 All right, thank you for joining us. Thank you for joining us. Sorry, one moment. Sorry about that, everyone. We've had a couple of feedback issues with the audio today. I think we just need to make sure that the presenters and I all have muted microphones when we're not speaking. So apologies for that. Hopefully we can avoid future strange sounds in the rest of the program. OK, so thank you for joining us for today's webinar. This is, of course, the second in this eight-part series to complement your in-person training for the Texas Heritage Responders Team. These programs are made possible through the generous grant funding support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. We'll be holding our next session on fundraising after disasters on Wednesday, March 21. Let's pull this over here quickly as a reminder. Please refer to this slide for all upcoming dates of programs. And just to refresh your, if you miss any of the sessions, I will email you following the program with a link to the webinar recording. Simply email me when you finish viewing the program, and then I'll mark that in your file. Before we begin the presentation, just a couple of quick technical notes. On your screen, you'll see several boxes, including one labeled chat on the left-hand side. You can use that chat box to say hello, ask questions, share any information or links that you'd like. If you post a question in the chat box, you'll receive a response from me. I will be collecting all questions and then verbally asking them of our presenters during a break in the presentation. Since we have two presenters today, they will each take questions following the end of their remarks. At the bottom of your screen is a box labeled web links. You can click on these to highlight them in blue, and then click the Browse To button in order to be taken directly to the site. That salvage at a glance guide will likely be familiar to you from your course handouts. All right, and with that, I'm very pleased to introduce you all to our wonderful presenters for today. Tara Kennedy and Al Barna. Tara Kennedy is a preservation services librarian at Yale University Library. She holds an MLIS and a certificate of advanced studies in library and archives conservation from the University of Texas at Austin, an MS in forensic science from the University of New Haven, and a bachelor's degree in art history from Northwestern University. Before her time at Yale, she worked at the National Archives, the Smithsonian, and the Gerald Ford Conservation Center. Tara is currently serving as co-chair of the AIC Health and Safety Committee. Outside of work, she is a theater critic for onstage blog and a volunteer for the DOE Network, the online international center for unidentified and missing persons. Our second presenter is Al Barna. Al is occupational health and safety officer at the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, which is the De Young and the Legion of Honor. His 20 plus years of experience at the Fine Arts Museums has enabled him to develop an award-winning museum safety program recognized by the State of California's Division of Occupational Safety and Health, or Cal OSHA's Golden Gate Award. Al is most proud of growing the safety and emergency response program for both museums under the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco umbrella as a staff and footprint have doubled in size. Al also serves as the museum climate liaison for the city and county of San Francisco's departmental climate action plan. Tara and Al are both members of the National Heritage Responders. Tara serves in the NHR Working Group, which helps to direct team activities and develop resources. While Al was deployed to New York City and served as the weekly team leader at the FAIC Cultural Recovery Center in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy in 2012. With that, I'd like to turn things over to Tara to start off today's presentation on health and safety after. Thanks, Jess. Coming to you live from Snowy, Connecticut, or at least it's starting to be snowy, probably not so snowy where you are. Lucky you. So, let's get started. So why is health and safety so important? So protecting people is paramount. That's the number one thing I wanna get across. Human life comes before collections. You can't save collections if you're not well. And if you just take five minutes to put on the proper personal protective equipment, you will save a lifetime in potential chronic and acute illnesses. It's required. There are OSHA requirements that exist for personal protective equipment, and there are a number of federal, there's a number of codes of federal regulations as well. And frankly, I've noticed over the years that health and safety seems to be the last thing on everyone's mind when a disaster strikes. And if I'll take the next slide as an example. So I saw this image. It's in the American Library Association magazine, showing Reforma President Tess Tobin on the left and ALA President-Elect Lode Garcia-Fabel visiting a hurricane-damaged library at the University of Puerto Rico. And basically I freaked. This was used for a publicity shot in a magazine. It clearly demonstrates that people do not understand how to protect themselves properly with personal protective equipment. You don't hold on to your respirator at the bottom while the other strap is hanging down and the other one is just so ill-fitting. It's gigantic. It probably leaks all the way around. The entire perimeter of the mask, I just saw that it instantly went, eek! So I thought it's really important to make sure that you use the equipment, not only use the equipment, but use it properly. So for the region that we're talking about today, the Houston area is what I focused on, even though it looks like a lot of you from our different regions in Texas. So I focused on Houston. Houston resides in Harris County, which is a flat, low-lying region near the Gulf of Mexico. And its elevation is only 80 feet or 32 meters above sea level. So it's one of its biggest risk factors, as you probably know, is flooding, despite an extensive drainage system in the form of bayous and man-made drainage ditches. And this past August with Hurricane Harvey, that this image shows the amount of rainfall that fell in the early morning hours of August 30th, 2017. And to give some perspective on the numbers that you're seeing on your screen, the city of Houston received as much rainfall in several days during that time as it does on an annual basis normally. The average rainfall amount is around 50 inches, was around 50 inches between 1981 and 2010. So Houston got walloped, essentially. And so one of the vulnerabilities of that location there on the Gulf of Mexico is hurricanes. And since the devastating Galveston Hurricane of 1900, which is still considered the deadliest weather disaster in US history, Southeastern Texas has always been at risk for hurricanes and tropical storms due to its climate and location on the Gulf of Mexico. And so the images you're seeing are the paths of Hurricane Orida on your right and Hurricane Ike on your left. And as a side note, if you wanna read a really interesting book about the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, Eric Larson's book, Isaac's Storm, is an excellent read, even if it is about weather. So one of the first things you're going to do is enact your emergency plan after a disaster. And if you don't have one, you need one. So it makes up a good response plan, pardon me. So emergency response plans are considered an ever-changing, ever-improving document. And you always need to be updating it and keeping the staff trained in critical functions in case of an emergency. For some reason, the image that's supposed to be here is not coming up. So I apologize for that. There's supposed to be a cycle showing sort of the ever, basically an emergency plan is a living, a response plan is a living document. So you will have a written plan. You need to have management support for such a plan. Staff training and drills, making sure people know what's in the plan is important. And you need to have feedback after you have said drills or even after emergencies so that you can have continuous improvement upon your response plan. So what are the elements of a response plan? At a bare minimum, the elements listed on this slide here should be included in your emergency response plan. And this is based on federal OSHA requirements. And in some cases, depending on the institution that you work for, they may have already incorporated these into their overall emergency operations plan. For example, I work at Yale, which is a giant university, and they have their own emergency operations plan and department. So if you have a larger university, a larger institution that you work for, a lot of this may already be in place for you. So what you're gonna be focusing on is gonna be collections and of course your own personal safety. So to give you an example of the elements of the library emergency response plan that we have, the first section we have is, well we have five sections to it, plus appendices that have various elements in it. Emergency communication section, prevention and risk assessment, which is important. Emergency preparation, emergency recovery and emergency response. So the emergency communications portion is the institutional level of communications are included in that if it's a large institution, like I mentioned, that has a large emergency management department. So you need to have those numbers. But if you don't have like something as, if you don't work for some places large as a university, it could be something as your communications plan could be something as simple as a phone tree. Who calls whom during a particular emergency. Prevention and risk assessment, things like checklists for places to make sure that you prevent emergencies from happening, such as making sure your temperature and relative humidity set points for collection spaces are a certain level. But if you have an integrated pest management program, essentially steps of a preventative conservation program essentially is what that section is. Emergency preparation, that's training and education for staff who will respond to emergencies, creating collections, priority lists and maps and overview of areas of responsibility. So the teams you have, the roles that these people and teams play and the overall responsibilities. The two main players we have in our plan are the facilities duty officer, which is essentially our buildings operations and security officer and the preservation duty officer, which is the person in the preservation department who carries what we call the emergency phone. So we have a 24 hour hotline that anyone can call with a collections emergency. And the, well, actually now I carry it all the time. So if anyone calls and I answer the phone and I help them sort out the emergency and I become the preservation duty officer. So it means I will give out instructions to the other managers and anybody else on the team as to how to handle the situation. Emergency recovery, you can have lists of your emergency supplies available. One of the things I do have is this chart here, which I'm sorry, it's hard to read here. But it sort of gives you a sense of how serious the emergency is and how you should respond. It's adapted from a table that's in the Stanford University's library's collection emergency response manual. I thought it was a really good overview to sort of give you a gauge as to what, what, how serious the emergency is. So, and at the bottom, the other thing that I recommend is the, which I think you already have as a handout as Jess mentioned, Betty Walsh's excellent salvage at a glance, which is the link, the first link at the bottom. And now, since I've yacked on about emergency plans, there's a poll that Jess has for y'all. Do you have an emergency plan and it's ready for action? How many you got it? No cheating. Looks like it's almost split down the middle. I can't see the whole thing. I was hoping for the best kind of plan. Oh yeah, sort of. But yeah, okay. So it's sort of all sort of, looks like it's split in thirds. So for those of you who don't have emergency plans, it might be something that would be something that might be on your list, your to-do list going forward. Tara, really quickly. A couple quick emergency, sorry. Tara, really quickly, sorry. Sorry, terrible, terrible reverb there and sorry to mute you for a moment. But the missing slide from earlier, sometimes this program does not like certain PowerPoint slides, I think especially animated ones. So this was what Tara was referencing in terms of the ongoing cycle of the planning process. So I just wanted to share that with you all before we move on to the next piece. So I'm gonna go ahead and hide that and turn things back over to Tara. Sorry about that. Thanks Jess. Okay, so I'm gonna talk just to briefly go over, mentioned some emergency response and salvage tools. On your left is a screenshot of the emergency response and salvage app which is based off the item on the right which is the emergency response and salvage wheel and also the field guide to emergency response. The items on the right are available through AIC and the emergency response and salvage app is available for the iPhone and Android operating systems for smartphones. It's okay, it's better than nothing. So if you don't have an emergency plan in place and are hoping for the best as our poll showed, having something like that on your smartphone is better than nothing. So at least you have some guidelines to follow. And it sounds like a lot of the tools you'll be getting through this particular program such will also be helpful to you. And I'm gonna make a pitch for a tool that I made. So the second link at the bottom of your screen there it says collections prioritization tool. I created a simple Excel spreadsheet to help Yale with creating a prioritization list for their collections. So what you're seeing here is a map that's a result of the collections prioritization tool and this is an old map so I'm not giving away any secrets. So if you go to that link and take a look you can download the instructions and tool. It's a series of yes or no questions that you ask the curator or librarian that's responsible for the collections and it helps them to prioritize collections without, I don't wanna say, it's basically walking them through a series of questions and by the time you do scoring at the end you've created a priority list that is almost painless. I've had feedback from librarians who were very concerned about not being able to decide which is most important and which isn't and was pleasantly surprised at the end of the process how easy it was. So I'm spreading the word and hoping that people can use this and if you have any feedback that you wanna give me on it I'm more than happy to take it. So feel free to play around with it and adapt it and make it your own. So first responders, these are your people, your go-to people who are gonna show up first in an emergency. So get to know your local firefighters and first responders. Like you can host an emotional informational social event where they can learn about your collections and the value of the community. This is a huge boon. I know of a number of cultural properties that have done this kind of thing and it's made a world of difference when there has been an emergency. The more familiar the responders are to your building and its contents, the more efficient their response will be and it also will be more respectful and they'll understand that you're not just in an office building, that you have precious contents and they may take better care and have a better understanding of what it is that the property is and its contents. And this is another important thing to have, offsite resources, public safety agencies, contractor lists, courier services, truck rentals, conservation resources like regional centers and art handling and shipping. Having that list include your regular vendors and service providers as well as emergency agencies on the federal, state and city levels. Some people have county levels instead of city depending. Exclusive service or priority service contract agreements are highly recommended in these situations if you can do that. We do have one for the library and it's not necessarily a contract but it's sort of an agreement that we are on a priority list with a disaster response company. And in situations where it's been, we've had overwhelming floods from pipe bursts and things like that has been extraordinarily helpful. So we talk a little bit about risk and exposure for these air, for during emergencies. So flooding and water damage, which I imagine most of you are probably fairly familiar with. And flooding can be result of hurricanes, tropical storms, excessive rain and earthquakes or even melting snow, which will probably be the case for us here on the East Coast in, I don't know, about tomorrow morning. Water damage can create hazardous electrical conditions, silt deposits, mud, debris and a toxic stew of raw sewage, fuel and chemicals. Flooding and water damage can also contribute to hazardous electrical conditions, as I mentioned. In Houston with Hurricane Harvey, there was much concerned about contaminated floodwaters and it was covered by a lot of media outlets, which I didn't notice so much as with Katrina, interestingly enough. So due to the number of petrochemical plants and refineries in the Houston area, benzene was a common contaminant found in the floodwaters after Hurricane Harvey. Pesticides were another contaminant that were found in the floodwaters due to exposure from the water with fields that use pesticides. Bacteria such as E. coli from sewage contamination, as well as heavy metals like lead and arsenic were found in standing water in one family's living room. And this was due to the fact that 40 of 1,219 area wastewater treatment plants were not in operation after the hurricane. The bacterial count was unusually extremely high. So unlike the woman in the picture, which you can see the space between her sleeve and her glove there, you should not have any bare skin exposed, that would be her forearms there. All open sores and wounds should be covered, all vaccinations should be up to date and wash your hands frequently if you're gonna go into floodwaters or even if you go into spaces where even if the floodwaters have receded, these contaminants can still remain. So you have to take extra care with those sorts of situations. It's something I wanted to point out because I noticed that there was a lot of media coverage for it and I think it's something that people don't think about as they're going into situations, especially after the floodwaters have receded. Well, mold risk is certainly high in these environments as well. It's got high humidity, high temperatures and plenty of organic material for it to thrive on, paper, drywall, carpets, and even non-organic surfaces that happen to be dusty, that's organic. The dust is organic. So all molds, you have to think about that all molds do pose a health risk of some sort and some people are more at risk than others. For some people, mold is first a sensitizer which then can become an allergen and then can later become toxic. So it varies from person to person so it's best to make sure that you protect yourself as if it could be something that you would be severely, you would have a severe reaction to. And some molds are toxic to begin with but only testing will tell. Stacky botrists or that toxic black mold that the media tends to talk about, is one of the toxic variants and usually grows on construction materials. So if it's black, it doesn't necessarily mean it's stacky botrists. But you don't know unless you test. So assume that all mold is hazardous. And active mold versus inactive mold, something to mention. Active mold is in the early stages of a bloom has sort of hair-like filaments and webs which develop into more like bushy appearance as the bloom matures. And it's easily seen under magnification. It's soft, it might smear when test with a fine brush. It also could be slimy and damp. And inactive mold is dry and powdery and will brush off materials readily. Just so folks know the difference. So fire produces smoke and smoke produces soot. Just this, and smoke and soot may contain, I'm sorry, smoke might contain carbon monoxide, methane, volatile organic compounds from aldehyde, benzene, acetic acid, formic acid, toluene, organic carbon, et cetera, there's a lot in fire and smoke. And smoke is actually the result of incomplete combustion. Smoke releases carbon particulates into the air and these particles are soot. And in the aftermath of a fire, soot will be deposited on surfaces within a fire damage structure, like you see in the next slide here, like this. And some hazards associated with soot are respiratory and dermal mostly. So it's an irritant to lung tissue and to your skin. So you wanna protect yourself from those as well. For chemical spills and releases, as mentioned with the floodwaters, chemicals from plants, from petrochemical plants and that sort of thing, pesticides from farms and even chemicals from facilities closets can cause problems. Environmental health and safety consultants should be brought in if there's a suspicion of chemicals in floodwaters or anywhere in the disaster area that you're working. Because you wanna make sure that you know what you're getting yourself into and maybe exposing yourself to. So speaking of chemicals in closets, one thing that's really helpful for folks who do have chemicals in their spaces, especially conservation labs, is proper identification of a chemical and chemical container content. And this eliminates chemical accidents and expedites medical emergency treatment and also firefighting as well, especially if you have different cabinets for different types of chemicals. So basic parts of a global harmonization standard, GHS compliant labeling is essential. All right, that's the end of my show. So now it's Al's turn. Thank you, does anyone has any questions? Okay, well I'll pick up where you left out, Terence, that was great. I hope everyone's hearing. Okay, we are gonna talk now about personal protective equipment, which of course is the equipment you will be using to go in for your salvage and recovery and remediation efforts after a disaster. What you're seeing here are posters that were designed during the Depression era. These were created by artists who were working in the Works Progress Administration, which was a part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's ideal programs. So you can see that personal protective equipment is not a new concept. In fact, it goes back centuries. Consider armor for your personal protective equipment. Before you don't any personal protective equipment, regardless of what it's going to be, you need to do a hazard assessment of the area you're going to be working. You have to determine the severity of the situation and what type of hazards might be introduced when you're selecting your PPE. And be aware that OSHA requires a written safety program in order to comply with a lot of safety standards, but also with personal protective equipment, you need to have a PPE program. And then for each of the areas that personal protective equipment addresses, you might also need a program that addresses that in terms of how you do training and how you wear the equipment, how it's distributed. So things like hearing protection, respiratory protection, ball protection, born pathogens protection, all of those require written safety programs, as well as your employer's responsibility to provide personal protective equipment that you need. There are five general categories of PPE. They are basically your head protection, eye protection, hand protection, foot protection, and respiratory protection. So we'll go into that individually. Start with respiratory protection. The respiratory protection is more complicated than the other categories of PPE. You need to have certain components in your program and in the way you actually manage your respiratory protection program. You have to consider respiratory, respirator selection. It has to meet standards that you have to find in the OSHA standards. You know that it's NIOSH certified and that it's a specific, you need to know the specific hazards that the permissible exposure levels are designed into the equipment. You need to know what the assigned protection factors are for the cartridges in the mask and you need to be aware of when cartridges need to be replaced. But the first thing is to have a medical evaluation. If you are deemed unfit or not healthy enough to wear a respirator, it can actually create more of a hazard for you. So getting a medical evaluation from a physician should be paramount. And Al, we had a couple of poll questions here. Do you want to go ahead and do those? Sure, yes, sorry. Oh, no worries. Okay, so the first one here is just wondering if any of you have ever worn a respirator when responding to an emergency event. So it looks like it's about 50-50. A few more of you have worn one. That's great. And then the follow-up question to that. Sorry Al. One, just a quick follow-up here. Have you been properly fit tested to wear a respirator? Great, well that's really helpful to see. So only about a third of you have had that fit testing. Okay, thank you all. Thanks Al. Okay, interesting information. Again, fit testing is extremely important because if you're wearing a respirator that doesn't fit properly, you're actually exposing yourself to more harm because most chemicals will sensitize your senses. After a while, you won't smell it, you won't taste it, but you will be absorbing it. So fit testing is extremely important and it should be done more than once a year. You should try and do a qualitative or quantitative fit test every time you use your respirator. And you also have to be aware of how to use your respirator. Your program should include information about checking the seals on the unit, how to use it with other PPE, being able to identify defective parts and how to replace them. And you should know about modifications to respirators and non-approved replacement parts. You want to stay with the manufacturer's parts and you don't want to modify your respirator. I once saw a gentleman who cut a hole into his respirator so that he could smoke a cigarette while he was working. So that's not a good idea, obviously. You need to be aware of maintenance and care for respirators. You want to know how to clean and disinfect it, how to store it and repair methods that you might have to utilize if you damaged it. As far as storage, I know from personal experience that when OSHA comes in and does an inspection, it will open your cabinets and open your closets and drawers and if they see a respirator, that's not stored properly in a sealed bag with the cartridges sealed, you will be cited for that and find for it. So having a respirator stashed away in a closet with other hammers and tools up against it or sitting on top of it, you open yourself up for violation because the cartridges are going to be absorbing any impurities in the air, particulates, whatever, vapors, chemicals. If they're not sealed, what a lot of people do is cover the cartridges with duct tape when they're not being used. Well, that's the most practical thing is to put it in a Ziploc bag. Okay, and it's crucial that you have a training program and information available for people who wear your respirators. They need to know why a respirator is necessary. They need to know about the compromise and effectiveness of a respirator. If you've got a respiratory ailment or a heart condition, you're putting more strain on your system. You need to be aware of that as well and that's where the medical certification comes in. You need to know what the capabilities and limitations are of the type of respirator that you're wearing. You need to know how to store it and basically should understand the general requirements of the respirator regulations that should propagates. And you also need to evaluate your program at least on an annual basis. You need to look into alternatives to wearing the respirator because actually a respirator should always be your last choice for PPE. If you can introduce mechanical controls, engineering controls, that should be your priority before you actually go to using the respirator. You want to make sure that your employees are involved in your respiratory protection program. Their input is really valuable to how successful your program is and based on all of that information, you may find yourself having to make adjustments to your program on an annual basis. Where I work at the Fine Arts Museums, we only wear a half mask air purifying respirators. We don't get into scuba gear or anything more complicated than that. If in a situation like that, we would bring in professionals to do the work. Again, determine if mechanical engineering controls can be employed to eliminate the use of a respirator. For instance, mechanical ventilation, floor fans, or if you have an HVAC system, it can be adjusted for 100% fresh air intake and 100% stale air removal. That might preclude the need to use a respirator. Talk about hand protection. This is a photograph actually from the Conservation Recovery Center in Brooklyn back after Hurricane Superstorm Sandy. Hand protection is important. It's governed by ANSI standard number 105. 2016. The standard numbers aren't important unless you have a job like I do where you actually have to convince management that these things need to be done and that there's consequences if they're not done. And excuse me. So there are a number of criteria for selecting the proper hand protection. There are many gloves designed for many different purposes. Here you have a bullet list of what you may be looking for and the type of glove that you need for whatever job you're going to be performing. You have mechanical protection. Protect your hands from moving parts and machinery. Chemical permeation and chemical degradation. Conservators will be aware of that because that's when you're using chemicals, you're handling them with appropriate gloves. Heat and flame protection is a factor that might be considered how abrasion resistant glove is. You're working outdoors in cold environment or if you're working in a cold room. You want to be protected from that risk and exposure. Cut resistance and puncture resistance are important factors. Ibration reduction if you're actually working heavy machinery like a jackhammer or maybe power tools. And another criteria is how much dexterity does the glove allow you? You wouldn't want to wear a glove to carry in a trust in bombs, for instance, which would make it hard for you to grasp the object. So dexterity is an important factor to consider when you're selecting safety gloves. We have head protection, which essentially is another poll question. Yeah, sorry about that. Do you know about the AIC Health and Safety Committee's glove chart? And Tara, you might want to jump in here. I'm seeing pretty much all knows and explain a little bit about this resource. Oh, wow. Oh, thank you, one person. So the Health and Safety Committee on the AIC Wiki website has created a chart that tells you which gloves you should be using depending on the chemical that you're using. So it's specifically for conservators. So if you're not a conservator, I can sort of understand why you haven't heard of it. But it still could be applicable to you, just stuff you're doing at home, because not all gloves are created equal. So apparently we need to do a better job of advertising that. So that is good information to have. Thank you. Okay, and along those lines, there are charts available for just about every category of personal protective equipment. You can find these through your vendors or through vendor catalogs, or OSHA puts out a great series of back sheets for just about any safety concern that you might have. So you can go to the OSHA website and look for those as well. Now we're talking about head protection, which essentially is hard hats most of the time. And OSHA actually has two standards that govern hard hat requirements. You don't have to concern yourself with those right now. Both standards require that workers wear hard hats when there's a potential for head injury from impacts, falling or flying objects, or electrical shock. That means that your employer must provide a hard hat that ensures that employees wear protective coverings and fall into situations. When objects or debris might fall from above and strike workers on the head, employees may strike their heads against fixed objects like supports, beams, or other equipment. And where there's a possibility that workers' heads will make contact with electrical hazards, it's very important. So wearing a hard hat doesn't make you invincible. You still have to use your judgment and use your safety skills when you're wearing a hard hat, as well as with all PPE. It doesn't make you invincible to injury or accidents. And with head protection, there are a number of things that are required on the protection itself so that you can purchase a hard hat and knowing you bought the appropriate type of hard hat for your job. Each helmet, each hard hat is going to have falling information that points out there. The manufacturer's name, the standard that the hat conforms with, and the type and class designation of the helmet, what size range it will fit, and the date it was manufactured. This is the underbill of a hard hat. And the red circle tells you where you can find that information. It's usually on the underbill of the hat or it could be on a label inside of the hat. And the FAIC, National Heritage Responders Group, are provided with a hard hat as part of their standard protective equipment. This happens to be my helmet. I'm sorry, I keep saying helmet and hard hat, but essentially, it's the same thing. Then you have foot protection. And I think this is very important. I often hear in our circle, people like to talk about boots on the ground. And I often wonder how many of those people actually own a pair of boots. So foot protection is something to consider after any emergency, any disaster situation, because you're going to have risk and exposures, glass, mud, electrical hazards. So when you purchase footwear, again, there's important information on the label. And you want to know what all of this means. So on the label here, of course, it's a men's shoe. It tells you what size it is, brand, and materials. But in the rectangle in the box is where the important information is. The ASTM number there tells you that this boot is approved by the American section of the International Association for Testing Materials. And line one tells you that it meets the performance requirements of that standard. Line two tells you that it is designed either for an M, a signified male, if it was an F, obviously it would be female. And it also identifies the existence of the impact resistance of that boot. In this case, the impact resistance is 75 pounds. And the compression resistance is signified where you see the C slash 75. It's also rated at 75 pounds, which actually correlates to about 2,500 pounds of compression. So you're buying a very high quality piece of footwear. And there's also the MT, which you don't see on this shoe. There'd be another line that would be the metatarsal designation and rating for the shoe. So again, this is usually found on the inside of the tongue of the shoe. It could be on the collar around the ankle part of the shoe. But you don't want to purchase a pair of work boots, a steel-tone work boots, if they do not have the ASTM approval. Hearing protection is not always primary to a lot of emergency response or recovery. But if it is needed, again, there's a number of criteria for wearing hearing protection. First of all, OSHA standard does not kick in until the decibel level exceeds 85 DBA. Does you, again, need a written safety program as well as providing the employees with the hearing protection? And the written hearing protection program is pretty extensive. You have to have a section that outlines the purpose of the program. You have to have a section that lists the policy of the institution. You need to discuss the scope of the program. You have to include a summary of all of the regulatory requirements for hearing protection. You have to have methods of monitoring employee noise exposure. Those are engineering controls and mechanical controls. You might have to bring in industrial hygienists to do that for you. You have to have a section on how you control noise exposures. All of your employees should have an audio metric testing performed before they actually wear hearing protection. You have to do a training program. Also, you have to maintain records. Record keeping is very big with OSHA. You need to have records of all of your programs and people, your employees, or staff that are involved in any of your safety programs. Training records, you need echo records. And you have to hang on to those for quite a while. Some of them as many as 30 years, so records need to be available for OSHA's perusal. You also have to discuss and come up with a method of how you calibrate the equipment that you are using. And there are some appendices to that whole program, caring maintenance of protective devices. You need to have a hearing loss prevention certification for each employee. Also, create a certification checklist so that you know that you are actually applying the OSHA standard. So it's not as simple as just putting on a pair of earplugs. There's a few things involved with it. It can be a little complicated. Basically, the hearing protection standard is designed to address continuous intermittent and impulse noise. It also will give you a formula for determining the permissible exposure levels and the time-weighted averages for the amount of noise and the level of decibels over a certain period of time. And all of that is factored in by a pretty standard charts and calculations done by menstrual hygen. We have eye protection as another concern. You need eye protection for different purposes. And you have to select the appropriate protection. Chemical resistance, if you're working in chemicals where you have the potential for splash or spills, making eye contact, you want to make sure that the eye protection you're wearing is chemically resistant. You might have to consider impact versus non-impact glassware or eyewear. If you're working construction, you pretty much need impact resistant eyewear. Laboratory work, maybe not as much. And if you're working with lasers, other light generating equipment, you would have to consider optical radiation protection as well. So let's go back to this slide. And based on what we've been discussing, I don't know if any of you see anything wrong with this photograph. It's not a poll question. I'll quickly tell you that no, this gentleman is really suited up perfectly for what he's doing. He's got head protection. He's got eye protection, ear protection. You might not be able to see all of this in the slide. And he's also got a fall protection. You see his harness. Hopefully that's something you won't have to be engaged in during your careers is a whole another specialized area of fall protection versus protective equipment. Anyway, and he's also wearing, you'll notice he's wearing a Tyvek suit. This comes in really handy if you're working in a dusty environment or an environment where you may be exposed to asbestos. Hopefully that's not the case. If you have asbestos problems in your building, they should be identified in advance. You should have an asbestos abatement program in place and an asbestos management program in place. And you need to be certified by your state government to basically run those programs. We'll talk about some of the immediate hazards that you might encounter where you're actually going to need PPE. Since glass, this is a photograph of glass pyramid in the courtyard of our Legion of Honor museum. This is taken from below in galleries that are on the basement level of the museum. So for me, I know that I don't want to be in an area where we have an abundance or a lot of glass in an earthquake situation. So something you can think these things out in advance just like you should know at least two exits out of any building or any location in a building that you're in, these are things you can do to protect yourself prior to a natural disaster. Because glass in most emergency or natural disaster situations will end up being broken glass. So there in lines of hazard and broken glasses obviously can result in cuts and lacerations. So if you were responding to a situation where you have glass and you're going to need to wear boots and proper gloves, and another thing to consider is when you clean glass, if you've been in a flood or an earthquake, there's always the potential for gas leaks, a natural gas leak. You might consider getting a selection of spark-proof tools because in a gas leak situation, if you're using a shovel and a broom to sweep up broken glass, that spark can trigger an explosion, a natural gas explosion. So just something to consider, they're not cheap, but they are very effective. In earthquakes and storms, hurricanes, high winds, you will likely experience falling objects. This is in one of our storage areas. You can see that these clocks are secured to a framework, which is also secured to the structural parts of the building. And our shelving units, you should always make sure your shelving units are secured to the walls, or at the very least, to the floor if you can't do a wall-secure situation. And we keep all of our materials containerized and in padded containers, and we also strap them in. I recommend using nylon straps and snap buckles as opposed to bungee cords because bungee cords can be really dangerous. They're a real eye hazard. So you had a number of close calls over the years with bungee cords snapping back or failing at hitting people. You don't want to lose an eye. So bungee cords are not the safest thing to use when you're securing your materials or your objects. You want to make yourself familiar with the utility shut-off locations in the buildings where you work. This is usually a responsibility of your building engineer, but if the building engineer is not available, you want to designate other people to know where and how to shut off your utilities. This is a floor plan that I made for one of our facilities. We have our water shut-off, the gas shut-off, and the electrical shut-off. And G is also designates our emergency generator system. And a utility site plan is also very helpful not only for your staff, but for the fire department. If they have this information in their system, for instance, San Francisco has a hazardous materials unit that's part of the fire department. And all of our hazardous materials inventories, our floor plans, our location of hazardous materials storage areas, all of that is in a computerized system that the Hazmat staff has. And they actually have that information on board their vehicles. So once they respond to an emergency at our facilities, they know where all of these utilities are located. They know where our hazardous materials are stored. It makes their job a lot easier. They can perform a much more effective operation. So you want on your site plan, which is a perimeter plan, to ensure that you have your sewer lines and your storm drains marked, all of your fire hydrants and any of the exterior shut-off. We have one last poll question here. Very quickly, and related to those last couple of slides, I specifically wanted to know if you know where the water main shut-off is for the primary building that you work in. OK, no one's feeling too confident about the answer to this. OK, one person knows for sure. But it looks like we're about 50-50 for having a sense of where it might be, but also half the group doesn't really know where to even start. So helpful information to have. Thanks, everyone. And that's the last poll question. OK, so when we're done here, you might want to go and talk to your facilities people and ask them where your utility shut-offs are located. Because you might be the only one in the building some afternoon. Hopefully, I won't be the case, but at least you'll know how to shut things down. And we'll just talk about shutting off gas. Most things like the electric, obviously, is a switch. But gas shut-off is confusing for a lot of people. And all you have to remember is that when you find the gas shut-off valve, if the valve is in line with the length of the pipe, the gas is open. When you turn that valve across the pipe, you have shut the gas. You effectively shut the gas off. All of your water lines should be labeled, and this is code in most municipalities, but you want to know your domestic water lines, your hot, cold water lines. All of this is really helpful not only for your staff, but also for emergency responders. Be aware of electrical hazards so that they can be in. This is our boiler room. Electrical hazards created, particularly in flood situations, water, earthquake situations. You have, obviously, you have seismic activity. Electric lines can be damaged. So you need to be aware of electrical hazards. They can, if you've got a short or if a wiring's been damaged, you can smell it. You have the smell of burnt insulation, or you might see and hear sparking. So those are very important issues to consider. And walking in wet water can be very dangerous around electrical equipment. So you want to make sure the people who are doing these assessments after a disaster are trained to be able to do it appropriately and not injure themselves. And not all electrical hazards will be as simple as this one, where you see the switch and the plug hanging out of the junction box. So this was also at the Cultural Recovery Center. And when I was sent or dispatched to the center, I wasn't quite sure how useful I would be, because I am not a conservator. But fortunately for me, the building was donated to AIC. And it hadn't been used in many years or more than storage. So I was able to go around and take care of things like this. So all of our volunteers who came in made it a safer experience for them by taking care of electrical hazards. Light bulbs in the exit signs that had burned out 30 years prior, we were able to take care of all of those things. And my intention was to make it a safe work environment for all of our volunteers. And the last thing we'll talk about is heat illness prevention. And this occurred to me when we were actually watching news footage of the flooding in Houston and the storm damage in Miami a few months ago. And I realized that most of the salvage and recovery work is probably going to have to be done outdoors, outside of the building. And so I thought it would incorporate some basic ideas about heat illness prevention. So there are a number of disorders related to heat illness. And there are three primary disorders that you should be aware of. The most minor is heat cramps. Here I have a list of a column of symptoms and a column of first aid. Notice as we go through that the first aid is pretty similar for all of these conditions. But they get a little more extensive, more serious, the condition is. So heat cramps are a good indicator that you may be dehydrating, too much sun or heat. Your body is giving you a message that you need to do something about it, which essentially is hydration and shade. Heat exhaustion is an early stage. Heat exhaustion is an early indicator that the body's cooling system is becoming overwhelmed. The symptoms are pretty obvious. And the first aid is also pretty obvious if you're using common sense. You want to get the person out of the heat, out of the sun, provide them with hydration, cool them down, ice packs, cold water, get the person wet, and get them to an emergency room if the symptoms don't improve within 60 minutes. Heat stroke is a late-stage heat illness, and it occurs when the body's system is actually overwhelmed by heat and they stop functioning. So your organ starts to shut down. Because of that, heat stroke is a very serious life threat and condition. So you will notice that you or your coworkers will become confused, impossibility that you think. Sweating and dry skin, it sounds like a contradiction, but it can manifest itself either way. And this is a situation where you would want to call 911 immediately, because this is a life-threatening condition. And the rest of the first aid is in line with the two other conditions we talked about. And the way to prevent this is through hydration. You have plenty of fluids. Water is ideal. Coffee and alcohol are not, should never be considered, that you don't want to drink a cold bitter on a hot day while you're working. And acclimatization, which means if you have the option, which quite often we don't in a disaster situation, the more time a person works outdoors, obviously, the easier it is for them to acclimatize to heat. But we don't always have that option. So that's where training comes in handy, employee training. And also, you should always employ a buddy system. People should never work on their own when they're outdoors in high-heat situations, because you need someone to keep an eye on you. So you keep an eye on each other. Like a lot of emergency response, you never go into a building alone. After a flood or a fire, you make sure you have someone else with you so that you have some accountability. And with that, that wraps up my portion of the presentation. And if you have any questions or if you ever need any information, I'm more than happy to make myself available. That's my email address on this slide. So feel free to contact me at any time to talk to you about any questions or problems that you might have. With that, I'd like to thank you for your time and your attention. Great audience. Great, well, thank you so much, Al. And thank you to both the presenters, Al and Tara, today. As you see with this final slide here, they're generous enough to share their contact information. So thank you for that. We did have one question come in. Al, Jesse was wondering, one of your last slides, say, not to administer fluids for heat stroke or did he read that wrong? I think I know the answer to that. Do not administer fluids. That's correct. At that stage, it's like a lot of medical emergencies. You, by giving somebody fluids, you may be prolonging the response time. Or the fact you don't want to give somebody fluids going to need to go under anesthesia or need surgery, it's the same with heat stroke. If you let the emergency responders and medical personnel determine if fluids are necessary. But you want to drink fluids at earlier stages and leading up to a potential medical emergency. But once you've got to that point of no return where you're wanting to shut down, you want to introduce fluids. Did anyone have any other questions related to anything Tara discussed or anything that Al discussed? Obviously, this is a very big topic, one that we touched on with a couple of presentations during your in-person sessions as well. And certainly something that I would encourage you all to continue to explore throughout the course of this training over the next few months. Lots of great resources. So Jennifer is wondering if there is a suggested website or source of information to convince administrators of the need for health and safety. Do either of you have suggestions for good go-to resources on that? It's a great question. I would think that any of the federal or state OSHA regulations, wouldn't you say Al? I mean, that's pretty hefty stuff. I mean, it does. Yes, and all of that information is available. And you can also, OSHA has a consultation service, which is really valuable. They'll come in and do an assessment of your entire building if you want them to. And they won't cite you for any violations they find. They'll give you an amount of time to rectify or remediate the violations. And it's a lot of management people. They hear OSHA, or they hear the fire department. They don't want to hear any more about it. But those people are actually your friend. And they have resources. And if you work with them in good faith, as a good faith gesture, it's appreciated. And they will help you. And as far as keeping your management people out of jail, that's another good point. I always tell my boss that I keep him in the director of the Museum of Jail. Because if you don't have these programs in place and if you're in violation of the rules, it's considered negligence. And in the event of an employee debt, fatality, or a serious injury where you've lost a limb, you're going to have a full OSHA investigation. And they will go wall to wall basically and find everything that is not up to code. And it can and occasionally does result in jail time for the responsible people. So if you can press on upper management, it is, in fact, the law to have these things in place so much the better. So good. Yeah, nothing like jail time to put the fear of God in your upper level of administration. So yeah, thank you, Al, for that reminder, too, that a lot of these guys that are considered to be scary can be our friends. Calling in the professionals who can check and make sure that we're up to code on any number of things might be a scary undertaking, but it's worth doing. So Christiana had a question for Tara. She found on Kool, which is conservation online for those of you who aren't aware, she found two articles from December 2000 and October 2003 about treatment of mold in libraries. The case study they used was the University of Oklahoma libraries and they successfully used chlorine dioxide in powder form, hanging in sachets in the storage area. And it was available commercially as aspatrol and centrex, but it's been discontinued. Do you know anything about this? Tara, is that familiar to you? Tara, is that familiar to you? It's not. I would say, and I can't even begin to hazard a guess as to this, so I probably won't. So I'm not familiar with this treatment methodology and if it's been discontinued, there might have been a reason why. I would have been interested to, I'll go make sure to go look that up actually because I would be interested to see who actually conducted this particular treatment if it was actually under the direction of conservators or not. And that was some time ago. So I mean, granted it's still in the early 2000s but I know there are still places that we are doing, we're doing some sort of, I guess you can consider rogue mold treatments that would not necessarily be the safest recommendations. So it would be something I'd have to read and be familiarized myself with because I'm not familiar with it. It was supposed to be safe for people because chlorine dioxide is used in drinkable water. I'm so afraid I can't comment because I don't actually know. Do you know anything about this Al, about this chemical? No, I do not. I know we do not have it in our inventories. That's something that maybe we can look into and see what we can find but thank you for raising the question. Oh, great, yes. If you can email the links to the articles, that might be helpful. Does anyone have any other questions? About the content covered today? Seeing no one typing, I wanna just go ahead and take this opportunity to thank everyone who joined us for the live session today. Hope you all found it to be useful and of course a big thank you to our two presenters, Al Barna and Tara Kenby. Both are coming at this topic from slightly different positions and I think both of those perspectives are so valuable in this discussion. And I wanna remind you all to please go ahead and take the survey about this particular webinar. It would just take a couple of minutes since you were caught from the last one. So again, just use this link box, the way you do with any other. Click on the text and click the browse to button and that should take you to a survey monkey link. So thank you all. And a reminder that our next webinar is gonna be coming up in a few short weeks on the topic of fundraising after disasters.