April 17, 2018 | Barb Carr

Evidence Collection: Two things every investigator should know about scene management

You may not be part of scene management when an incident occurs at your facility but there are two things every investigator should know:

Hazards that are present in the work area and how to handle them. It’s impossible to anticipate every accident that could happen but we can evaluate hazards that are present at our facilities that could affect employees and the community at large to structure a scene management plan.
Priorities for evidence collection. The opportunity to collect evidence decreases over time. Here are a few things to keep in mind during, and immediately following, scene management.
- Fragile evidence goes away.
- Witnesses forget what they saw.
- Environmental conditions change making it hard to understand why an incident occurred.
- Clean-up and restart begins; thus, changing the scene from its original state.

Learn more by holding our 1-Day Effective Interviewing & Evidence Collection Training at your facility. It is a standalone course but also fits well with our 2-Day TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis Training. Contact me for details: carr@taproot.com.