Join HSI Chief Safety Officer Jill James as she visits environmental health and safety professionals in their workplaces to explore important workplace safety topics. The video covers the importance of alarm systems, the difference between a fire alarm and hazmat alarm, and how to appropriately use them.

Video Transcript:

Hi I'm Jill, Chief Safety Officer with HSI. I'm a former OSHA inspector and I'm here to help you identify and correct workplace safety hazards.

For this series we're at the University of Louisville in beautiful Kentucky to show you no matter where you work, safety training is for everyone.

Part of building emergency response plans can include alarm systems, we have two alarm examples right here. This one is a fire alarm system and the blue one is for the event of a hazardous material release. The thing that I would like people to know about this is that there's two actions that are required in order to sound these alarm systems.

You see the plastic cover that's on the outside of each alarm, if we are to lift this plastic cover an alarm would sound locally, meaning just in this area that would alert someone that might be coming with a malicious intent to back away. And so in order to actually activate the entire building system we need to pull the bar in the red cover and push on the blue. So we two actions would be lifting the plastic listening to that alarm and then pulling the pull station and pushing on the blue which would then activate the whole building alarm system which would be both audible and visual. You see the red would sound for fire and the blue would sound for the hazard response.

And so remember it's a two-step process when you're going to activate your alarm system if you have one of these plastic covers as a deterrent at your alarm station.

I hope you gained a safety skill today. If you know someone who needs this go ahead and pass it on.

Safety is everyone's business.