Speaking of Visual Chemical Safety, how about Visual Chemical Safety for Emergency Responders?

EPA SARA 312 Tier II/2 report for facilities, will chemicals at your facility injure firefighters or other emergency responders?

This Visual Chemical Safety website is primarily for workers and consumers, but there are other aspects to it. One relates to the Environmental Protection Agency EPA Superfund Amendment and Reauthorization Act SARA 312 Tier 2 report.

A mobile emergency operations center, in this case operated by the North Carolina Air National Guard

SARA is also known as the Community Right To Know act,, and was inspired by the chemical catastrophe in Bhopal, India, shortly followed by a less serious incident in Institute, WV.

The SARA 312 Tier II/2 report was intended to be useful to firefighters and emergency responders but it’s not very graphical and not interactive at all. Imagine you’re an emergency responder headed to a facility, how would you want the location, amounts and hazards of the chemicals you are approaching to be shared with you?

I’ll be starting with LinkedIn posts about visualizing the workflow for this report (more than 100 distinct steps from start to submission). But during report preparation and afterwards we will be asking the question and brainstorming “what might better visual tools look like for this information?”

I’m planning a blog post on. this daily as we count down from Jan 1 to Mar 1 when the report is due (no extensions). If you have an interest check them out at https://www.linkedin.com/in/kathyjmalone/ . This was my post there from today.

 “Any time someone says “all you have to do is”, you know you’re in trouble” quote from my mentor.

Since Jan 1 was a Saturday this year, you lost 2 days by the time you came back to work from the holidays if you weren’t starting your physical inventory and walkthrough over the weekend.

Here’s a high-level flowchart of the discrete steps required to get your SARA 312 Tier II/2 report out the door (btw, I’ve been helping companies complete their Tier II/2 reports since the first year it was required).

High level workflow for the SARA 312 Tier II/2 report. These 9 simple steps expand to more than 100 discrete tasks that will need to be completed before you hit the Submit button on your report.

A friend once said “everyone told me what to do, but no one told me how”.

Track with me for the remaining 56 days and we’ll go through the “how to” together in exquisite (painful) detail.

This workflow will branch into multiple workflows with lots of steps.

What’s your guess of what the total number of specific tasks that need to be done to get your Tier 2 out the door?

I’m guessing closer to 200 than 100.

Here’s to March 2nd!