Sustainability & Risk / Hazard Abatement / Environmental Hazard Manager

Ongoing Building Monitoring

Some hazardous substances require ongoing building monitoring to ensure that the substance does not re-appear or remains within acceptable levels. For example:

• Some organizations will perform yearly surveys of specific locations to ensure that radon levels stay within acceptable bounds.
• Organizations in humid tropical climates perform extensive checks for mold many times each year to detect and abate mold before it spreads.
• Many countries have regulations that require ongoing building monitoring for asbestos in locations where discovered asbestos was contained rather than removed.

To perform ongoing building monitoring, you will create a new project for each periodic re-inspection (monthly, quarterly, yearly, etc.). You can then copy the assessment items from the previous period’s project into the current period’s project. See Preparing for Follow Up Assessments and Re-Assessments.

To view a history of your monitoring efforts for a specific area, see the topic Tracking Assessment Item History. Working from the Manage Hazard Assessment Items task, you can create an assessment history that provides proof of your monitoring efforts to regulatory agencies; you can also view the history of inspection results and historical trends for each area.

Example of Ongoing Building Monitoring

The following describes using the Hazard Abatement application to do ongoing monitoring for the presence of mold.

1. Define the initial project. Define a monthly mold survey project with a start date and optional end date. Name the new project appropriately to reflect the time period it covers. For example, you may wish to include the month or year in the project title, for example 2013-01-MOLD. See Hazardous Materials Projects.
2. Generate assessment items for the mold survey project using the Manage Hazard Assessment Items task.

   When generating assessment items, you can specify a Site Code to generate records throughout a specific site, and you can choose the Floors option to create assessment items for each floor at the site. You would then choose ceilings, walls, and floors for the Location of Material field to pinpoint the location to be assessed. A separate assessment item is generated for each location material you select. When inspecting for mold, you might want to visit each room in the building. See Creating Hazard Assessment Item Records.

3. Set the date to perform: From the Manage Hazard Assessment Items task, set a due date for one or more of the resulting assessment items by running the Update Selections action and entering a Date to Perform.
4. Assign a worker: From the Manage Hazard Assessment Items' Assessments tab, assign one or more of the generated assessment items to a worker by selecting the check box for the items. Click Assign Selection, and select Assign to Assessor or Assign to Inspector/Worker from the submenu. Select the assignment from the lists, and click Assign.
5. Inspectors view their assignments: After the assignments are made, when inspectors sign in, they will see their assessment items grouped by project.
6. Generate additional assessment items. To create more items for this month's monitoring, you would generate additional assessment items for this project by following steps 2 to 4. Since this project involves monthly monitoring, to create assessment items for the next month, you would create a new project, and copy the existing assessment items to the new project, starting from step 1.

   You can do the following to facilitate updating the new assessment items:

   • Select multiple items to bulk edit them, such as when changing dates, or making assignments.
   • Use the Copy As New action from the edit form for any assessment item to copy it to the project. You can then make changes to the assessment items as needed.

7. Update assessment items from inspection results: As the inspection progresses and results are available, you or an inspector/field assessor would update assessment items individually or in bulk to reflect information from the inspection. See Provide Details about Surveying a Hazmat Assessment Item and Updating a Hazmat Assessment Items as a Project Progresses.

8. Define next month’s project: After this month’s project is complete, when the next month arrives, define a project (for example, 2013-02-MOLD) for the new month’s inspection by following step 1.

9. Copy assessment items from previous month: Since the project involves monthly monitoring, to create assessment items for the next month, you would copy the existing assessment items from the last completed month to the new project. For example, you would copy assessment items from project ‘2013-01-MOLD’ to project ‘2013-02-MOLD’.

10. Edit copied assessment items: You may want to edit or reset some values from the copied assessment items in preparation for a new inspection. You can do the following to facilitate updating the newly copied assessment items:

    • Select multiple items to bulk edit them, such as when changing dates, making assignments, or resetting the hazard rank, rating, response, or status.

    • Use the Copy As New action from the edit form for any assessment item to make another copy in the project. You can then make changes to the assessment item as needed.

11. Go back and repeat from Step 3.