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Suggestions for FRC Safety Captains

In 2020 I was a Safety Manager at a regional. I participated in pit inspections, interviews, and judging for the safety award. Here are some suggestions I have for any Safety Captain. These are particularly intended to be a good starting point for someone suddenly appointed as Safety Captain a few weeks or days before competition who doesn’t know where to get started.

A team’s safety does not come from one person alone. There are things the safety captain can do individually, but real success will come from having a team culture of safety, where people know what they have to do to be safe, and feel comfortable reminding each other.

Your team should be appointing a Safety Captain before Kickoff; see if you can make that happen next year. Does your team’s website have a safety page? Do you have a “safety moment” at every meeting, explaining a single safety tip or describing a near miss? You’ll never avoid making mistakes, so the important thing is to learn from them.

Binder 🔗

You should have a clearly-labelled and well-organised safety binder in the pit. This should contain:

Relevant FIRST manuals, esepcially the Safety Manual and Event Rules. You may be the only person on the team to read these, so make sure you pass along any relevant information. Be prepared to demonstrate familiarity with these materials.
Data sheets for hazardous chemicals (e.g. glue, lubricant, basically any bottles, tubes, or spray cans in the pit). It’s fairly easy to find these online and print them out. Manuals for tools you brought to the event. Again, almost every manual can be found online. Search on msds.com.
Team safety manuals or training materials. Basic first aid information. How to operate a fire extinguisher (PASS=Pull, aim, squeeze, sweep). Safety guidelines for outreach events.
Pit safety checklist List of equipment you should have. List of things you should remember to do or not do.
Event-specific information such as the nearest emergency hospital
List of people on the team with CPR/First Aid training
List of people on the team certified to operate certain types of machinery
Safety event log. Safety audit reports.
Copies of any posters or flyers you are handing out.

General responsibilities at an event 🔗

You will be expected to attend daily Safety Captain meetings, probably early each morning. This is a good venue to speak up and raise any questions you may have, offer suggestions, raise general safety concerns, or offer praise. Keep your eyes open during the day to see if you can find something to share. You may be asked to vote for a daily Safety Captain award.

At an event, you are also supposed to be a safety ambassador for FIRST. If you see an issue, you should draw it to someone’s attention. (Be careful if you find yourself in the position of criticizing a specific team. Remember you can involve one of your mentors.) Direct people with injuries to the EMT desk at pit admin. Offer (with any teammates you can gather) to take a turn on the entrance to give the volunteers there a break.

Judged awards 🔗

Since 2022, there is no longer a separate judged safety award. Instead safety is a consideration for all judged awards. This means that any judge may perform a pit safety inspection, interview the safety captain, or review your safety binder.

Some specific things judges may look for in a pit inspection: First aid kit, battery spill kit, data sheets, daisy-chained power strips, loose hair or clothing, food, any unsafe practices. Judges and other volunteers may also notice if people on you team are forgetting safety glasses, crowding their pit, playing football in the aisle, transporting a robot improperly (e.g. without human first), or lifting improperly (lift with the knees, not the back). Even if they don’t say anything, they may note your team number and pass it along. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that actions outside of the judge interview can’t lose your team its chance at a judged award.

If you’re interviewed about safety, resist the temptation to depict the team as having a perfect safety record. No-one will believe this. It’s better to be able to talk about how you deal with the safety issues that arise. What does the team do after an injury or a near miss? Is there a safety event log? What have you had to change this season to improve safety?

Does this year’s game or your team’s robot design present any specific safety challenges? Have you developed any interesting approaches to mitigate them?

If someone comes to your pit and asks a random team member where the Safety Captain is, what will they say? (Several teams I spoke to had no idea what I was talking about.) This should be covered as part of “judge talking”. Also, you should have some visible identification as Safety Captain, like a button, a cape, a hat, or a custom-decorated high-visibility vest. (Try to avoid selecting something that resembles a FIRST volunteer uniform, like an orange or yellow baseball cap, or a red or black vest. There’s no rule against it, but you never want to make a judge frown. Also, you may want to avoid wearing retroreflective tape near the field.)

Special event activities 🔗

A lot of teams have special things they do to demonstrate their commitment to safety. Some examples:

Putting up safety posters in other team’s pits and handing out safety flyers. This should be done with caution. If another team wants to put posters and flyers in your pit, then by all means accept these as it shows good safety spirit. Don’t do this yourself unless you are truly going to do a good job of it, as it easily becomes just more trash (with your team’s name on it).
Videos, websites, apps. This is a lot of work but it does impress judges. If you have a monitor in your pit, you can use it to show safety videos, including ones you didn’t make.
Safety mascots
Handing out first aid kits or other safety equipment with your team’s logo on them.

Youth Protection Policy 🔗

YPP is an important part of safety, but this is an area where adult mentors should be strongly involved. For everyone’s protection, both adults and students should avoid being in a situation where they are alone one-on-one, or where there is extensive private communication. Students should know that they ought to report any situation that makes them uncomfortable, whether because of another student or a mentor.

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