Environmental & Risk Management / Clean Building / Environmental Hazard Manager

Environmental Hazard Manager: Overview

As an environmental hazard manager, you have two major tasks:

Manage the day-to-day details of hazmat issues -- You can manage all the details of surveying and abating a particular area -- from tracking information about the location, hazardous material, samples collected, and lab results returned, to recording the inspection and abatement companies that handled the issue and their certifications to do so, to entering the final cost of abating the hazmat -- by recording your details in assessment items which belong to a hazmat project.
Manage the Overall Process Flow -- In addition to all the details of collecting samples, analyzing samples, and abating a particular room, an environmental manager needs tools for managing the overall project and process flow, as well as creating an audit trail of the specific actions taken. Environmental and project managers can use the application's project activity items to manage the overall project.

These two functions are outlined below:

Managing the Details of a Hazmat Project

As a hazmat manager, you are responsible for managing the day-to -day tasks of a hazmat assessment and abatement project. These projects require tracking and organizing a great deal of data and managing the work of both internal staff, and outside contractors. You typically follow this process to manage a hazmat project:

Prerequisite: The project manager creates a hazmat project outlining a certain area in the building that must be checked for specific hazardous substances. This could be part of a periodic assessment cycle, or in response to a special circumstance such as a demolition or construction project.

Create hazard assessment item records which can be used to survey your facility for hazmat issues, record problems, and record resolutions.
Assign hazmat assessment items to field assessors who go into the field, examine each area defined by the project, and record their findings.
To assess an area, field assessors typically perform the following tasks. Depending on operations at your site, as an environmental hazard manager you may support field assessors in their work or perform these tasks yourself:

Provide details on the location of hazmat assessment items.
Sometimes, the presence of hazardous substances is obvious as you can immediately see it, such as mold. In other situations, you may need to collect samples from all or some of the areas being examined and record in the system how you collected the samples.
Send the samples out to a laboratory for testing of the presence of hazardous substances. When the lab returns the results of testing the samples, record the hazardous substance test results.
If the sample collecting is being handled by an outside inspector, you may need to assign hazmat items to inspectors.
Using the results of the samples, provide details about the survey and recommend actions.
As the project progresses, you may need to update your initial findings and complete additional fields.
As the project progresses, you may need to review basic facility data to support your decisions and prioritizing.

With field assessments and lab results at hand, you (or a cost estimator) can now estimate costs of addressing hazmat issues found in the field and through testing.
You must now analyze the tasks at hand and prioritize the items that must be addressed. You may find that some must be immediately addressed in order for your site to comply with regulations or ensure employee safety and well-being. For other items, you may have some discretion and be able to prioritize by cost or disruption factor. Use the Scoreboard report to help you prioritize work.
You are now ready to address the individual hazmat issues.

To address the hazmat issues, you may need to enlist outside contractors and abatement workers. If these users are granted direct access to the system, you must assign hazmat items to inspectors, abatement workers, and other HAZMAT professionals.
As the project progresses, you can update hazmat assessment items individually or in bulk.

When the abatement workers and other staff finish their work, enter the cost of resolving hazmat issues.
Inspect the completed work, update the system with final details, and close out the assessment item.
Throughout the process, you can run various reports to support your decision-making. See Management Reports and Operational Reports.
Prepare for follow-up inspections and re-inspections.
At various points in the process, prepare to track the history of your assessment items by copying them to other projects, such as archive projects.

Managing the Overall Process Flow

You can completely manage a hazmat project, from start to finish, using hazard assessment items, as outlined above. Hazard assessment item records have the Hazard Status and Pending Action fields to record each stage in the management cycle.

However, the Clean Building application offers environmental hazard managers additional tools for tracking the process flow of the overall process.

Using these tools is completely optional. You can choose to implement them in any combination and for as many hazard assessment items that require them. For example, only some items may require additional communication. For items that present extremely dangerous situations, you may wish to manage the process flow with action items and/or service requests; other items may not require these tools at all.

These tools also enable you to maintain as detailed an audit trail as you wish of all communications and activity for the project and individual assessment items, which may help meet your regulatory obligations for documentation, or help reduce your liability risk in case of future audits or claims.