COMPANIES WITH WORLDWIDE FACILITIES ARE ON TRACK TO BETTER WORKPLACE SAFETY IN BUILDINGS WITH ASBESTOS CONTAINING MATERIALS (ACM). USING eFACILITY, GOLDER'S FACILITY MANAGEMENT TOOL THAT COMBINES MANY KINDS OF DATA IN ONE CENTRAL WEB-BASED RESOURCE, ACM IN BUILDINGS CAN BE MORE EASILY MANAGED.

Many organizations struggle with the issue of asbestos, a material once widely praised for its fire-retardant properties, which found its way into a wide range of building materials, literally from flooring to ceiling tiles.

Recently there’s been growing corporate and public concern for legal liability and health & safety issues associated with human exposure to asbestos fibers in the workplace. It’s a worldwide challenge, and companies with far-flung operations are under pressure to deal with the specter of asbestos in all of their locations.

Solving the problem starts with the development of a defensible, worldwide, audit standard for characterizing all occurrences of asbestos within a building. Based on the audit’s risk assessment criteria, the next step is to select the most critical issues, such as damaged friable ACM, and deal with them first.

Systems are required to manage a facility’s ACM: to keep track of vast amounts of data including photographs of ACM, survey documents, interactive floor plans showing the spatial extent of ACM, laboratory results, management procedures and abatement work records. Golder provides eFacility’s asbestos module to perform this task. This tool allows the facility’s asbestos program managers to manage all their ACM issues through a secure Internet connection.

As a result, employee safety worldwide is improved because steps are being taken to deal with risks they may face in their workplaces.