The Futel Telephone Sanitation and Hygiene Programs

When the pandemic first hit Portland in early 2020 we figured we were in the wrong industry. Surprisingly, Futel phone usage did not decrease by a large amount. We realized that many people were still going to be using our phones even in hazardous conditions, so we had to make them safer.

Our solution was to implement telephone sanitation and hygiene programs. These would allow the phones to be used safely and provide a valuable service for many non-users of the phones.

Telephone Sanitation Program

The telephone sanitation program consists of a cadre of telephone sanitation engineers trained and equipped to regularly sanitize the telephones. The purpose of the program is primarily to improve the health and safety of telephone users, and secondarily to assure users that the telephones are safe to use.

At first it was difficult to find supplies and equipment. Disinfectant and PPE were sold out everywhere. We were able to buy sufficient amounts of bleach and sponges, and small quantities of rubber gloves, nalgene gloves, and spray bottles. Now that the west coast has settled into our new reality, we are able to keep our supplies stocked.

To inform users, stickers with the date of sanitation and the engineer’s handle are applied after every procedure.

While the sanitization procedure is designed to limit deleterious effects on the telephone hardware, we have had to replace some handsets and appear to be experiencing accelerated keyboard wear. The procedure does create a cool patina on the chrome, however, and makes the informational copy more challenging to read and probably more satisfying for those who attempt to do so.

Progress And Outcome

We have achieved and continue to achieve the safety improvement objectives. Keeping a sustainable volunteer force is always a challenge, and the program would benefit from an additional dedicated sanitation cohort to supplement the current volunteers, who are largely the telephone hosts and already have tasks to execute.

Hygiene Program

The hygiene program deploys handwashing stations to every telephone location where we are able to do so. The purpose of the program is to improve the health and safety of Futel users or any other individuals who wish to use the stations.

The handwashing stations are essentially soap dispensers, water supplies, and hands free water dispensers. There are several ways to implement this, we chose to base ours on a foot operated pump drawing water from a tank to a spigot. This is an economical and robust solution but has the large drawback of being less accessible to wheelchair users and other people with limited leg mobility. The design objectives of our implementation are to provide water and soap with minimal maintenance and cleaning requirements, ruggedness when faced with careless or hostile users, and inexpensive parts to discourage theft. The pump is a rubber primer bulb under a pedal, the tank is a bucket or plastic barrel, and the spigot is PVC conduit. A wood and rebar frame anchors everything. A bottle of liquid soap is ziptied to the frame.

To reduce cleaning requirements, the installations do not include a basin or any other graywater collection, the spigot just empties over the pavement. Because of this the spigot must be to the side to avoid splashing the user’s foot.

Soap was difficult to acquire in the early days of the pandemic, but we were able to get a large container of blue industrial hand soap.

Progress And Outcome

We have achieved and continue to achieve the safety improvement objectives. There have been surprisingly few instances of vandalism or theft of parts and supplies.