paper signs came into play as you can see it shows where the emt station is and that that is the nearest one. Our solution idea: On the pit maps and public maps that were available have an icon for where the AED is in the event it is needed.
What Did We Do:
We are working on developing safety standards for each event. We hope that when a team checks into an event they get 3 stickers for: First Aid Kit, ABC Fire Extinguisher, Battery Spill Kit. Then when they go back to the pit they will place the stickers on their signs that correspond to the emergency equipment they have in their pit. (Discard the extra). Also through the event have pit admin make an announcement about the stickers so people become more used to understanding/interpreting them.
Other Safety Things:
Safety Glasses, At CASD there were lots of visitors that did not have safety glasses. The event was not offering glasses to borrow at this event and so there were a lot of people in the pits who ended up without glasses, although their teams did end up giving them glasses. We implemented a volunteer service to help enforce glasses in the pits. Below you can see a schedule for the glasses checks. We had people stay at the entrances to the pits. No team was forced to do this (Although 2543 definitely helped out a lot). We only ended up implementing this late into the competition however felt it was quite effective at ensuring people had safety glasses on in the pit. A simple sign up sheet was used to fill slots.
Calling Safety Captains (Basic Announcement for what safety captains can do a a event to prompt safety):
So what can you do to help this:
- Keep Safety alive, Keep promoting safety in both your teams and at events
- Stickers, If you can there are rolls of stickers on amazon and if you can make these stickers (or work with your other safety captains) for the following items: First Aid Kit, ABC Fire Extinguisher, Battery Spill Kit. Then at the event go around and have teams put them on the team number paper they were given. Ask pit admin to make a announcement about this to help promote the knowledge about them
- Papers, At CASD 4160 handed out papers that helped direct people to the nearest safety equipment. Make your own to hand out with your stickers.
Working to Help Captains
At CASD we made a safety captain discord. This Discord Contained captains and the safety manager volunteers. We hope to expand this to provide more resources to teams to prompt safety. This helped to allow for us to communicate easily with other captains at the event and plan for the future on helping expand the safety stickers into more events.
Thanks to the hard work from safety captains from the following teams: 4160, 2102, 4419, 5025, 3880, 4270, 4919, and both captains from 2839. These captains were the ground breakers for this project and worked hard to help see this project grow (And hopefully grow more).
Of course big thanks to Jason and Chris the event Safety Manager Volunteers. You helped support the new ideas and are were always excited to see new ways to promote safety.
(A little Logo one of the Captians Made that we love)
Any Feedback Would Be Greatly Appreciated and Accepted.
