Service area: Available in California, Nevada, Arizona, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, North Dakota and South Dakota.
Hazardous materials is where the fire service and the safety consultant meet, and very few consultants have stood on both sides of it. Michael McNeil ran hazardous materials programs inside a federal agency — site cleanups, hazard communication signage, safety data sheet stations, right-to-know postings and a rewritten Forest hazardous materials training program — and did it as a fire officer whose day job was prevention and response.
The standard that governs the work
8 CCR §5192, “Hazardous Waste Operations and Emergency Response” (federal equivalent 29 CFR §1910.120) is the controlling standard. Subsection (a)(1) reaches five categories: cleanup at uncontrolled hazardous waste sites, RCRA corrective action, voluntary cleanup at recognized uncontrolled sites, operations at treatment, storage and disposal facilities, and “emergency response operations for releases of, or substantial threats of releases of, hazardous substances.”
That last category is the one employers miss. A company with no waste site at all still falls under §5192 the moment it plans to respond to its own chemical release rather than evacuate and call the fire department. Which of those two you choose is a written decision with training obligations attached, and most companies have never made it deliberately.
The training tiers, and why the wrong one is expensive
- General site worker — 40 hours off site plus three days of supervised field experience for removal activities; 24 hours plus one day where the work is occasional and limited or the area is fully characterized and safe.
- First Responder Awareness — no fixed hours, but demonstrated competency is required.
- First Responder Operations — at least eight hours.
- Hazardous Materials Technician — at least 24 hours.
- Hazardous Materials Specialist — at least 24 hours at technician level.
An employer that trains its people to Awareness and then expects them to control a spill has put them above their training level, and has created the citation itself.
Hazard communication is where the citations actually come from
Most hazardous materials citations are not exotic. They are the ordinary things: a safety data sheet nobody can produce, a secondary container with no label, a storage cabinet holding incompatibles, a chemical inventory that has not been reconciled in years, an employee who cannot say what they are working with. Those are the findings that led to the federal cleanup work described above, and they are the same findings today.
What we do
- Chemical inventory and hazard assessment
- Hazard Communication program development and training under 8 CCR §5194
- Safety data sheet systems, labeling and right-to-know stations
- Storage, segregation and incompatibility review
- Written §5192 programs — site safety and health plans, emergency response plans and the decision on whether you respond or evacuate
- HAZWOPER training-level assessment and refresher tracking
- Spill and release response planning, and post-incident assessment
- Exposure monitoring during handling, transfer and cleanup — see industrial hygiene
- Hazardous materials incident investigation — see serious injury and fatality investigation
- Contractor and vendor oversight on remediation projects
Frequently asked questions
Does §5192 apply to my business if I do not have a waste site?
It can. Subsection (a)(1) covers emergency response operations for releases or substantial threats of releases of hazardous substances, wherever they occur. If your written plan is that your own employees will contain a spill, you are inside the standard and the training tiers apply. If your plan is to evacuate and call the fire department, you are generally outside it — but that has to be an actual written plan that people are trained on, not an assumption.
What HAZWOPER training level do my people need?
It depends entirely on what you expect them to do. Awareness is for people who may discover a release and are expected to notify and stay clear. Operations, at eight hours minimum, is for defensive containment from a distance. Technician, at 24 hours minimum, is for people who will approach and stop the release. The common and expensive error is training to Awareness and then acting at Technician level.
Can you handle the actual remediation?
No, and that is deliberate. We assess, write the programs, monitor exposures, oversee the contractor and investigate what went wrong. Keeping the technical oversight independent of the company doing the removal is the point — it is what makes the exposure data and the closure documentation defensible.
Talk to Michael directly
Call (626) 546-9384 or email mike@mcneilsafetyconsulting.com. See also environmental site assessment and the full list of services.
States We Serve
McNeil Safety Consulting provides this service to clients in the following states:
- California
- Nevada
- Arizona
- Oregon
- Washington
- Idaho
- Montana
- Utah
- Wyoming
- Colorado
- New Mexico
- North Dakota
- South Dakota
To confirm coverage for your site, call (626) 546-9384.