Garrett Braiden grew up in La Jara, Colorado, population 700, a tiny town tucked into the San Luis Valley south of Alamosa, where the nearest city is two hours away and self-reliance is a given. He now commutes daily from Lehi by FrontRunner train, walks across campus to his office at the University of Utah's Environmental Health and Safety department in Fort Douglas and spends his days making sure that the hundreds of researchers who depend on him can do their work without putting themselves or anyone else in harm's way.

In an earlier incarnation of his job at the U Braiden might be found testing an emergency eyewash station and checking that fume hoods are pulling air at the correct velocity. But now, with his title of Occupational Safety Specialist, his work defies a simple job description. On any given day, he might be prepping documentation for a lab inspection, or responding to an after-hours emergency page. "We're not here to get them in trouble," he says of the faculty and students he works with. "We're here to prevent them from getting in trouble and to make sure they're safe."

Good to go

That distinction matters to Braiden. The EHS team at the U does not issue citations, which is the province of UOSH, Utah's state-level occupational safety authority. What Braiden and his colleagues do is make sure that labs are ready before a UOSH inspector arrives unannounced. "If we can do our job and work with them to get everything as it should be," he says, "then when they come inspecting, they're already good to go."

The work of helping ensure compliance with applicable regulations is more layered than it might appear from the outside. A typical lab inspection brings together specialists—a radiation expert, a biosafety expert or a chemical safety officer, Braiden himself overseeing the whole. Together they walk through everything from fire extinguisher placement to whether chairs in chemical labs are made of cleanable materials. ("People will have fabric chairs from 20 years ago," he notes matter-of-factly. "You can't have those in there.") Eyewash stations must be flushed weekly by the labs themselves; skip that, and they run rust-red. Centrifuges need maintenance logs because, as Braiden puts it with characteristic understatement, unmaintained centrifuges "can kind of explode."

Root-cause analysis 

When emergencies do happen, Braiden is on call. A recent acid spill in one of his assigned zones required evacuating the space, coordinating with the waste management team, and then, following the immediate crisis—and beyond the expected load of paperwork—conducting a full root cause analysis. "I'll interview people that were involved, ask how they're doing medically, figure out what happened, and look at what we could have done to prevent it." Those findings often end up in EHS's public "Lessons Learned" library, a resource anyone can access at ehs.utah.edu. 

Braiden describes what he does as "upstream health” . . . intervening before problems become injuries, before exposures become diagnoses, before a researcher's oversight becomes a safety incident. It is, he says, what drew him to the field in the first place: "You're not treating symptoms. You're treating causes."

Behind every lab that runs smoothly, safely, and without interruption, there is someone doing exactly that work. At the U, one of those people is Garrett Braiden.

by David Pace

This is the fourth in a series of periodic spotlights on staff who work in the Department of Environmental Health and Safety at the U. You can read about Christin Torres here, Emily O’Hagan here and Brandon Newell here.