Safety and Security: The Intersection

Security and safety often go hand in hand, but sometimes they conflict. Here are ways to cooperate to achieve both departments' goals.

Often, the leveraging of these overlaps works by circulating personnel across missions. Greg Halvacs, CSO of Cardinal Health, a medical products and services company in Dublin, Ohio, uses security audits to ask safety-related questions (Do you have a lockout, tag-out program in place? Let me see your loss-time accident log sheet.) and safety audits to ask security questions (Do you do background checks?).

He says the practice saves travel costs and reduces the time that field sites have to spend dealing with audit committees. Sometimes the security coordinator at a site becomes the full-time safety contact; at other sites, safety people are tasked with asset security, taking inventory of items and equipment on a site, and monitoring the presence (or absence) of subcontractors. While examples can be found of both flavors of integration—moving security's responsibilities to safety and safety's to security—the former seems more common, perhaps because in certain industries, safety is usually more heavily manned and is more familiar with the operating landscape.

Emergency response or disaster preparedness units are often textbook cases of integration. United Rentals of Greenwich, Conn., rents items such as generators and chain saws, which can be critical for advancing both safety and security after a disaster. As a result, UR places a priority on having outlets in disaster areas up and running very quickly after an event, regardless of the damage their branch might have experienced, or, indeed, whether there had been a preexisting UR branch in that area at all.

According to Steven Baird, VP of corporate security, UR keeps a small fleet of reaction trailers in the parts of the U.S. most likely to be affected by hurricanes or tornadoes. When there is a disaster, a trailer drives to the heart of the affected area. "If an unplanned disaster hits, we can usually get to a site in 12 hours or less," Baird says. "If we have any warning, as with a hurricane, we're ready to go as soon as the storm has blown through." These trailers carry everything necessary to support a UR presence until a new building is found or built, from staff facilities (a kitchen, a bathroom, sleeping quarters, satellite uplinks) to emergency gear (fencing, ladders, saws, traffic cones, rain gear). Trailer staff have been trained in emergency medical procedures and First Responder protocols. They do safety (checking for downed wires and leaking fuel), security (setting up a corral with illuminated fencing) and business resumption (organizing connections with supply trucks).