Worried about your finger paint? HazMat help is only a call away
Published: December 1, 2006
Earlier this year, staff at the San Jose Unified School District called CSBA’s HazMat communication hotline with an unusual request: They needed current toxicological information for a specific brand of finger paint that students were using that day at a local elementary school.
Although no student painters were affected, a number of adults who had been exposed to the paint felt sick. The district needed to be sure the paint wasn’t responsible for their symptoms. Within minutes, the district, school site and emergency room staff had all the relevant information they needed to ensure that the paint was safe—thanks to HazMat’s extensive database and 24-hour hazardous material information hotline.
“All it took was a single phone call,” said Linda Loesch, administrative assistant to the district’s director for auxiliary services. “It was fabulous.”
Loesch said she likes the simplicity of CSBA’s HazMat Communication Program, which for the past decade has helped school districts and county offices of education comply with complex regulations governing the use, transportation and storage of hazardous materials.
The program, a partnership between CSBA and the California-based 3E Company, is a self-described “paperless compliance” system that reduces the costs of maintaining the product-specific toxicological information about every hazardous material stored or used at school sites. State and federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration laws require employers to maintain current and easily accessible “Material Safety Data Sheets,” or MSDSs, for all hazardous materials at the site. These regulations apply to everything from chemicals in classroom science labs to cleanser and detergent in the janitorial storeroom.
As the San Jose USD officials discovered, the rules also apply to finger paint.
Keeping current with OSHA regulations and ensuring the safety of students and staff in the event of a spill or accident is an enormous task that requires detailed record-keeping and expert technical support.
The 3E Company maintains an extensive database of product-specific MSDSs and operates a hotline, with operators available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The hotline gives clients instant access to MSDSs as well as assistance in the event of a chemical spill, release, poisoning or exposure.
Loesch said the program is convenient and easy to use—the district also recently relied on it to deal with spilled mercury. “The MSDS service is great,” she said. “We like the one-stop-shopping aspect of the program. It’s easy for us to get the information we need.”
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