At Yale University, you most likely expect the best education but you should also expect to have a safe environment. In March of 2015, almost 100 college dorm rooms had to be repainted due to unsafe lead levels. This posed a risk to not only the students but also the maintenance staff who keeps the rooms maintained on a regular basis.
What happened was that a student noticed the paint in his room was decaying and might contain lead. After being tested, the paint did indeed contain a hazardous amount of lead and needed to be repainted. As you probably know, the lead itself in paint is not what causes a hazard, it is when the paint starts to decay that it poses a health threat. In this particular case, the windowsill in question actually had an astounding percentage of lead – more than 15 times the level that is considered safe.
With a large educational building such as a university, preventative maintenance can get behind without having a proper grasp on scheduling which is why schools need a system in place such as Preventative Maintenance Software with Maintenance Care. This software that is entirely web-based, allows maintenance facility management to input the preventative maintenance tasks as well as regular work order tasks that have to be done throughout the day, week, or month.
In response to this investigation, the school stated that the repainting of the rooms were in response to their regular maintenance, not as part of the student's inquiry and outcome of the testing. No matter if that is true or not, it shows how important preventative maintenance is to the safety of others.
For instance, repainting a windowsill and in this case 69 windowsills and rooms, is a huge undertaking. By having it scheduled automatically, you can have time to complete this task easier and it doesn't have to be done all at once, like it was in this particular case.
Read More: Hazardous Material Handling
Not every instance is going to be this severe but by staying on top of preventative maintenance duties, you can certainly have more time to do other work rather than having to rush around and push other work aside in order to get an emergency work order completed in time.