If variety is the spice of life than Hazardous Waste Manager Emily O’Hagan leads a pretty exciting life.

Emily O'Hagan

Busy with processing waste pickups from University of Utah labs for disposal, shipping dangerous goods worldwide and inspecting lab spaces for proper chemical handling and storage, O’Hagan has seen it all. You will find the gloved and masked O’Hagan, who is employed by the Environmental Health and Safety (EHS) department at the U, regularly suited up in fire-resistant long-sleeved khaki shirt and navy blue pants moving a wide variety of hazardous materials out of labs and other university facilities to a holding and sorting station before dispatching them to an off-campus facility for incineration. For O’Hagan dealing with dangerous materials is her business.

Mysterious campus corner

A typical day involves arriving at her office, checking email queries about how to dispose of materials as well as how to navigate the Safety Administrative Management System, software for waste submissions. Armed with an overview of the day’s requests, she checks in with the technicians who will do the pickups, what they should pay attention to and what they will be packing into the truck to transfer to the mysterious, hidden Building 590, “our own little corner of campus” near Red Butte Garden.

At the secured and armed 590, many kinds of hazardous wastes, including radioactive materials are stored.

Entering a clean room for an inspection in full PPE

The process of managing hazardous waste is more complicated than you might first imagine. “I can’t follow any regulations until I know what’s in the container,” she says, whether flammable solvents like ethanol, methanol or dichloromethane. “Bleach can’t be mixed with ammonia,” she reminds us of just one example of how volatile unintended chemical reactions can be. This process of “bulking” or consolidating similar materials into 55-gallon metal drums is a big part of her work before the U team contacts Clean Harbors or other third parties to ship out the waste to be incinerated or otherwise safely discarded.

“Once the techs are gone,” she says, "I go through the retaining section, checking dates on the materials that have been dropped off: which is hazardous and which are not, all within four days of their arrival.” In fact, hazardous waste management is highly regulated by local and federal agencies (Environmental Protection Agency — EPA , Occupational and Safety and Health Administration — OSHA, to name just two), and the paperwork and reporting is, naturally, voluminous. In her steel-toed boots, O’Hagan is adept at all of it, largely because of her background in chemistry.

Making research safe

A native of Sandy, O’Hagan’s first choice for a job growing up was to be an astronaut. Her second choice was something related to chemistry. “I always had an affinity for math and science,” she says, and her parents encouraged her to pursue STEM. “So it wasn’t exactly out of the blue — hey guys, guess what I’m going to do: hazardous waste!”

But following graduation with a BS in chemistry in 2022 and an internship working with other chemists to identify, segregate, and pack hazardous waste at Clean Harbors in Tooele, she saw her future, and that future was making science research at the U less dangerous for students and faculty as well as the public.

Emily O'Hagan and College of Science Safety Director working on cleaning out an old glove box. Credit: Jim Muller.

Besides flammable liquids that are bulked, O’Hagan deals with other categories of hazardous waste, including cylinders of flammable and non-flammable gases and flammable solids like metal dust or naphthalene (mothballs). Other discarded materials can become dangerous when wet or spontaneously combustible. Finally, there is a miscellaneous category like used gloves and weigh boats. Most of these items get incinerated. If non-regulated they go to a landfill. Other items like acidic solutions can be neutralized then solidified and landfilled in a secure place.

Since O’Hagan and her team at EHS are into transporting waste, she has to be up to date not only with the EPA and OSHA but with the Department of Transportation and the International Air Transport Associate which regulates shipping and the workers involved with shipping from point-to-point via ground or air. Though too young, perhaps, to have hefted them at home when a youth, O’Hagan refers to the highly detailed manuals she keeps at her desk as “phonebook-sized.”

Label, label, label

Keeping us all safe at the U and beyond, O’Hagan is at-the-ready when asked how we can all help with the safe disposal and transportation of hazardous wastes: “The biggest ‘PSA’ I have is to graduate students to tell us what’s in those containers, in those vials and flasks. Some graduate students [and retiring faculty when they exit their labs] will leave a note for us to ‘check notebook’ and we don’t have that notebook.”

That uncertainty is not the kind of variety, or “spice” that makes Emily O’Hagan’s job gratifying. So, the message is clear: safety first and always whether you’re required at work to wear those steel-toed boots and full-face respirators or not.

For occupational safety specialist Christin Torres, it all started with her love of the environment. Born in Sandy and raised in Grantsville, Utah she grew up in the Great Basin along the Wasatch Front.

The almost feral high-desert and mountain terrain profoundly shapes everyone who lives here. But it takes a special sensitivity to realize just how fragile that environment is. Torres has that sensitivity and earned not one but two associate degrees in the environmental sciences from Salt Lake Community College.

But career tracks have a life of their own, it would seem, and during a five-year stint beginning as an intern with an environmental health and safety consulting firm, Torres was tasked with an interesting and, it turned out, a transformational project related to the demolition of a smelter.

For many years in Salt Lake Valley the iconic Murray smokestacks stood like silent sentinels to the past when the duo — one of which was 450-feet tall above the former smelter — attempted back in the first half of the 20^th century to lift smoke filled with lead and arsenic away from the population below.

For Torres it was the spectacular demolition and clean-up of these mid-valley landmarks that marked her foray from her training and her ambition to “try to save the world,” as she says, to the more formalized sector of environmental health and safety (EHS).

“While I was there [at the consulting firm], I got a lot of cross-training in the health and safety side of things,” she recalls. At the old Murray smelter site, her job was to do the environmental monitoring of the project, determining dust levels and making sure there wasn't cross contamination into other areas. “I got into the safety or the IH [industrial health] side of things because I started conducting exposure assessments on employees rather than the environment.”

It wasn’t just the training Torres got as the stacks came down; it was an ethic of occupational safety for individuals, an ethic that continues to this day.

This formative experience led Torres not only to a bachelor’s degree but to work in 2004 as a compliance officer at the state-level Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Under the OSHA law created by the U.S. Congress, employers are responsible for providing a safe and healthful workplace for their workers. “I was so excited to go into the regulatory side of things,” she says, “because as a consultant we're always trying to help the employer comply with the regulations.”

Torres later advanced at OSHA to the position of an industrial hygienist, involved in identifying, evaluating and controlling hazards that can affect the health of workers, including chemical, physical, ergonomic, or biological exposures. Then, in 2004, she decided to try her luck at the federal level and found herself a consumer safety officer at the Food and Drug Administration.

Christin Torres

“I never imagined that I would work in safety,” says Torres. “I didn't know that safety and the environmental sciences went together, but they absolutely do. If you had asked me 'what are you going to be when you grow up?' it wouldn't have been a compliance officer or an occupational safety specialist.”

Except for a stint as a massage therapist for a few years prior to the pandemic, Torres has stayed in the field of health and safety where she discovered what she likes about it: researching federal and state regulations. In February she joined the Environmental Health and Safety department at the University of Utah as a compliance specialist. “I absolutely love doing research on regulations and interpretations and how they apply to this situation and how I can hold my employer accountable and to ask for corrective actions,” she says.

While Torres found what she liked about the work of EHS, she never lost track of the “why” in her career — the real motivation to learn, for example, the ins-and-outs of laboratory safety which is a new aspect of her work in compliance at a research university. Whether saving a personified Mother Earth as an idealistic youth, protecting Salt Lake Valley residents from the demolition of a toxic smelter, or, later, facilitating healing through massage, her work, currently in compliance, has been designed to help and protect others.

“This sounds grandiose,” she says, “but I really am helping people make it home every day … I'm helping employers or students who are employees become aware of their surroundings, teaching them how to do things safer so that they can go home to their family everyday with all of their fingers and [both] … their arms, being able to breathe normally because they didn't breathe in something accidentally and ruin their lungs… . If you're changing the way an employer does their business to make it a safer place to work the potential to save a life is high, in my opinion.”

Just talking with Christin Torres with her easy laugh and penchant for regulatory detail will make you feel safer.