As our members get ready to leave for Australia, we are making final preparations to ensure that the team will be safe during the trip. Thanks to help from our partners at Fastenal, our friends at the RFS, Carlos Miller (a bay-area firefighter), and UC Berkeley’s EH&S, we have our bases covered.
My job, as team safety officer, involves planning and packing all the safety equipment we will need, including fire extinguishers, first-aid kits, high-voltage gloves, driver suits and “cool” safety glasses to name a few. With help from Scott Shackleton and Doug Wood at the Richmond Field Station, we got this process started with some much-appreciated donations. Most of the supplies were shipped off in the container along with Impulse, and await us when we arrive Down Under. However, our contacts at the Office of Environmental Health and Safety were kind enough to put together a “care package” for our trip. The most exciting inclusion is two boxes of safety sunglasses marked with the Cal logo. We will surely be wearing these in the bright hot Australian outback and might even trade some with other teams. If any of you see Phil Maynard or Tim Pine around campus or in University Hall, thank them for their support!
We also had most of our members who are going to Australia get first-aid and CPR trained so that we are prepared in the (hopefully unlikely) event of an emergency. With our first-aid kits, training and planning, we can focus on what we love doing: racing solar vehicles.
Australia, here we come!