CHO Managing Violations – What to Do When Things Go Wrong

A course for Chemical Hygiene Officers on what to do when things go wrong

Every Chemical Hygiene Officer will one day face a violation: an inspector at the door, a citation in the mail, a colleague who breaks a rule, or a spill that leaves the building. This course teaches the response, from the first hour to the closed case, so a bad day becomes a record of a program that works.

It is written for Chemical Hygiene Officers in education and in industry. Every lesson teaches one part of the response, then shows it twice, once in a school or district and once in a company or lab.

Eight modules, one playbook

• Who Can Cite You, and for What: OSHA, the State Plans, EPA, the fire marshal and the others, and the rules behind most lab findings.
• The Inspection Itself: the knock at the door, the walkaround, the records binder and the closing conference.
• The Citation Arrives: reading it, the fifteen working days, informal conferences and contests, and proving the fix.
• Reporting When Something Has Happened: the 8-hour and 24-hour clocks, chemical releases, and preserving the scene.
• When Your Own People Break the Rules: sorting the behavior, making rules real, stopping work and protecting people who report.
• Root Cause and Corrective Action: why “retrain the employee” is rarely the answer, and fixes that last.
• Self-Audit and Self-Disclosure: finding problems first, OSHA’s self-audit policy and EPA’s Audit Policy.
• Communicating When Things Go Wrong: leadership, staff, families, customers and the press.

Each module ends with a Task, and each Task writes one part of your own Violation Response Playbook. The final project assembles the parts into one playbook for your school district or your site.