Figuring Out Services
August 26, 2019
How Employees Should Respond to Chemical Spills
When a chemical spill is mishandled, many people, property, and environment can get hurt and distracting the business activities severely. Before a company thinks of how to deal with chemical spills, it should think of how to prevent the accident from happening. Teach the employees and lay down procedures that are appropriate for storing, handling, disposing of, transferring and using every type of chemical in the company. Aside from training employees, you should provide them with protective gear and other necessities that are needed to handle chemical spills correctly. The training programs are affordable for even a small organization. This is the appropriate way of handling a chemical spill accident that employee should learn.
The employees should learn about all the hazards that are involved with the chemicals that they deal with daily at the job site. Ensure that all the employees learn and understand the procedures they should follow when chemicals spill. Employees can keep reminding themselves of the response procedure if you put them in writing and hang the written material at a strategic place where they can all see it every day. Employees learn better when you have the equipment to demonstrate to them how they should react to the chemical spillages. The equipment that you make available for the employee should be of high quality to enable them to handle the chemical spill efficiently.
There should be an efficient and smooth flow of communication among the employees to let everyone know about the occurrence of the hazard. Tell all the employees to move away from the chemical spill no matter how small it may appear. Determine the environmental threats, physical damage to the property and how the chemical will affect human beings. After assessing the risk of the spill you should evaluate the quantity of the spill to determine if you can clean it up without help from outside. You should finally evaluate the potential of the impact of the spill, and if the impact is not alarming you can consider cleaning it up by yourselves. There may be no compatible chemical in the laboratory at that moment that can neutralize the liquid to make it safe for cleaning.
If after evaluating the chemical spill you find out that you can clean it up by yourself you should proceed to recommend the procedures to follow. You should contact the officer in charge of handling hazardous cases in your company because they have to be informed. Follow the right cleanup procedure for every type of chemical spill. You need to contain the liquid from spreading to other places to make cleaning easier and harmless. The materials that have been used to clean the chemical should be disposed of in separate trash from there one you used to throw away other dirt. Ensure that the area you have cleaned up is not left contaminated by the chemical.