SECTION I:  INTRODUCTION

WHY WE HAVE AN ENVIRONMENTAL  HEALTH AND SAFETY PROGRAM

When you see or hear the phrase “environmental health and safety,” what runs through your mind?  What are you thinking and visualizing?  Is it, perhaps, checklists and inspections and unwanted paperwork?  Does it bring to mind a “big brother is watching” concept, or “someone’s trying to tell me what I can and cannot do?”

Hopefully, this is not the case.  Rather, the achievement of your health and your safety within your environment are the underlying commitment and the very foundation upon which our environmental health and safety program at Community Colleges of Spokane is built.    Think for a moment about the meaning of these words:

SAFETY:  The condition of being safe from undergoing or causing hurt, injury or loss.  Freedom from harm or risk.  Security from threat or danger, harm or loss.  (In other words, the opposite of danger/dangerous.)

HEALTH:  The condition of being sound in body, mind or spirit; freedom from physical disease or pain.  Well-being.

Now we have the picture!  Freedom, not restrictions!  The freedom to be safe; the freedom to be in good health. Is this something for which we want to unite our efforts?  You bet!  Environmental health and safety, both at home and in the workplace, should be a concern and goal common to each of us.  Most certainly it cannot be achieved or realized by any one individual.  On the other hand, by working together, with each of us accepting personal responsibility for his/her own actions, a safe and healthful working and learning environment for all who are a part of Community Colleges of Spokane becomes an attainable goal.

There are certain topics none of us likes to think about or come to terms with; in particular, such things as accidental injury or even death.  Unfortunately these are realities of life in spite of the fact that most of us choose to take the ostrich approach, believing, “It will never happen to me, or to my loved ones.”  The facts, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLA), tell  us otherwise.   The BLA reported the following accident statistics for the United States in 1994:

· 92,200 people suffered accidental deaths

· 18.6 million suffered disabling injuries

· 6,588 workers were killed on the job

· accidents were the fifth leading cause of death for all people of all ages

· accidents were the leading cause of death for people ages 1-37 years

· twice as many males died in accidents as females

· for ages 1-24 years, motor vehicle accidents (MVAs) were the leading cause of accidental deaths, followed by drowning, fires and burns

· more than 90 per cent of fatal motor vehicle accidents occur in the driver’s home state

· more than three out of four drivers involved in fatal MVA accidents were within 25 miles of their  homes 

· by age 78 falls replace motor vehicle accidents as the leading cause of accidental injuries,  accounting for more than half of all accidental deaths for the elderly age group

Consider the definition of ACCIDENT:  1) an event occurring by chance or arising from unknown cause;  2) an unfortunate event resulting from carelessness, unawareness, ignorance, or a combination of causes.

We may not be able to totally eliminate an accident as described in definition #1, but most certainly we could, by conscious choice and a concerted effort, eliminate the majority of accidents as described in definition #2.   THE CHOICE IS OURS!  Consider the “Accident Cause and Result Sequence:”

CAUSE (unsafe conditions - 10%; human error - 90%) produces EFFECT (accidents:  injury, damage, death)

Clearly, it is up to each of us to decrease accidents by working toward elimination of both unsafe conditions and human error.