06
FROM THE
PORCH SWING I’VE GOT SOME CHEMISTRY
It only took me about 19 years to finish college. Surprisingly, I did take some courses in most of those years. I’d enroll, go awhile, and then take some time off. I’d finish a class or two, drop a class or two, or even just not finish without dropping out. That last habit didn’t help my grade point average, and after about a decade one university told me that I was no longer welcome to re-enroll. I moved somewhere else, where my habits caught up with me, and I enrolled in a night class at a different university.
Impending fatherhood brought a major attitude adjustment. Nine-month stints at low-ceiling jobs don’t add much to the college fund of an unborn baby, so with one monster semester, taking so many classes I had to get special permission, I finally finished college, and earned multiple bachelor’s degrees. (Thanks, Dad, for paying my bills that semester). Those degrees allowed me to get a huge raise
(thank you, Ray Goff), and helped me along the path to glorified magazine columnist (thank you, Peter). And the youngest of my children is now well on the way to joining her predecessors with college degrees of their own.
So, what does this have to do with Dangerous Goods (HazMat for transport)? Well, I recently got back from a training trip with paper copies of the DG regulations in my backpack. As I complained about how heavy the backpack was, I happened to glance at an old chemistry textbook on my bookshelf and realized the regulations are bigger! I lined up my chemistry textbooks, threw in an analytical chem lab manual for good measure, and noted that they took up less space than the combination of IATA, IMDG Code, and ground regs (you choose - ADR or 49CFR). And then the timeframes hit me. Sure, most people don’t take 19 years to finish a bachelor’s degree, but the ‘normal’, shorter time is
four years. And how does that 4-19 year range compare to initial multi-modal training? There are a number of five-day multimodal classes available, but there are also a number of one-day multimodal programs out there, especially on the internet. So, 1-5 days versus 4-19 years!
“Ah”, one might say, “chemists have to know what’s on every page, while DG folk don’t need to know every single regulation”, and there is some merit to that argument. But, flipping through my chemistry texts, there were pages and pages of exercises, and lots of pictures and drawings and illustrations. The DG regs have no exercises that I know of, and precious few pieces of non-text information. There’re certainly more words in HazMat regulations that the chemistry texts, so to rephrase the objection, perhaps one might say “we can probably skip a lot more of the words in the regs than a chemistry professor can skip in the chem texts”.
HCB MONTHLY | SEPTEMBER 2016
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