They may hire a personal liability attorney and litigate on a contingency basis (which basically costs them nothing, win or lose), but you get to pay your lawyer $200/hour to defend what may be a real or imaginary injury. Besides that, government regulations are pretty specific as to what needs to be safely stored and how. If you don’t follow the regulations (OSHA, EPA, DOT, etc.), then you are at added risk for government fines and could undermine your defense in private litigation.
You need two things. You need someone knowledgeable about regulations and the safe storage of hazardous material. You also need someone who can provide those products at a reasonable cost in a timeframe to fully protect you. For many hazardous materials, salvage drums are the appropriate and preferred storage medium . Even then, it is not just any steel drum. Depending again on the material to be stored, carbon-steel, stainless steel, seamless steel drum or variants on size and strength need to be evaluated. Don’t forget radioactive material. For instance, if you are in or wanting to get in the business of handling radioactive medical waste, you need appropriate storage containers between the steps of collecting and destroying/disposing of that material.
Another consideration is that you may not even realize that the material you have on hand needs special storage. Or, you may not even know what it is – you inherited it when you bought the business, found it behind the tool shed, your employees are tracking through the warehouse – all sorts of situations may arise where the prudent thing to do is get it analyzed and then get it stored or disposed of. In other words, find a reputable lab to get it analyzed. Often times, prudency in pursuing identification and proper containment are good defenses in case someone wants to make an issue of it.
Finally, check out – thoroughly – the supplier who is going to provide you the storage containers you need. Like anything else, there are minimum specs to be met, and “overkill” with respect to meeting or exceeding standards is not unreasonable. Yes, you can probably go overseas and find a real bargain for drums or other storage containers. So, when you receive your shipment of 55-gallon barrels from someplace in the middle of China, you are going to be absolutely sure that the mil-thickness and quality of the steel is exactly what you ordered and paid for? Hope so. If it doesn’t, and an “incident” occurs, the supplier is 6,000 miles away and even further with respect to shared liability. Find someone you can trust and stick with them – it will pay off in the long run.
This article is written by a storage drum expert working for Skolnik. For more detail about salvage drums here.
Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/branding-articles/safe-storage-for-hazardous-material-1531229.html
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