Sustainability & Risk / Hazard Abatement / Environmental Hazard Manager
Sustainability & Risk / Hazard Abatement / Field Assessor

Provide Details on the Location of a Hazmat Assessment Item

Typically, an environmental hazard manager has generated or created a series of hazard assessment items based on location or other criteria. These records are associated with an hazard assessment project and may contain basic location information. These assessment items have typically been assigned to a field assessor or inspector who will go out to the field to visit these areas and record results.

As a field inspector, your first step is to further define the location that you are inspecting. Knowing exactly where within a room the hazardous substance is located can save time, as well as ensure the safety of other personnel involved in its management, such as inspectors and abatement workers. As outlined below, you have available several fields for specifying an exact location.

Note: Depending on practices at your site, an environmental hazard manager, abatement worker, or other professional involved in hazard management may also perform this task. Whether you are a field assessor, an inspector, an abatement worker, or an environmental hazard manager, you will enter information using one of the following tasks:
Manage Assessment Items
Manage My Assessment Items
Manage My Hazard Abatement Items
Depending on your role, you may be restricted from editing some fields that are listed below.

  1. Select the Manage Assessment Items task, which is available from the Field Assessor, Abatement Worker, and Environmental Hazard Manager roles.

  2. Select the hazard assessment project to see a list of existing assessment items for the project. If you are a field assessor or abatement worker, you will see only items assigned to you.
  1. Click the Edit button for an assessment item.
  2. In the resulting form, complete these fields:
    Site/Building/Floor/RoomThe system automatically completes these Building and Site with the building and site associated with the hazmat project. Complete the Floor Code and Room Code fields as necessary to reflect the location you are assessing. (These fields may have already been completed when the record was originally generated.) See Homogeneous Area below, as you may not wish to create assessment item records for each individual room involved in the project
    Location of MaterialChoose the type of location that you will be examining by choosing a value from the list of location types. Note that a location type may be associated with a particular hazardous substance.

    Location Detail

    Use this field to further detail the location type. For example, if you chose "elevator shaft" for the Location Type, you could enter "Northeast corner" for this field.

    Latitude/Longitude

    This information is handy for situations in which the problem occurs outside of the building (such as lead paint that was not properly disposed of but instead was dumped into the ground), and you want to track the specific location on the site of the hazardous material.

    You can manually enter the latitude and longitude values.

    Homogeneous Area ID

    Use this field to associate the assessment item with a homogeneous area (a series of similar rooms or areas that you can group together) by entering a value for this field. You will then use this same value for other assessment items that you want to associate with this same homogeneous area. This strategy is useful when documenting samples. Rather than collect samples from each individual room, you may wish to treat a series of rooms as one area and collect a sample from this one area. The sample that you collect from this one area can be deemed applicable to all rooms that are part of the homogeneous area.

    Or, as another option, you can establish one assessment record for a homogenous area spanning multiple rooms, such as managing the hazmat on an entire ceiling. Then, you can use the Rooms button to associate the various rooms covered by this area with this one assessment item.

    How you use this field will depend on the level of detail required by practices at your site.

    Location Drawing
    Location Document
    Location Photo
    Use these document fields to store scanned copies of any documents, drawings, or photos related to the location of the assessment item. For example, you may wish to take pictures of the location and attach the image files as documents.
    Material Location NotesEnter any descriptive notes about the location and specific sampling area you are working with. It is important to provide as much descriptive information as possible in order to pinpoint the exact spot where the potentially hazardous material is located.

Documenting the Hazmat Area on a Floor Plan Drawing

  • For complete documentation of hazmat assessment items, you may wish to indicate on a floor plan CAD drawing the exact areas on the floor with issues.

  • If your site wants to update CAD drawings in this manner, as a field assessor you will need to make notes on the exact location of the problems. This information will then be passed along to a CAD specialist who will update the floor plan drawings with these locations. There are a few methods for noting this information:

  • Next

    Enter information about surveying the area and the hazmat that you find