Departmental Forms



New Mandate - Field Safety Policy

Current New Field Policies effective 6/3/2010, updated 4/20/2011

Effective immediately, Chair Gerhard Pratt is requiring the following procedures to be followed for *all* off-campus field work undertaken by any member of the Department:

1. As per this policy, as Department Chair I am required to approve all safety preparations made for research field work prior to commencement. For all off-campus field work, you must obtain the Department Chair's signature on your field safety plan and itinerary one week prior to departure, and this must be filed with our Department Safety Officer, Miyako Maekawa.

2. From now onwards, all department participants in any field work (including research field work) must fill out either the Assumption of Risk form or Safety Away prior to departure. All information on this form will of course be kept confidential as is our standard policy.

3. We will require you to provide your next-of-kin on this form, in addition to an emergency contact.

4. Where-ever possible field trip leaders must provide an emergency contact phone number, and are expected to be reachable at this number. Similarly all trip leaders must ensure they carry contact numbers in the Department to contact in the event of an emergency. We will provide these numbers on request.

I will be asking the Field Trips committee to review this policy and formally implement these procedures in due course, but these procedures are now mandatory. Failure to comply will mean you are in breach of our safety procedures.

If you have regular trips with the same people to the same area, we can certainly try to streamline the process with a "standing approval", but ultimately we do require that we hold records of each off-campus field trip and the participants before departure.