Unit VI Case Study
Read the following scenario, and answer
the questions following each section:
The Dosit Corporation is a chemical
manufacturer, and its products are sold to other manufacturers and used in
household cleaning products. The company has 290 employees with about 220
involved in the production process, 30 working as maintenance personnel, and
the remainder in clerical, sales, engineering, and senior management positions.
The company has never had a safety
manager before it recently hiring you. The company president instructed you to
find out what is wrong regarding safety and health and then to fix it. Several
binders and files have been given to you with the explanation that they are the
existing safety policies and records. Looking through one folder, you find a
chemical inventory list from two years ago that included 780 chemicals. You
find no records of hazard communication training, and the existing
written program is very minimal and inadequate. You also look at the MSDS/SDS
files and find considerably fewer than 780 MSDS/SDSs.
Question 1.What steps should you take to bring the company into compliance with
the HCS considering best practices?
You went on a tour of your
company’s chemical processing area with the production foreman. As with any
such operations, there are pipes going everywhere and numerous tanks. You
noticed that few of the pipes and none of the tanks have visible labels
indicating what is in the tanks or pipes.
Question 2a. Is this a problem from a safety or regulatory point of view? Why?
Question 2b. What would be your recommendation on labeling considering the
regulatory requirements?
You have just finished training the
entire workforce about chemical hazards. The training was not well received by
the workforce, and they generally appeared to be bored; end-of-class quizzes
indicated that they did not really grasp the essential information. You do not
understand how this could be because you carefully went over the MSDS/SDS for
each chemical that a given group of workers were potentially exposed to and
explained in detail the precautions they needed to take.
Question 3a. What most likely went wrong in this training?
Question 3b. How could future training be improved, including the explanation
of chemical hazards without specifically addressing each chemical?
During the inventory, you find a quart
can of a chemical with a label in the maintenance shop. You find out that the
shop personnel only use it occasionally and for unfreezing rusted bolts. They
do not seem to know anything about the chemical’s potential hazards, and the
wording on the container is not totally legible, so you are not sure what the
hazards are either.
Question 4a. How would find out about the proper use, storage, and disposal of
this chemical?
Question 4b. How would you identify the chemical as hazardous, or as not
hazardous?
During an inventory, you come
across an unlabeled five-gallon container of a chemical on which someone has
written a chemical name.
Question 5.What should you do, if anything, about this container?
Use complete sentences when
formulating your responses, and use APA format when writing your responses.
Your paper must be a minimum of two pages in length, not including title and
reference pages. Provide examples in your discussions, and support your answers
with appropriate references and in-text citations.
Information about accessing the
Blackboard Grading Rubric for this assignment is provided below.
