Hazardous Waste Operations and Emergency Response (HAZWOPER) training is required by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) for workers who will be exposed to dangerous wastes in the workplace. Recently, the gulf oil spill has brought attention and an increase in enrollment in HAZWOPER training as people head south to join in the relief effort. Training can be completed online for a charge, and the courses offered on the website are authored by industrial experts and aim to prepare workers to avoid injury or accident as well as comply with OSHA regulations.

The highest level course, the 40-hour HAZWOPER training course has been engineered to prepare workers that will be involved as volunteers or employees in clean-up operations and emergency response situations as well as working towards storage, disposal or treatment at hazardous waste sites. The course aims to equip the enrolled worker with the specific skills needed for their job, rather than loading them with superfluous or unrelated information. Through the online program, the prospective worker will come to an understanding of OSHA as an organization and what their role is in ensuring occupational safety, learn to identify hazardous materials in their workplace, accumulate a working knowledge of chemical compounds and mixtures that are explosive, harmfully radioactive, or flammable, become familiar with what equipment is required and its proper usage, and prepare workers for treating themselves or others in case of exposure to the hazardous materials they will be working with. These goals will be met with study and subsequent testing on the following, non-inclusive, list of subjects: Medical surveillance, air monitoring, emergency procedure, toxicology, hazard identification, decontamination, respiratory protection, confined air entry, radioactive hazards and material sampling.

The lower level, and lower priced, courses are not as exhaustive and provide a more basic knowledge of hazard identification, accident prevention, and emergency procedure. Generally speaking, the lower levels of HAZWOPER training deal with what is called site control.

HAZWOPER jobs are on the rise and in high demand currently, not only on the Gulf Coast, but all along the Sunbelt, inland as well as on the coast. Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida and Alabama are the current hot spots. Some perks that add some incentive for the dangerous work HAZWOPER graduates move on to include no-experience-necessary positions with great benefits that range from engineering, to office work, to on-site clean up. The oil spill along the Gulf Coast is a tragedy and disaster of monstrous proportion, but in a recessed economy, it is also an opportunity.