Fourth Edition | Marquis Who’s Who Insight 9 When I first started in the hazardous materials field back in the 1980s, there were no regulations. Now, we have well-established requirements for personal protection and we have regulatory programs to assist with identifying and reducing risk. How have you navigated disruptions in your industry to remain a top professional? You have to look at what’s going on in the field and what other professionals are doing and try to absorb as many good components as you can while keeping your wits about you and looking for alternative ways to manage outcomes. We worked in unique ways that would identify affordable options for companies because it wasn’t just about helping them to meet requirements of whatever regulatory agency or corporate managers were going to review our results. It was also important that the recommendations be clear and understandable by plant management, which for many English is a second language. How do you feel your industry has changed/evolved? It has changed a lot and it’s not because they necessarily want to—it’s because the regulatory agencies have finally decided that they need to address some of their root issues. A lot of this started because of an event in India where there was a chemical release from a U.S. facility that killed 3,000 people and injured close to 10,000. After this, the U.S. and other countries began to implement regulations to deal with large amounts of hazardous materials. Prior to that, they were regulating waste, but not materials. That was the law in California that I helped to implement. Not too long after that, the EPA released its rules to protect off-site populations and the environment. We helped a lot of industries in the United States meet these requirements and we helped industries overseas to understand different requirements and how to meet them. So the new requirements in state and federal law, once implemented, required the industries to change. What innovations or technologies do you feel will shape the future of your industry? So much of it is people just sitting down with a pencil and paper and going through things in detail. There are a number of different ways you can go about determining risk, but the most effective way can also be the most expensive. There are some computer programs out there that will help you to manage risks once they have been identified and that has been done successfully with nuclear power plants and is now being used by the chemical industry. One of the studies that was performed after I left the consulting firm involved looking at water treatment plants and assessing how they would be affected in the event of a terrorist attack. The consultants hired by the EPA developed programs to help identify these risks and ways to combat them. Since this was an EPA project, the data is open to all water treatment plant operators at no cost. What excites you the most about your industry? When I first started in the hazardous materials field back in the 1980s, therewere no regulations. Now, we havewellestablished requirements for personal protection and we have regulatory programs to assist with identifying and reducing risk. We have really cleaned up most of the unregulated hazardous material sites as well. When we first started, we would find a location where people had been dumping barrels for a while and we would oversee the clean-up. Those sites of unregulated hazardous waste are no longer found in Santa Barbara County, at least when I left. We worked with the highway patrol to support their efforts to get the leaking trucks out of the hazardous waste hauling business. They cleaned up the trucking industry pretty quickly in California. The entire program has gone from no regulation to a nice set of regulations along with opportunities to learn about how you can reduce risks and protect your employees, the environment, and the community. It has been exciting to see this whole transition occur.
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