Environmental & Risk Management / Clean Building / Environmental Hazard Manager

Addressing Hazmat Issues

Once field assessors and inspectors assess areas for the presence of hazardous substances and collect samples from these areas, environmental hazard managers review the field and sample results and note the deficiencies. Deficiencies might include items that clearly contain hazardous substances that can compromise health, items that do not meet environmental codes, or items that are cracked or broken and are therefore producing air-borne hazardous substances.

Determining the Items to Address

You must now review your assessment data and determine the items that need to be addressed. You can:

Review the Scoreboard report and other reports to see the most urgent items. These reports are located in the Operational Reports and Management Reports sections of the Process Navigator.

You may also wish to review these fields of the individual assessment items. Depending on practices at your site, a field assessor may have completed these fields, or you as a manager may have completed them. You may wish to filter the Manage Hazard Assessment Items view by these fields.
Hazard Rank
Hazard Rating
Material Condition
Friability
Contains Hazardous Substance?
Hazard Response
Recommended Action

Procedure

Take note of the items that you wish to address, and then follow this procedure.

On the Process Navigator, select the Manage Assessment Items task.
Select the hazard assessment project, move to the Assessments tab, and choose Show to see a list of existing assessment items for this project.

If necessary, use the filter console to limit the list of assessment items. For example, you may wish to see only those records whose Friable? or Contains Hazardous Substance? is Yes.

For the items requiring attention, complete the Hazard Status field to show how you are addressing this item. You may also need to complete these fields:

Pending Action	Use this field to describe the next planned step in the management process of this item. For example, you might initially complete this field with "Perform Assessment." Later, in the process you can change it to "Perform Abatement" or "Perform Re-Inspection." This field is validated by the Hazard Problem Types table. Use Pending Action and Hazard Status (below) to help track your workflow. For example, the Hazard Status may be “initial survey in progress”, and Pending Action may be “estimate inspection” or “perform inspection”, depending on the unique workflow that each organization chooses to follow.
Hazard Status	Holds the current status in the hazmat management process of managing this item. As the process flows from a problem being reported, to investigated, to further testing, to resolution, users involved in the process will update this field with the appropriate value. For example, you can choose from Reported, Initially Assessed, Assessed, Verified, and so on. The exact values from which you can choose are determined by your site.
Date Required Date Started Date Completed Date Abated	Complete these fields to show key dates in resolving the item.
Hazard Response	From the available list, indicate how you resolved the item (encapsulated, removed, encased, etc.) Some items may contain asbestos, but if they are in tact (not cracked or chipped), they are not releasing asbestos into the air and are best left undisturbed. In this case, use the No Response or Manage value.
Labeled?	If you (or the abatement worker) seal an area that contains a hazardous substance, you typically label it as such so that future inspectors can bypass this area. Set this field to Yes if the area was labeled as part of the resolution.

If resolving the issue requires an abatement worker, inspector, or other outside contractor, you can assign these types of worker to the assessment items. In this case, these users may complete the above fields. See Assigning Hazmat Items to Inspectors, Abatement Workers, and other Hazmat Professionals