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All of the MIT offices charged with providing services and oversight to the MIT community on Environmental, Health, and Safety (EHS) issues have been reorganized into a single EHS team reporting to MIT’s Managing Director for Environmental Programs and Risk Management and Senior Counsel Jamie Lewis Keith. The reason for consolidating the offices is to provide improved service to MIT clients and to create clearer accountability than was possible under a more fragmented organization. EHS service can now be obtained by calling a single number: x2-EHSS. (You can continue to reach your EHS contacts by their individual extensions as well.)
Which offices are involved?
The EHS team is composed of the following three offices:
1) the new Environmental Management Office (EMO), which includes former staff of the Safety Office who provide hazardous waste services and deal with environmental compliance and hazardous materials. (The EMO was created to raise responsibility for environmental matters to an equal level with health and safety issues.)2) the Safety Office, which will concentrate on fire safety, accident prevention, and emergency response, as well as confined space rescue, pressure vessels, and miscellaneous safety concerns; and
3) the Environmental Medical Service (EMS), which will continue to manage environmental health and safety concerns involving industrial hygiene, biosafety, and radiation protection.
These three offices are now operating as the EHS team under Ms. Keith’s Environmental Programs Office. The team provides service and has oversight for every EHS regulatory program that governs MIT’s work. Primary responsibility for good management, including compliance, remains in the labs, centers, and departments in order to preserve their independence.
Executive Vice President John R. Curry said that this consolidation is part of a continuing effort to bring together and align closely related activities and to clarify who is responsible for what.
In the past, these offices had overlapping responsibilities and shared jurisdiction as well as different reporting structures. This, combined with the absence of a single manager with overall EHS authority, had created some confusion for departments, labs, and centers as well as inadequate accountability of these services.
Now, the EHS team has assigned service and oversight responsibility for every EHS regulatory program that governs MIT’s work to a single position within one of the three offices. In addition, the appropriate EHS team members will represent MIT in dealing with regulatory authorities.
Our wide range of research programs means that the Institute must comply with many more regulations than most other universities face. And as principal investigators know, the number and the complexity of these regulations have been growing steadily. Two years ago, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) inspected about 25 percent of MIT’s labs and research centers and noted that the Institute did not have a clear delineation of roles, responsibilities, and accountability for compliance. Nor was there a centralized management system or organization.
EPA will be requiring MIT to implement an EHS management system. “Our challenge will be in designing an EHS management system that both works for MIT by preserving the independence and responsibility of labs, centers, and departments, and that satisfies EPA’s requirement for clearer overall management and accountability,” Ms. Keith said.
In order to avoid EPA requiring MIT to hire an accounting firm to impose a commercially focused off-the-shelf management system that won’t work at MIT, Ms. Keith wants to work with the MIT community to design a system that reflects a balance of local control and central service and oversight.
The comprehensive EHS management system will integrate three key components: compliance, positive initiatives, and education. To meet this challenge, Ms. Keith and the EHS team will work closely with representatives of the faculty, researchers, administrative departments, and students to ensure that the system functions well for the laboratories, research centers, and departments it is intended to serve. The Provost and the Vice President and Dean for Research are working with Ms. Keith on effective ways to involve faculty in this initiative.
EHS team members also will work with MIT’s Environmental Programs Task Force on positive initiatives and with the Green Building Task Force on the development of sustainable building guidelines. The Environmental Programs Task Force is a group of volunteers from across MIT, including students, which was convened by Ms. Keith last fall. So far, the group has made significant progress on helping to increase both recycling and the purchasing of “green” products at the Institute. The Green Building Task Force was formed by Ms. Keith and Director of Facilities Victoria Sirianni in January, and it includes Professors Leon Glicksman and Leslie Norford.
New EHS phone number – x2-EHSS
The single phone number to call for environmental health and safety services – x2-EHSS – will relieve the community of the burden of figuring out which office within the EHS team has responsibility for any particular issue.
“The number one priority in this reorganization is client service,” Ms. Keith has said. “For example, with EHS’s cross-training initiative and consolidation of legally mandated regulatory training programs in EHS issues over the coming year, every lab visit made and every training program offered by the team will provide service and assistance on a full range of environmental health and safety issues,” she said. “It will be the EHS team’s job, not the MIT community’s responsibility, to find the right person for assistance on any EHS issue.”
EHS Leaders
Gerald Diaz will continue to direct the Safety Office. William Van Schalkwyk, formerly deputy director of the Safety Office and environmental compliance manager, is now director of the Environmental Management Office. Lou DiBerardinis is director of operations and administration at EMS, as well as continuing his role as Institute industrial hygiene officer. He is responsible for all EMS services, staff, and resources. Dr. Robert McCunney is EMS’s director for occupational medicine, policy, and education, coordinating efforts in those three areas. He and Dr. David Diamond, an MIT Medical physician, will continue to see faculty and staff who need occupational and/or environmental medicine evaluations at MIT Medical.
Faculty members who have questions about the reorganization or who have comments about the development of the EHS management system may contact Jamie Keith or Bill Van Schalkwyk at 452-2082 or send email to billv@mit.edu.
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