Dear colleagues,

I hope this email finds you all well.

I have been planning on reaching out to my university (San Francisco State University) regarding some safety issues that I've observed.

BLUF: Is there any best way to let EHS and facilities know about issues that I've observed and to do so in a way that is palatable for them? I don't want to come off as nitpicky and I recognize that the devil is in the details. I've attached photos of some of the issues that I've seen. I'm working on a draft of the email and it's linked here.

I come from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where the emphasis on safety was steadfast and there were adequate fiscal resources to support a comprehensive safety program from weekly testing of all emergency equipment to having weekly lab space inspections from our Department Safety Advisor (DSAs). UCSF uses Risk and Safety Solutions for chemical management, SDS consolidation, and hazardous waste tagging (via WASTe tags), to name a few. At UCSF, our lab dealt with chemicals such as Tamoxifen (CAS RN 10540-29-1) and Phalloidin (CAS RN 17466-45-4), and we had SOPs to deal with these chemicals and to mitigate their hazards. UCSF EHS encourages the use of control banded SOPs. I have worked both in research at UCSF and also in the hospital (I worked both at the Benioff Children's Hospital as well as at the medical center/hospital at Parnassus) with UCSF Health. At the hospital as well, there was a strong emphasis on safety, particularly when working with patients with various infectious diseases such as TB, Clostridioides difficile infection (CDI; one of the HAIs I'd like to get the least!) and also with patients on various cancer treatments requiring a two-minute scrub before entry to the unit which was under positive pressure.

The primary impetus behind putting this together is that at UCSF, emergency equipment was routinely tested weekly, per the ANSI standard. SFSU does not have such rigorous testing, with equipment being tested monthly, if even that. The eye/face wash in a teaching laboratory was only tested monthly and there was no plumbed drain for the eyewash. I was not able to find any evidence of the emergency shower ever being tested.

Other concerns included a fume hood that is corroded, no HPDFs installed on the roof of this building, no testing of the emergency diesel generator supplied for the building (let alone per NFPA 110), multiple leaks in piping, no evidence of ANSI Z9.5 compliance, hot water that presents a scalding risk, a lack of a water management program, no vacuum breakers on lab faucets, and corrosion on an air handler. I've attached photos of some of these issues.

My plan is to send an email consolidating these issues and to send it to both EHS and facilities. I had connected with a Chemical & Environmental Management Specialist (CHMM, CHO) on campus and she said that coordination between EHS and facilities was poor at best and downright hostile at worst. She said that the two departments rarely connect with one another and that there had been a lot of finger pointing in the past with regard to what falls under the purview of EHS or facilities.