China Promulgated “Guideline for Emergency Preparedness of Hazardous Chemical Accidents”

On December 26, 2019, the Ministry of Emergency Management of China promulgated the “Guideline for Emergency Preparedness of Hazardous Chemical Accidents”. The Guideline was developed to strengthen the emergency preparedness in production safety accidents for the relevant companies and to improve the level of emergency management. The main contents of the Guideline are as follows.

Scope of application

The Guideline is applied to companies that produce, use, manage and store hazardous chemicals (Those companies could be called as “Hazardous Chemicals Companies”). In addition, emergency management departments or other departments that are responsible for the management of production safety could use this Guideline as a reference when conducting audits on hazardous chemicals.

Items

In the “Guideline”, the following 14 items are presented as contents of the emergency preparedness.

1. Philosophy: be aware of emergency preparedness;
2. Organization and responsibility: the primary responsibility for the company’s emergency activities in the production safety accident belongs to the managers;
3. Laws and regulations: the company always comply with the latest laws and regulations;
4. Risk Assessment: it investigates the causes of total risk;
5. Plan management: it prepares emergency measures in advance;
6. Monitoring and alarm;
7. First aid education and emergency training;
8. On-duty system: specialized facilities, equipment and staff should be set;
9. Information management: information of the company’s basic status, production processes, risk, critical hazard sources and SDS, etc. should be well managed;
10. Emergency equipment and facilities;
11. Building a rescue team;
12. First aid and rescue, which are considered to be the most important issue after an accident;
13. Restoration: post-risk assessment, recovery, emergency assessment, etc.;
14. Budget guarantee: budget used for monitoring alerts, education and training, equipment facilities etc. should be secured;

In addition, at the end of the “Guideline”, detailed activities for implementation are also presented for the above 14 requirements.

The original text of the above “Guideline” can be viewed from the following URL (Simplified Chinese).
https://www.mem.gov.cn/gk/tzgg/tz/201912/t20191231_342960.shtml