Join us on September 30, 2020 at 8:00 PM Eastern for NOHVCC’s USFS Risk Assessment Guidance webinar. Read below to brush up on the details before logging on.
Webinar Description:
Anyone who organizes or participates in events or performs volunteer efforts on National Forests should join us for our September 30 webinar. Sandy Bearden, Safety Manager, United States Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Region will describe the new Forest Service guidance that will impact the way volunteers and others assess risk in projects. This webinar will allow you to hear directly from the Forest Service about any new expectations, as well as provide an opportunity to have questions answered.
Bearden will demonstrate how to properly fill out the new Risk Assessment Worksheet – which could prove invaluable to volunteers as the guidance is implemented.
Register for the webinar here.
Background Information from the USFS Risk Management Website:
To accomplish the mission of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service, we expose employees, volunteers, and contractors to a wide variety of environments ranging from secure office settings to extremes of weather, terrain, fires, and floods. All these workplace situations have hazards that present some degree of risk of harm to employees.
Fortunately, most of the risk our employees face is manageable through deliberate, collaborative, and thoughtful risk management.
The Forest Service risk management program exists to help managers and employees identify and communicate value and objectives, identify risks, evaluate how to mitigate them to the lowest practicable level, and then decide if the value or attempting to achieve the objectives is worth accepting the residual risks.
More about the new Risk Assessment Guidance:
The risk management council, in cooperation with the office of safety and occupational health and the aviation safety council, has implemented an Operational Risk Management Guide. Essentially, all Forest Service actions seek to meet multiple objectives, not just safety-related objectives. This guide is written to be inclusive of managing the risks associated with meeting any objective, especially the objective of no harm to employees.
The ORM process and the newly developed risk assessment worksheet, when signed by a line officer or other approved authority, can replace the Job Hazard Analysis (JHA) form.
NOHVCC encourages everyone who recreates or volunteers on USFS lands to participate in the September 30 webinar. Changes to Risk Assessment could impact OHV projects and volunteer efforts. The resources above are intended to help provide some background information and to help you prepare questions for our guest host.
