March 8-14 was Safety Awareness Week for Kirkwood Community College. Kirkwood hosted three events for the special week: Safety & Sustainability Meet-and-Greet/Spot the Hazard, VR Safety and Emergency Preparedness/First Aid.
The event on March 9 included many activities, one of them being “Spot the Hazard” where students were presented with multiple physical visual aids of common work settings such an office and laboratory.
Some hazards found in the different settings were food and drink, loose cords and too many things plugged into one outlet being found in a lavatory setting.
Jack Kelley, environmental specialist, commented that the biggest hazard that students miss is “there’s an aerosol can in the recycle bin. You can’t do that.
A lot of people don’t know that you can’t throw away Lysol spray, that’s considered a pressurized thing, so it’s disposed of in a different way.”
Sustainability Club members also attended the event. Jacob Zirkelbach, Sustainability Committee co-chair, talked about how Kirkwood has a lot of different programs, and some of them use hazardous material whether it is for a CNC machine or for the auto shop. This hazardous material cannot be simply thrown into the landfill. It must be put under the earth and ensured it will not leak into the soil and groundwater and therefore into our environment.
“Sustainability is a lot of things, but one of them is making sure that things aren’t getting into our environment that don’t need to be there,” said Zirkelbach. “I’m sure you’ve heard a lot about PFAS, those forever chemicals. A lot of those are leftovers from a whole bunch of industrial processes, and we teach industrial processes. So we’re gonna see some of those materials come up, and it’s just about intercepting them here as opposed to later on down the line in rivers and oceans and lakes, where they’re impossible to get out.”
Public Safety officers were also present for the event. They talked about automated external defibrillators and how they work. AEDs scan heart rhythms and shock the patient to help restore their normal heartbeat. Officers noted that it is important to continue doing chest compression after the shocks since chest compression is how one manually pumps the blood for the incapacitated person, delivering vital oxygen to the patient.
Event organizer and Environmental Health and Safety Manager Zoe Harris said she hopes students understand that safety is important both on and off campus. “I hope that they take away that the safety occurs both at Kirkwood, but there are steps that you can take off campus as well,” she said.
Categories: Feature
