What This Course Is and What It Is Not

Every working day, trucks on US highways carry fuel, paint, acids, compressed gases, batteries and cleaning chemicals. Most of these loads arrive safely because many people did small things correctly: the shipper classified the material, the packer chose the right drum, someone wrote the shipping paper, someone placed the labels, and the driver had the right placards and emergency information in the cab.

This course is awareness training for those people. It is written for shipping and receiving staff, warehouse supervisors, managers of drivers, and environment, health and safety (EHS) staff who prepare or offer hazardous materials (hazmat) for transport by highway in the United States.

What the course covers

• How the Hazardous Materials Regulations (HMR) are organised, who writes them and who enforces them.
• The nine hazard classes, their divisions and the three packing groups.
• How to read every column of the Hazardous Materials Table.
• Shipping papers, emergency response information and the emergency response telephone number.
• Marking, labelling and placarding, including the placard tables and the 1,001-pound rule.
• Packaging, segregation, loading and unloading, and the main exceptions.
• Safety, security plans, the Emergency Response Guidebook and incident reporting.

How to use the course

Each module builds on the one before. Module 2 teaches you to classify a material; module 3 uses that class to read the table and write the shipping paper; module 4 uses the same facts to mark, label and placard. Keep your own company's procedures beside you. Where this course says "typically", your employer's procedure or the regulation text decides the real answer.

Examples use invented companies. Quorvale Logistics runs a distribution warehouse in Texas, and Sarnet Process Services sends maintenance chemicals to its job sites. All figures in their examples are invented for teaching.