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Welcome to OutdoorSafety.org. Risk management, liability, safety, protocols...it never seems to end. Keeping up with the latest issues and trends in the field is almost a fulltime job in itself. That's why OutdoorEd.com has created OutdoorSafety.org devoted just to issues of safety and risk management. We are sharing all of our knowledge with you and hope you'll do the same.
This is a user-oriented site. Send us your issues, share your thoughts, and help make everyone's program that much safer--submit an article, news item, directory link or protocol. We'll bring you the latest news headlines from the Internet as well as articles and discussions from experts in the field. Take a look through the site and send us your comments
Rip currents are powerful, channeled currents of water flowing away from shore. They typically extend from the shoreline, through the surf zone, and past the line of breaking waves. Rip currents form as waves disperse along the beach causing water to become trapped between the beach and a sandbar or other underwater feature. The water converges into a narrow, river-like channel moving away from the shore at high speed. A rip current consists of three parts: the feeder current flowing parallel to the shore inside the breakers; the neck, where the feeder currents converge and flow through the breakers in a narrow band or "rip"; and the head, where the current widens and slackens outside the breaker line. Rip currents can occur at any beach with breaking waves, including the Great Lakes.
Site Management - The Missing Link: Paul Nicolazzo director of the Wilderness Medicine Training Center brings his twenty plus years as an outdoor adventure program designer and staff trainer to this excellent article about how staff can manage risk in the field. The Site Management model is an innovative thought process for running safe activities and can be trained to your staff in a much shorter amount of time than has been previously thought possible. Don't miss this article!
Risk Management for Organizations: Keeping the Ship Afloat: The concept of risk management is one that has to encompass the whole of your program, from the first day of planning a new activity through the last piece of gear that is put away when the trip is over. Managing Risk throughout an organization requires that all levels of program and administrative staff understand the importance and the interconnectedness of their efforts. It is such a huge task and involves so many different players in your organization that it's often hard to make sure that all the jobs get done and done well. Preston Cline of Adventured Management and Rick Curtis of Princeton University and OutdoorEd.com team up to give you a framework to operate from that will help you and your staff both vision and envision how risk management should permeate your organization. "Keeping the Ship Afloat" presents a metaphor for organizational risk management that encompasses five stages of program development and implementation: assessment, planning and developing the program, selecting & training staff, running the program and finally reviewing and evaluating the program.
Conducting Internal Incident Reviews: A process for developing wilderness incident case studies: Unfortunately, accidents can and do happen in the outdoor recreation and education industry. When there is an incident it is crucial to do a thorough review. But just how do you go about gathering the right information? Kurt Merrill and Kris Wright from the Student Conservation Association present in-depth incident review process to help you systematically approach collecting high quality information. These types if in-depth incident reviews and case study analyses will ultimately increase the breadth of our industry’s risk management knowledge, help to reduce the occurrence of specific incidents, and serve to increase the overall quality of our programs.
Technology Update: Personal Locater Beacons (PLD) come online: Cell phones, satellite phones, GPS.it goes on and on. There have been lots of discussions in our field about 'technology creep,' the slow (and so far it seems inevitable) extension of technological devices into the backcountry. Well, get ready to welcome one more device into the mix, the Personal Locater Device (PLD). The PLD is the extension of two other devices which have been around for years, the EPIRB (Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon) for maritime use the the ELT (Emergency Locator Transmitters) for aviation use. All three devices can be used in an emergency to send an emergency beacon signal to a satellite. The satellite relays the signal to a ground station where the call is forwarded on to the appropriate emergency response system. Find out about this upcoming technolgy and what it may mean for your program.
First Aider's Guide to Acute Alcohol Poisoning: At first glance you might wonder what this topic has to do with outdoor or experiential education. Well, dealing with alcohol abuse and binge drinking is becoming a bigger and bigger issue both on college campus and in high schools. One of the ways to empower students around alcohol issues is to train them through first aid to understand the how to recognize and treat someone who is severely intoxicated. Princeton University uses this approach with student outdoor leaders to provide a well-informed and well-trained group of students on campus who are prepared to respond and treat their fellow students.
Assessing Physical Fitness of Participants and Staff using Non-Exercise Screening Techniques: One of the biggest and most overlooked challenges of participant placement is determining the physical fitness level of your participants. Assigning people to an appropriate trip activity level can also be a major risk management issue. Placing someone on a trip that's too physically challenging can lead to injuries, evacuations, or an unsatisfactory experience. Each year at Princeton University has to evaluate over 600 incoming participants for the annual Wilderness Orientation Program. This article shows you some of the accepted methods for determining physical condition levels like maximum oxygen uptake, Body Mass Index, and the Harvard Step Test and shows you some exciting non-exercise-based screening tests to help you evaluate fitness levels. The article includes online practices tests to score your own fitness level.
