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| WV DEP |
After the Arizona Fire Marshal’s Office wrote up Mesa High School during the first week of school for improper storage and identification of chemicals on campus, the district is nearing completion of a comprehensive effort to identify and log thousands of chemicals in Mesa’s 84 schools.
The district is entering the names, amounts and expiration dates of the substances into a database that can be accessed by school officials and outside emergency workers. Officials also are creating a comprehensive safety training program for everyone who handles chemicals in the district — from custodians to chemistry teachers.
“If there is an emergency — say someone ingests or is exposed to chemicals — the first responder is going to want to know exactly what they were exposed to,” said district operations director Rick Michalek. In the event of a fire at a school, firefighters also need to know what kinds of explosive substances might be inside of a school.
Michalek said the district had already hired John Amenson, a safety consultant with the firm Risknomics LLC., when it realized at the start of the school year that it needed to speed up plans for a new training program and the database of all chemicals being used in the school system.
Amenson had already been helping the district compile information about hazardous materials including fertilizer for agriculture classes to the Department of Homeland Security.
“Our plan now is much broader in scope than what the fire marshal recommended,” Michalek said.
Amenson and district maintenance supervisor Robin Todd explained that until this school year each school had individual policies for storing and logging chemicals for classes and cleaning. And, because of employee turnover, some schools have not been able to readily locate their logs of chemicals at the start of each school year. That’s what happened at Mesa High on the first week of school this year, they explained.
This year, all Mesa schools employees who handle chemicals will be involved in what the district calls a “chemical roundup,” he said. That involves disposing of all outdated cleaners and lab chemicals and sending information about the rest to a new centralized computer database.
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