Richard M Petitte, MS, CSP

Session Objectives:

Overview of Chemical Hazards
Importance of safety in Chemicals and TSCA
Understanding of Chemical Hazards related to TSCA

Topic:

This instructor-led course gives class participants a practical, reality-based foundation in safe chemical handling, hazard communication, and emergency response. Participants learn how OSHA defines a hazardous chemical and how to recognize the major hazard categories—corrosive, flammable, toxic, reactive, biological, carcinogenic, and radioactive—along with the physical states, the four routes of exposure (inhalation, ingestion, absorption, injection), and their warning symptoms. The class then covers safe handling and transfer practices, incompatible-chemical segregation, proper storage and grounding of flammables, primary and secondary container labeling, SDS use, and the roles of OSHA, NFPA, EPA, and DOT in regulating chemical storage. Emergency content includes spill control and containment, shutdown and evacuation procedures, what emergency responders need to know, and first aid for chemical contact with the eyes and skin, inhalation, and ingestion. The final segment covers exposure control—engineering controls and ventilation, personal hygiene, housekeeping, monitoring, decontamination, PPE selection, and respiratory protection, including respirator types, protection factors relative to the TLV, cartridge change-out, care and maintenance, and medical fitness evaluations. Taught by a Board Certified Safety Professional with more than four decades of industrial EHS experience and over 60,000 people trained, the course closes with each party's hazard communication responsibilities: manufacturers assess, distributors transmit, and employers inform their workers. The presentations conclude with a summary of the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), including recent changes.