Deployment, Day 124 – Self-Assessments

One of the projects that has been preoccupying a great deal of my time while we roam aimlessly around the ocean are my annual shipboard self-assessments. There is a federal agency called OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration), which is the main U.S. agency tasked with the enforcement of safety and health legislation in the workplace. Because ships of the U.S. Navy are assets of the Department of Defense, they do not fall under the purview of OSHA, which falls under the Department of Labor. However, the Navy has set up a parallel program to ensure workplace safety and health on their ships called NAVOSH, or the Navy Occupational Safety And Health program.

As the ship’s safety officer, I am responsible for the ship’s compliance with NAVOSH regulations. As part of this compliance, my Safety Department and I are required to conduct annual self-assessments on all 12 NAVOSH programs. These programs are Asbestos Control, Hearing Conservation, Sight Conservation, Heat Stress, Lead Safety, Respiratory Protection, Tagout (deals with making sure shipboard equipment, especially electrical, is properly secured before maintenance), Electrical Safety, Radiation Safety, Personal Protective Equipment, Gas Free Engineering (deals with making sure certain ship’s spaces have enough oxygen and are free of toxic gases before entry), and Hazardous Material/Hazardous Waste.

As you can see, there are a lot of critical safety areas that I need to monitor, and it is not an easy task. Even though the assessments are only annual, each assessment takes about a week, and after it is done I need to submit the evaluation to the ship’s Commanding Officer. Not only that, but I need to follow-up to make sure any and all discrepancies are corrected. Sometimes that takes months. The Naval Safety Center will probably visit our ship this fall and do a safety evaluation, so I need to make sure that all our safety programs, especially the NAVOSH programs, are in compliance.

So far I have five of the twelve assessments for the year complete, with one more happening this week. Gotta love this ship life.