Part 3 - Walkways: What You Need To Know To Design, Maintain, and Insure Cleaner, Safer Floors

What You Need To Know

This course covers what you need to know to design, maintain, and insure cleaner and safer floors. The 3-hour online course is broken into 3 parts to make it easy for you to learn anywhere, anytime, and at your own pace.

There is a $40 billion slip, trip, and fall walkway safety problem in North America. It's a complex issue requiring everyone involved to be educated to a "need to know" level. This course is the "need to know" for interior designers, architects, engineers, contractors, facility managers, building owner/operators, building service contractors, risk managers, loss control managers, safety managers, lawyers, forensic engineers, and anyone in the insurance business.

Walkways are the surfaces we rely on every day. We must be able to step with confidence. Are you also selecting flooring materials for health, safety, and welfare? Do you know what standards can be used to evaluate pedestrian risk? Do you what factors affect slip resistance of flooring? Do you know why coefficient of friction (COF) is used to measure risk? Do you know how to calculate and use SCOF and DCOF values? Do you know what slip meters are approved and what published standard applies to what flooring surface? Can you advise your team and your customers on how to minimize the risk of slip, trip, fall? Do you know the best practice processes for manual and machine daily and restorative cleaning? Have you ever specified a traction audit pre and post-install to quantify the level of slip resistance you selected for the design versus what was installed? Do you know what makes a walkway auditor qualified? If you have a slip and fall incident, or maintenance problem that affects the slip resistance of the floor, do you know how to evaluate the problem to develop a solution? Did you know the new A326.3 DCOF test method states that the specifier is responsible for selecting the COF levels?

These are some of the "what you need to know" questions answered in the three courses.

This course is presented in three parts.

Part 1

What You Need To Know:

1. The annual $40+ billion slip and fall problem in residential and commercial facilities
2. The science of slip, trip fall
3. Key definitions
4. The science of walking and the human gait
5. Factors affecting pedestrian safety.

Part 2

What You Need To Know:

1. Flooring material and selection (18 materials reviewed including resilient, non-resilient, specialty)
2. Facility zones framework (walkway/facility, sources of contamination, cleaning/maintenance, risk areas/zones, monitoring/audit plan)
3. Cleaning processes (daily and restorative, manual and machine)
4. Solutions to reduce the risk of slips and falls using mats, traction tapes, and traction coatings.

Part 3

What You Need To Know:

1. Slip resistance
2. The physics of coefficient of friction (COF), static coefficient of friction (SCOF), and dynamic coefficient of friction (DCOF)
3. The published standards available to measure risk and safety of flooring materials using wet static coefficient of friction (WSCOF), dry SCOF, wet dynamic coefficient of friction (WDCOF) and dry DCOF. Key standards include the ANSI B101.1 (WSCOF), ANSI B101.3 (WDCOF), ANSI A137.1 Acu-test™ (WDCOF), the new ANSI A326.3 (WDCOF), and the ASTM D2047 (Dry SCOF).
4. The key ASTM standards related to walkways (ASTM F1637, A1264).
5. Approved slip meters available to measure COF.
6. Current OSHA and ADA requirements related to walkways.

In 3 hours you will learn what you need to know. You will be able to apply your knowledge immediately to design, maintain, and insure cleaner, safer floors.