January 18, 2006

Safety Celebration – Ten BNL Organizations Now Hold OHSAS 18001 Registration

Lab Director Praveen Chaudhari and Safety & Health Services Division Manager Pat Williams held a celebration on January 19, 2006 to show BNL’s appreciation to the many dedicated employees who worked for 12 months to prepare seven organizations — the Superconducting Magnet Division (SMD), Basic Energy Sciences (BES) Directorate, Instrumentation Division, Physics Department, National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS), Environmental & Waste Management Services (EWMS) Division, and Staff Services (SS) Division — for successful registration of their occupational safety management systems to Occupational Health & Safety Assessment Series (OHSAS) 18001.

Among those who celebrated the successful registration of seven more BNL organizations to the OHSAS 18001 safety management standard are hosts Praveen Chaudhari (front, second from left) and Pat Williams (front, second from right); and, between them, from left: BNL organization representatives Tom Kirk, Sally Dawson, John Taylor, Robert Casey, Michael Clancy, and Veljko Radeka, with Jeff Swenson (front, left).

OHSAS 18001 is widely acknowledged as offering one of the best guidelines available for safety management systems and it is a significant enhancement of the Integrated Safety Management System that was already in place on site. In addition to the certificates of appreciation presented to all those in attendance, framed OHSAS 18001 Certificates of Registration were presented to Chaudhari as representing BNL, and to Tom Kirk for SMD, John Taylor for BES, Veljko Radeka for Instrumentation, Sally Dawson for Physics, Robert Casey for NSLS, Michael Clancy for EWMS, and Jeff Swenson for SS.

Together with the three pilot organizations that were successfully registered in September 2004 — the Central Fabrication Services Division, Collider-Accelerator Department, and Plant Engineering Division — BNL now has a total of 10 organizations’ occupational safety management systems that have achieved OHSAS 18001 registration.

Regarding future plans for the Lab, Jim Tarpinian, Assistant Laboratory Director for Environment, Safety, Health, & Quality, explains, “In 2006, we will expand the OHSAS 18001 registration to include the balance of BNL organizations. The important thing for BNL is not the registration itself, but the processes of job-risk assessments, employee involvement, goals and objectives, management review, and continual improvement. OHSAS 18001 is a significant enhancement to our Integrated Safety Management System.”