Safety

The improve the safety when people are working alone at the telescope, a ``Short Term Alarm'' facility has been developed and offered to the observers at NOT. This STA is basically a timer which can be activated for a given period during which the person(s) are planning to make short journeys between the facilities on the mountain: e.g., Control Room to Service Building, or Telescope to Residencia. The functionality is identical to the existing ``Travel Time Monitor'' which we use when travelling between sea-level and the observatory; An increasing circle of observatory personnel are notified through automated email messages if the timer for a given person has not been stopped before reaching the set time limit. We are investigating to expand the notification services to also include an automated telephone call through our newly installed telephone exchange service.

An issue related to safety, is knowing who is expected to be in our facilities on the mountain. Through our data-base duty and observing schedule system we in principle know who is on duty, and who are observing. Information on the people expected to be on site is now being collected and processed each day, for three different parts of the day (morning, afternoon and night).

To improve safety in the workshop, a separate storage box has been placed outside to keep chemicals (oil paints, cleaning liquids, etc.). Also, various old barrels standing outside were removed.