Sustainability & Risk / Hazard Abatement / Environmental Hazard Manager

Creating Hazard Assessment Item Records

After a project manager defines a new hazmat project, a hazmat manager typically takes over and sets up the details of the project by creating hazmat assessment items that list the individual areas that should be assessed and inspected for the existence of a hazardous substance, and if hazmat is found, should be managed, abated, and re-inspected. As the hazmat project progresses, field assessors, inspectors, and abatement workers will update the assessment item records with their findings.

As an environmental hazard manager you can create hazmat assessment items in a few ways:

• manually create assessment item records by choosing the Add New button and completing the appropriate fields on the resulting form.
• have the system automatically generate a set of assessment item records for buildings, floors, or rooms based on the criteria you provide. The below procedure outlines the steps for automatic generation.

You also have control over the level of detail at which you want to track issues.

• You can create one assessment item to assess an entire floor or building. If necessary, you can associate particular rooms with the assessment item. See the Homogeneous Area field in Provide Details on the Location of a Hazmat Assessment Item
• You can create individual assessment items for each floor in a building or each room on a floor. The detailed fields of the assessment item records support this level of tracking. If you do create many assessment items in this manner, you will find that the system has features for updating them in bulk and assigning them in bulk to the same worker.

Note: It is possible to create records by copying them from one project to another. This is usually done when you want to track history. See Tracking Hazmat Assessment Item History.

Procedure to Generate Hazard Assessment Item Records

1. Select the Environmental Hazard Manager / Manage Assessment Items task.
2. Select the hazard assessment project to see a list of existing assessment items for this project. If necessary, you can filter the list of existing assessment items using the Filter console in the top frame. Note that the values that you choose in this filter are strictly for displaying a list of existing assessment items. These values do not affect the generation of assessment items.
3. Review the list of existing assessment items and determine the new records that you need to generate.
4. Choose the Generate Assessment Items button. The system presents a dialog for you to specify the properties by which the system will generate assessment items.

• When completing the dialog, you can enter as many or few options in order to control the types of records that are generated. For example, you can generate assessment items for an entire building or site, or further refine your records by generating them based on such criteria as the department using the area, the building age, the building rehabilitation date, building use, and so forth.
• You must specify whether to generate records for the buildings, floors, or rooms that meet the criteria that you specify. The type of project will determine the level at which you generate records. For example, if you are inspecting for mold, you may wish to visit each room in the building. If you are inspecting pipes for asbestos, you may wish to generate assessment records for each floor. If necessary, you can later associate specific rooms with each floor-based assessment item.
• You must complete the Location of Material option to specify the specific location (floor, wall, ceiling tile, wiring) within a building, floor, or room to assess and manage. Since hazardous material can be located anywhere within an area, setting the specific type of location within the area focuses the assessment and ensures that specific areas are managed. For example, for one floor you could generate assessment records that focus on managing hazmat in pipes, and another set of assessment records focusing on managing hazmat in ceiling tiles. If you do not require this level of detail, complete this option with Other to indicate that all locations should be inspected. Note that location types can be associated with specific hazardous substances so that you might have separate location type values for assessing a ceiling tile for mold and assessing a ceiling tile for asbestos.
• If your hazmat project is associated with a site or building, the system will automatically apply these values to the dialog as it is likely that you will want to generate records for the building/site associated with the project. If you have not associated a site and building with the project, these fields will be blank. Note that you must minimally complete a site for which to generate records.

5. Optional (Default Values frame): If you know the parties who will be working with these assessment items, you can specify these values and the system will automatically assign them to the new assessment item records that it creates. For example, if you always use the same field assessors, inspectors, or abatement workers, you can enter these values now. If your workers tend to vary, you will want to leave these fields blank and then assign specific workers to the individual assessment items.

• Assessed By -- Choose the field assessor who will assess the area.
• Assigned To -- Choose the inspector who will inspect the area. You can also use this field to associate other hazmat professionals with the assessment items.
• Abatement Worker -- Choose the abatement worker who will resolve the problem.
• Abatement Reason -- Enter the reason why these areas are being managed. For example, if you are working on this area in preparation for renovation, you can enter Renovation as the reason.

6. Choose Generate and the system generates the records and displays them.

Next: After generating the records, you assign them to a field assessor and/or inspector who goes to the field and assesses the presence of hazmat in these locations.