April 08 Issue - Employee Monthly Magazine

Spotlight

It's about taking care of each other

Technician Joel Montalvo of Nuclear Materials Science and Maryrose Montalvo, right, perform a hand-and-foot check on monitors before exiting a room in PF-4 at Technical Area 55. Photo by Joe Riedel

"We have family here. We want to make it safe for them." That's one of the driving forces behind safety-based observation, according to Maryrose Montalvo of Quality Performance.

For Montalvo, safety isn't just another job duty or box to check on a form, it's a way of life. Montalvo is one of the facilitators of the Stockpile Manufacturing and Support (SMS) Directorate's ATOMICS program. ATOMICS is an acronym for Allowing Timely Observations Measures Increased Commitment to Safety.

The key to the ATOMICS program and safety-based observation is simple: "It's a matter of workers taking care of workers," said Montalvo.

Montalvo learned about safety and taking care of others early on. Her late father, Percy Lujan, was a captain in the Los Alamos County Fire Department who routinely practiced safety while fighting fires. According to Montalvo, her father was one of only seven "crash and fire" experts in the nation, and he helped the Los Alamos County Airport obtain its crash and fire certification. Without this certification, the airport couldn't operate, she explained.

Montalvo and her colleagues in the ATOMICS program are now working with the Lab's Environment, Safety, Health, and Quality Integration Office and Voluntary Protection Program Office to incorporate safety-observation into institutional safety programs. In February, safety experts from around the Department of Energy complex came to the Laboratory to talk about behavior-based safety and how it can be incorporated into existing safety programs. Likewise, several Lab employees traveled to Pantex last year to benchmark safety-observation processes.

Montalvo said as of mid-March, 765 employees in the SMS Directorate have completed the enhanced ATOMICS safety observation orientation, which was started in 2000 in the former Nuclear Materials Technology Division.

"At the end of the day, can you say you've done everything in your power to make it safe so that others can work here tomorrow?" asked Montalvo. She wants every employee to be able to answer "yes." That's how important safety is to her.

-Steve Sandoval