David McClung has been selected as the chapter’s first Safety Professional of the Year (SPY) award winner. David was one of the original four members who worked on setting up the section with the Cascade Chapter and ASSP. He is currently the Chapter Secretary and will be the Chapter Vice President when the new chapter year starts on July 1st. David has played an integral role as part of the leadership team in completing the process to becoming an officially chartered chapter through society.
In addition to being on the executive committee David was the Nominations and Elections Committee Chair for our first election of officers. He also served as a committee member on our first Bylaws Committee and is the current Bylaws Committee Chair a position he has held for two years. In that role he led an effort to update our section bylaws to the current chapter bylaws. He has been a volunteer for the ASSP Booth at both the COSHA Fall Conference and the Mid-Oregon Construction Summit.
David is the Safety Manager for Deschutes Brewing. His current focus at the operation is core life safety programs such as energy control, fall protection, and confined space safety. He also has done a lot of work with chemical onboarding and making this a more formal process at the operation. David is also an active member of the Master Brewers Association of America (MBAA).
Prior to working for Deschutes David worked at Lonza where he started in operations and worked into a hybrid Operator/EHS Specialist. He was promoted to EHS Specialist/Industrial Hygiene where he developed studies, executed sampling, and analyzed results. He also did process safety and design review of systems in house and off the self-systems ensuring they were safe to use operator and met regulatory standards.
During the COVID-19 pandemic David created and shared resources with the membership. These included safety information on creating cleaning chemicals at home and things to avoid with chemicals when they had become hard to get. He also created and shared templates for a coronavirus response plan, business continuity, a COVID-19 Fact sheet, a brief presentation on COVID-19, among many other resources.
As the pandemic wore on David continued providing free templates he had created with the membership including a sample mask policy, social distancing policy, mask communication (why we were masks), a COVID-19 guidance matrix, and others. David also put together a quick response to members on the FDA warning on methanol contaminated hand sanitizers pointing out an experience he had at a local food wagon. He shared the resources from the FDA on lists and took pictures of the hand sanitizer to share with membership. He also wrote an article in the chapter newsletter (Broken Top Bulletin) in the summer edition about hand sanitizers and updating the information with membership.