April 2015 Newsletter

Click here for the April 2015 Newsletter

It’s hard to believe that we are finally rid of bad weather and spring is upon us and now in April we have our last meeting at Snuffy’s until next September.

We had a great joint March NJAIHA meeting. First, it was a pleasure to have it as the joint meeting with the NJ Chapter-American Society of Safety Engineers (NJASSE), and the Mid-Atlantic Biological Safety Association (MABSA) and we thank their officers and members for their great turnout and support as always. For speakers we had Edward Lifshitz, MD, FACP, Medical DirectorCommunicable Disease Service, NJ Department of Health(NJDOH) educate us on the current issues and updates on Ebola which has been a topic for two meeting this year due to its relevancy and newness to many of us. Dr Lifshitz and NJDOH have been great at providing speakers for our meetings. This was followed by Joe Piccolo, CHMM, Senior Manager, Safety, Health and Environmental Dept., Roche Molecular Systems, Inc who did a phenomenal presentation on a recent warehouse forklift accident that he investigated. The story-line and events presented gave all of us excellent insight into the practical solution side of dealing with an accident in the workplace from the initial efforts for worker rescue through the preventative actions and steps taken to eliminate the problem (see related photos-pages10-11).

We are pleased to have received 5 student applications for the NJAIHA scholarships and that we will be announcing our student awards in our next NJAIHA newsletter.

We are also looking forward to our April 16th meeting at Snuffy’s. This is Past-Presidents meeting where we recognize and honor those individuals who have prior served as NJAIHA Section Presidents. We also have also had two fine speakers and topics for the evening. We have one of our own board members and current Past-President Craig Doolittle, PE Senior Consultant, TRC Environmental Corporation speaking on confined spaces – Case Studies of Unusual Spaces and How Best to Protect Workers Entering Them and Benjamin M. Sallemi, Ph.D., GZA GeoEnvironmental discussing A Life-Time Mortality Risk Assessment to Asbestos Exposure Following the Collapse of the World Trade Towers.

I will be at the AIHCE 2015 in Salt Lake City, Utah, so I look forward to seeing many of you there next month. Finally please mark your calendars for the end of the year NJAIHA banquet and scholarship awards dinner at Baskin Ridge Country Club on Thursday June 11th. It will be a great event as always.

Sincerely,
Stephen Siegel, CIH MBA
President NJ AIHA