Environmental & Risk Management / Clean Building / Environmental Hazard Manager

Preparing for Follow Up Assessments and Re-Assessments

Ensuring a clean building free of hazardous substances is not a one-time effort. Assessments need to be periodically performed to ensure that existing known issues do not worsen, as well as to look for new issues. As an environmental hazard manager, you will want to plan for follow-up and re-inspections.

For example, suppose a previous assessment noted that radon was present but not at levels that required your action. You will want to periodically check this area to ensure that levels have not risen and now need attention.
Similarly, regulations may call for periodic re-assessment; for example, a school system must comply with U.S. EPA AHERA regulations and perform a full asbestos re-inspection of all school buildings every three years.

To prepare for a follow-up inspection or re-inspection of an area that has already been inspected, you can use the system's copying feature to generate new assessment items from existing ones. Knowing the results of previous assessments can aid in re-assessment efforts.

When you create new assessment items from existing assessment items, many properties will be the same; however, some fields will need to be updated with information specific to the follow-up assessment. For example, you might have a different assessor, inspector, abatement worker, documents, costs, and dates. It is also important to update the condition and status. Accordingly, the system does not copy the following data when creating new assessment items from existing ones:

Assessed By/Assigned To
Hazard Status
Project ID
Document fields
Cost fields
associated sample and lab result data
associated activity items

Procedure to Copy Assessment Items to a New Project

Follow these general steps to copy assessment items from an existing project to a newly created project:

Create a hazmat project for holding your re-assessment data, and name it appropriately. For example, you may wish to include the date or year in the project title. The project must be for the same hazardous substance as the project from which you will copy records.
Copy assessment items from the current (source) project to the destination project created in step 1. This entails:

Run the Manage Hazard Assessment Items task and load your source assessment project.
Select the assessment items for areas that you will re-assess. To select all assessment items on the screen, click the topmost check box in the field title header row.
Choose the Copy Selections button.
Choose the destination project created in step 1 (you can only choose from projects that are associated with the same hazardous substance as the current project), and click Create Copies.
The system copies the selected items from the current project to the destination project. The function does not copy all data and does not copy assigned activity items and lab results.

To access the project with the newly copied assessment items, select the Select Project tab, and click Select in the row for the project. The Assessments tab shows the copied assessment items in the Hazard Assessment Items tab.
Use this new project and its assessment records for your follow-up inspection. In the blank assessment item fields, record data specific to this assessment. If necessary, you can edit values that were copied from the original assessment item.

See Ongoing Building Monitoring for an example of working with an ongoing project.