Ep 67 | The Cardinal Rule of Hazmat Hauling

Welcome to Driving the Line, the pursuit of safety, where we talk about the real issues out on the road, focus on safe driving, and learn industry best practices from your hosts Kenny Ray, Mike Bohan, Jim Seibert, and Barry Harrison, and the hopes that by driving the line, we get more drivers home safe and sound. This podcast was made possible by the Marsh McLennan Agency. Welcome, everyone, to Driving the Line podcast. This is Kenny Ray.

I am one of your hosts, and I'll be doing solo today. All of my colleagues are out on the road taking care of clients and being safe, and so I'm going to share some thoughts with our audience today about a topic that may initially seem very specific. And the reason I bring that up is because we tend to try here on Driving the Line to have our episodes general in nature to where they appeal to a wide audience, or at least they're applicable to a wide audience. And again, our focus is the trucking, the transportation industry, and dealing with safety in regards to that.

We also talk a little bit about agricultural safety because one of our co-hosts, Mr. Jim Sybert, is an ag safety professional. But generally, we talk about the trucking industry, and we primarily discuss things in general that are applicable across our industry, as opposed to getting into the various niches that are very common in our industry. I'll give you an example.

It wouldn't do us much good to focus an episode purely on auto haulers or car haulers or to focus an episode purely on livestock haulers because that's a very small segment of our industry. So we tend to talk about things in general. However, today I'm going to discuss kind of what's going on in the hazardous material world. Now, before you tune out or turn off the episode, hear me out, please.

This is not going to be a technical deep dive into the world of hazmat. What I really want to do is talk about the regulatory environment that's going on right now as it impacts hazards material. And one reason that we decided to do this episode is because we have more and more and more, and however many mores you want to put in that sentence, we have more and more and more trucking companies that would not identify themselves now, particularly in the past, as a hazardous material carrier that are now dipping their toe into the hazmat world.

And part of the reason for that is a very specific product that is coming into our country in enormous quantities. And I'm going to discuss that more in just a few minutes. So I just wanted to lay the predicate to start out the episode to tell you we normally try to appeal or present a topic that appeals to a wide audience. and when I mention the word hazmat, some of you may say, ah, that's not me, I'm not going to listen to that.

I encourage you to listen to the episode because I believe with all my heart that by the end of it you're going to find something in this episode that did apply to you. If nothing else, as a consumer that uses some of these products, and we're going to talk about a real issue involving one of these products that is causing problems across our nation, not with the trucking industry, but with the end user of these products, families in their homes, people that live in apartments, people at their workplace, people in their vehicles.

And so in all honesty, that topic really applies to everybody in our nation. So I think you'll find something very interesting in this particular episode. So what is going on in the hazmat world? Well, because we primarily focus on truck transportation and a little bit in ag, I'm going to first start talking about the regulatory environment.

And I do that because hazardous material is a highly regulated industry within a highly regulated industry, which is the trucking industry. But it's very important for me to note that this particular episode is being recorded in the year 2026. And the reason that is important is because all of us that listen to podcasts have learned podcasts basically live forever. If they're in the digital world, you can go back and find episodes of podcasts that were recorded 5, 6, 8, 10, 15 years ago.

They're still out there. And so anytime we're talking about a regulatory topic, whether that's trucking in general or has material specifically, we have to remember the time frame in which the podcast was recorded because regulations change. So for instance, I'm recording this in the year 2026. If someone happens to listen to this five years from now, in the year 2031, we may be in a completely different regulatory environment.

So some of the things I say today may not be applicable five years in the future. My guess is some of them will be, and I'll tell you why, because I'm coming up on 40 years of working in hazmat and in my past four decades of working in the hazardous material world very little has actually changed now we've gone to digital copies of the regulations we've gone to devices that that help us in our monitoring and logging and documenting hazmat but the hazmat regs themselves, the transportation of hazardous material, very little of that has changed even over the past 40 years.

So I believe even in the future when this podcast is listened to, some of the stuff we talk about today will still be applicable even in that time frame. Now the reason I mentioned 2026 is because both the trucking and the hazardous material world are highly regulated and they're highly regulated both by federal and state governments here in the U.S. And we may have some listeners in Canada and the Canadian government, both the national government of Canada and the various provinces also regulate hazmat.

And their regs are very, very similar, very similar to ours in the U.S. But we basically have two regulatory environments that we're dealing with, both at the federal and the state level. And the reason it's important to mention federal regulation and the year 2026, and let me pause here and tell you, this is not a political discussion.

Let me repeat that. This is not a political discussion. But the way our government in the United States is structured, all of the regulatory agencies at the federal level, and this is just a basic civics reminder, all of the federal regulatory agencies are under the executive branch of our government, which means the president. So ultimately, the boss, if you will, of the U.

S. Department of Transportation, OSHA, EPA, whatever federal regulatory agency you want to mention, at any given time, the secretary or the head of that particular regulatory agency answers directly to the president of the United States. So depending on the political persuasion of whatever administration is in effect at the time, you get some real world effects that directly impact our day-to-day operations, both in trucking and hazmat. So in 2026, the current administration is somewhat anti-regulatory.

They basically have pulled back some of the regulatory agencies, and they're of the mindset that business ought to just be able to operate and let the free world economy work. And so we've actually seen during this particular administration some pulling back of various regulatory activities. And the way that mostly manifests itself is two ways. Number one, we've seen a reduction or even elimination of some regulations where they just have said, this is not going to be law anymore.

We're just not going to enforce this. And the other way, and this is the one that impacts trucking industries the most, we've seen a tremendous reduction in the number of audits that are being conducted across the nation on various trucking companies. Now, having said that, at some point the administration will change. It always does.

We have well over 200 years of history in our country with lots and lots of different administrations. And another one will come in at some point in the future that will have a different philosophy, and we will see more regulation. We'll see more audits. That's just the fact of life living in our form of government in the United States.

So it's very important to understand right now we're in a somewhat less restrictive regulatory environment, but that can change with the next election. So it's just important. It's amazing how whoever's in office actually does impact the trucking industry to a very, very significant degree. So what is that dynamic that goes on kind of between the federal and the state governments?

We've already mentioned that hazmat is highly regulated. So at the federal level, we're dealing with an agency that we in the trucking industry called PHMSA that is P-H-M-S-A that's an abbreviation for the Pipeline Hazardous Material Safety Administration that is a part of the United States Department of Transportation so at the federal level we have PHMSA that's the folks that write the hazmat regs we have the FMCSA the Federal Motor Care Safety Administration We have the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA.

Anytime you hauling hazmat that may accidentally through an accident or some misuse of equipment failure of equipment and we have a hazard material released into the environment whether that gets on the ground it gets in the air it gets in the water then it becomes hazardous waste, and the Environmental Protection Agency is very much interested in that. We also have OSHA, the Occupational Safety Health Administration, which regulates all of the personal protective equipment that drivers will use when they're loading and unloading.

If you have warehouse operations and you store hazmat or you got forklift operators that are moving hazmat in and out of trailers, they're regulated by OSHA. If you happen to haul explosives, you're regulated by the ATF, the Alcohol Tobacco Firearms Administration. If you happen to haul radioactive materials, you're regulated by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And if you haul any hazardous material for the United States military, then you're also regulated by the Department of Defense.

And the reason I list all of those is just to remind you of how many different regulatory agencies, number one, have some type of insight or some type of oversight or control over the trucking industry, and especially they do if you're dealing with hazardous material. At the state level, it doesn't matter which state you're in, You're always going to have whichever agency is tasked with roadside inspections. And so I'm in Texas. So for me, it's the Texas Department of Public Safety or the Texas Highway Patrol that has statewide authority.

But then we have almost 100 local agencies in the state of Texas. That's either a sheriff's department, a police department that have been trained. And they have officers that are what we call CVE, commercial vehicle enforcement, that they go out and they work trucks just like the state highway patrol does in Texas. So you've got the roadside enforcement folks that are out stopping these trucks and actually inspect them on the side of the road.

And then, just like we mentioned the Environmental Protection Agency, if you're hauling hazardous waste, which is a type of hazmat, or you have an uncontrolled release of hazardous material, what we would call a spill, the state environmental agency will also get involved with that to protect state waterways and state lands and things like that. And then you also have some specialized state agencies. I'll give you an example here in Texas. We have a lot of intermodal containers that come into the port of Houston that, of all things, are loaded with alcoholic beverages.

They may be bringing wine from France. They may be bringing vodka from some of the Eastern European countries. They may be bringing tequila from South America. And you will have an entire intermodal container loaded with alcoholic beverages that ultimately are going to be delivered to a liquor store or grocery store, wherever you buy adult beverages.

But once they get on the highway, transporting that load of alcoholic beverages falls under the regulation here in Texas, what we call the TABC, the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission. You actually have to have a permit to haul alcoholic beverages. Now, why do I even mention alcoholic beverages on a podcast about hazmat? Well, guess what?

If the alcohol content is high enough in these various alcoholic beverages, it actually makes them flammable liquids. They will burn if they're anywhere near an ignition source, and so they become a hazardous material. And the only reason I bring that up, once again, mentioning this dynamic between the federal government and the various state governments is that trucking companies that get involved in hazardous material have regulatory oversight from so many different agencies it's sometimes it's it's it's you just sit and say really that many those those that number of agencies are watching over me and the answer to that is yes they are indeed.

So let's talk for just a second about the U.S. Department of Transportation. Who does what in terms of HAZMAT at USDOT?

Well, you have two primary agencies. You have this FEMSA, and I use that an acronym. FEMSA, again, that is the Pipeline Hazardous Material Safety Administration. That is a full-fledged organizational unit within the U.

S. Department of Transportation. We use the term USDOT in the trucking industry. We just throw that around like we say, oh, USDOT.

What we really mean when we say USDOT, we're really talking about FMCSA, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. Those are the folks that oversee all trucking in the U.S. So it's really a misnomer when those of us in the industry say, oh, I'm under USDOT.

Yeah, that's really true, but you're not under all aspects of USDOT. If you're a non-hazmat trucking company, you're simply under the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. And it's important to bring that up for just a second because USDOT actually regulates hazardous material by what we call multi-modes. And there's basically five.

Those of us in the trucking industry, they regulate the movement of hazardous material by truck. That's hazmat going up and down the highway. They also regulate the movement of hazardous material by trains or by rail. They regulate the movement of hazardous material by boats or ships.

That's the marine movement of hazmat. They regulate the movement of hazardous material by air. There's very few hazmats that can be put on aircraft. There's very, very few hazmats that can be put on passenger aircraft, but the ones that can be, USDOT regulates those as well.

And then the fifth way that USDOT regulates hazmat is the unmanned movement of hazmat, and that is through pipelines, underground pipelines, that millions and millions and millions of barrels of oil and other petrochemicals are moved, thousands of gallons every single day are moved around our country through pipelines that run literally all over our nation. So USDOT regulates all of those. So what PHMSA does, the Pipeline Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, they write the rules.

They write all of the HAZMAT regs, and they write them for all of those different modes. They write the regs for air transportation, marine transportation, rail transportation, trucks, and pipeline. They write all of that. what FMCSA, the Federal Motor Care Safety Administration, they have some roles in hazmat as well.

And the biggest one is they set the insurance requirements. And the reason I bring this up, and I'm going to stress this again in just a moment. I'm a safety guy. I'm in the risk consulting business.

And I know trucking companies do not like having to pay an enormous amount of money for insurance. But the fact is they're required by law to have insurance. But when U-Haul has MAD, you have to have additional levels over and above the standard amount, the standard requirement that all trucking companies have to have. And it's one place I see where trucking companies get in trouble often is they're transporting hazardous material, but they have not upped or increased their insurance coverage.

So the Federal Motor care safety administration sets the requirements for insurance they're also the ones that do audits so even a trucking company that is under the hazard material regulations which were written by FEMSA the pipeline hazard material safety administration FMCSA is the one that will come in and do an audit and make sure that the trucking company is complying with those hazard material regulations. FMCSA also is the one that writes the CDL, commercial driver's license regulations, including the hazard material and tank endorsement that are often found on the CDL of drivers that transport hazardous materials.

And then the one other thing, and this one has always surprised me just a little, and again, I'm in my fourth decade of dealing with hazmat in a regulatory world. FMCSA, there is a specialized permit called, it's called a safety permit. That's all it's called is a safety permit. But if a trucking company hauls what we call the baddest of the bad, some really high risk, high danger, hazmat, these are things like some of the explosive, radioactive materials, inhalation hazard poisons, some oxidizers.

If a trucking company is hauling those very specialized products, they have to have an additional special permit issued by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration that gives them the authority to transport those high-danger, high-risk hazardous materials. So we basically have two agencies within the U.S. Department of Transportation that really oversee the transportation of hazardous material by trucks across our public highways in the U.

S. Now, the reason I bring those two regulations up, and if you work for a trucking company, I don't care if you don't remember anything else from this podcast, I hope you will remember this. Neither one of those agencies can release you or exempt you from the other agencies' requirements. Neither one, either the Pipeline Hazterial Safety Administration or the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, those are sister agencies within the U.

S. Department of Transportation. Each of them have rules. Each of them will grant exceptions, exemptions.

They'll give you outs on certain things if you do things a certain way. but neither one of them have the authority to release you from the requirements of the other agency. Here's where this comes into play. There are certain hazmats that are regulated by PHMSA, the Pipeline Hazardous Materials Safety Administration.

If you haul these hazardous materials in a certain way I give you a classic example car batteries You think about the battery that you have on your personal vehicle If car batteries and those they all contain acid So acid is a class A corrosive Okay it's a hazardous material. But if batteries are packaged in such a way, normally they're stacked on pallets, the pallet is then shrink wrapped, and then they load an entire pallet into the back of a truck and then if they the load securement on that they brace it and block it in certain ways where the the post on the battery can't come in contact with anything else there can't be any other hazmat on on the truck there are certain ways if you haul car batteries a certain way FEMSA the Pipeline Hashteral Safety Administration exempts you from all the regs all the hazmat regs so you basically are hauling a hazardous material, but you're exempted from the hazardous material rules if you transport these products in a certain way.

And car batteries are just one example. There's a lot of exemptions within the hazmat regs. But guess what? Even though you may be exempted, you may not have to have a shipping paper.

You may not have to have placards. You may not have to have marking or labeling. You may not have to have emergency response information. You may be exempted from it.

You sit and say, well, man, I'm exempted from everything. Well, guess what? FMCSA, because FEMSA cannot release you from FMCSA's requirements, FMCSA gets to set the requirement for insurance. So here you are transporting hazmat, but you've basically, by doing things correctly, you've exempted yourself from all the regs, but FMCSA says, no, no, no, no, no, you're hauling hazmat, so you still have to have the elevated amount of insurance.

So again, the cardinal rule, and the one thing I want you to remember from this podcast, neither one of these sister federal agencies can release you from the other's requirements, And I see this often when I do audits on trucking companies. They will be hauling certain hazmats, and they're doing it right. I want to brag on these trucking companies. They're doing every single thing exactly the way that the Pipeline Hazardary Safety Administration says they must do them.

They're a safe company. They're checking all the boxes, and they're saying, we're not regulated under hazmat. But then FMCSA says, oh, yes, you are for your insurance requirement. And then we'll see that they're not carrying enough insurance.

They're not meeting the regulatory requirement for insurance. So let's talk for just a second about the types of trucking companies that are involved or are not involved in HAZMAT. And I have seen this over the years. trucking companies generally fall into one of three categories.

We have trucking companies that simply say, no, never. I'm not hauling hazmat, not interested in it, don't care anything about it, not going to mess with it, and I'm just never, ever, ever going to haul hazmat. Then we have companies that say, I think I'll take a look at it. There's some lanes out there that are offering some pretty good rates.

I don't want to be a full hazmat carrier, but maybe there's some opportunities. I call those people dabblers. They dabble in hazmat. And then we have motor carriers that proudly say, I'm a hazmat carrier.

I'm fully in. So how do those three companies look? Okay. And now I'm sharing this from the perspective of a safety professional, a risk consultant.

So let's talk first of all about these trucking companies that say I'm never ever ever going to haul hazmat. That is a great position to be in if you can be resolute about that, meaning you never waver from that posture. If you say I'm never going to haul hazmat, then you need to be resolute and say I'm never going to haul hazmat. What I see happen though, will be in a downturn in the freight industry.

And we're in one right now. Again, I told y'all, this is the year 2026. Freight rates are terrible right now. Trucking companies are hurting across our nation.

And so a lot of trucking companies are looking for opportunities, sources of revenue. How can I keep my drivers engaged? How can we get more loads? And what will happen is I've seen it over and over and over, a freight broker will reach out and contact a trucking company and say, hey, Mr.

Trucking Company, hey, Mrs. Trucking Company, I've got this load. It's coming into the port. It's coming into Houston.

It's coming into New Orleans, coming into New York, coming into LA, coming into wherever off of a ship. And they say, it's hazmat. I've seen it over and over. They'll say this, it's hazmat, but it's really not.

And really what the broker is saying is this product gets a lot of exemptions. Okay. But I'm going to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, again, if somebody has been doing this a long, long time, something's either hazmat or it's not. You can't change the complexion of what the core product is.

You may can exempt it from some regulations, but you just can't wave a magic wand and turn a hazardous material into a non-hazardous material. However, brokers will make you think that that is indeed possible. It's not. And so normally when I see one of these interactions between a broker and a trucking company, and a lot of times a trucking company will call me or they'll call another safety professional and they'll say, hey, I've been offered the opportunity to haul this.

Can you tell me what's involved? I'm tickled to death when they do that because then I can share with them hey listen you may want to haul this but you need to do this this this and this first and a lot of times they say that's too much hassle or I won't I won't generate enough revenue off this load to cover the expense of putting those steps into place so I'm going to walk away from it but what I invariably I've seen is somebody will just say yes to that broker and then they either get stopped on a roadside inspection or heaven forbid they get involved in a crash and they end up in litigation and then it comes out they're hauling hazmat and they weren't truly prepared to do that and what I normally see is a broker will offer a class nine hazard material and again I told you at the start of podcast this is not a deep technical dive into hazmat but the hazmat world all hazardous materials are grouped into one of nine what we call hazard classes uh just for example class one's all the explosives class twos all the compressed gases class threes all the flammable liquids class four are flammable solids class fives are oxidizers class six are poisons class sevens are radioactives class eights are corrosives and then class nine is what we call miscellaneous and it's any of the hazmat that didn't fit into one of the previous eight categories the problem with the class nines and this is only in the u.

s we're the only country that does this if you're hauling a class nine miscellaneous hazmat you're not required by law to placard the load so basically if you don't have to have placards your driver doesn't have to have a hazard material endorsement on their CDL. So these brokers, that's what a broker will say. He or she will say, hey, this is hazmat, but it's really not. And what they're really saying is this is a class nine and you don't have to have placards on the truck.

That would be a true statement, but it's not a true statement when they say this is a hazmat, but it's really not. And so I've gotten now, and I teach hazmat all over the country, but I've gotten to now where I start telling people class nines to me are kind of the gateway drug, if you will, of the hasterial world. And what I mean by that, we used to hear all the time, marijuana is the gateway drug. You smoke marijuana, and then by the end of the week, you'll be doing cocaine or methamphetamine or whatever, meaning that if you ever start smoking marijuana, invariably you're going to end up in the hard drugs.

Well, Class IX hazmat is kind of like that. These brokers will get trucking companies to start dabbling in the Class IX, and then two or three months later the broker will call say hey you've been doing me a fantastic job and the trucking company has and they'll say you know i've got some something else but it's a class three it's flamble liquid it's a class eight it's a corrosive but it's not really a bad one you're interested in doing that as well and so by opening the door and initially hauling those class nines you kind of open yourself up to saying uh maybe i ought to look at some other hazmat that moves us from this category of a trucking company that says I'll never ever do it to the ones that dabble in it and the dad the ones that dabble in it are ones that they're the core of their business is something else and they've started hauling just a few hazmat loads on the side these are the ones that I have the greatest fear of them getting in trouble number one I see that most of them do not have their insurance structured correctly and I often find they're not doing proper training on their drivers.

And those two things are most often found either during an audit or heaven forbid, if the trucking company is sued, it'll come out during litigation. So we often see trucking companies that say, I'm never hauling hazmat to where they move into kind of that middle category and they start dabbling in it. And then there's some real consequences there if they don't do things right. And then the last category are the ones that are fully in.

Those are the companies that say we are a hazmat carrier. We have subject matter experts on our staff. We know what we're doing. We do it correctly.

We do it safely, but they also know their limitations. I've got some very good friends that are in the gasoline hauling business. They haul thousands and thousands of gallons of gasoline every day to the gas stations where you purchase gas. Okay.

They're good at what they do. They're very safe, very, very safe. But if you were to call them and say, Hey, I've got a load of explosives would you haul that all you would hear was them laughing as they're hanging the phone up they know their limitations they're in the flamble liquid business they're not going to haul you can entice them enough to get them even interested in explosives or radioactives they know their lane and they stay in it and very very good hazmat carriers So what are some potential changes that are coming in the hazmat world?

Again, I've already mentioned this is the year 2026 and the current regulatory environment is basically non-regulatory. So we don't foresee any real big changes in the regulations this year with two exceptions. And let me share with you real quickly what these are. One of them I think is going to be catastrophic, at least to the trucking industry if it happens.

And that is there are some of the states, individual states, that are not pleased that the federal government is not more forcibly enforcing the hazmat regs. And so some of the states are considering new state laws or new state regulations specifically aimed at hazmat material. Right now in the U.S.

, we have uniform hazmat laws across our nation. They affect all 48 of the lower states plus Alaska. And again, they're very, very similar to the Canadian laws. But can you imagine the problems for a trucking company if they're an over-the-road interstate carrier?

meaning they go outside of their state. Can you imagine the trouble if every state had a different set of hazmat laws? I'm in Texas, but imagine if you got a Texas trucking company that's fixing haul a load to the West Coast, California, and they leave Texas and they cross New Mexico, they cross Arizona, they cross Nevada, and then they enter California. Imagine if every single one of those states had different hazmat regs or required you to have a state permit to go through their state it would it number one it would add tremendous logistical issues to trucking companies it would add tremendous expense to trucking companies and you would constantly be worried you know am i complying with with this state's law you know a very similar thing we have right now are snow chain laws they're different in a lot of states and every trucking company that runs anywhere west going across the Rocky Mountains, they always wonder, am I in compliance with this particular state's snow chain law?

And so imagine that that's on a much smaller scale. Imagine if we were applying that across the nation in terms of hazmat. So that's one I hope doesn't happen. But there are some states that are saying we're not pleased with the fact that the federal government is not more vigorously enforcing the hazmat regs.

And there are some states considering specific state laws just for their state in terms of hazmat. Now, the other one that I think we will see, and I mentioned at the very start, there's a product that really affects everybody in our nation, and it's a product called lithium ion batteries. Every one of you listening to this podcast have them. If you've got a smartphone, they're in your smartphone.

If you've got a laptop computer, it's what powers your laptop computer. If you have children or grandchildren at home and they've got remote-controlled toys or they've got toys that are driven by rechargeable batteries, those are lithium-ion batteries. If you have a rechargeable drill in your shop, you've got a rechargeable flashlight, you've got a rechargeable or a cordless vacuum cleaner at your house, those are all today run by lithium-ion batteries. And the problem with lithium ion batteries, lithium is a metal and it's mined out of the earth and it has an amazing capacity for storing electrical energy, electrical charge.

The problem is it also will burn and it will catch on fire. And when it does, water will not phase it. You can't put a lithium fire out with water. It takes some very specialized chemicals, specialized foam.

and the problem is there are millions and millions and millions of these batteries coming into our country every day from overseas. Now we've got some U.S. manufacturers that make lithium ion batteries to a very high standard.

They meet the United Laboratory standards for safety but most of these batteries coming in from overseas do not and those are the ones we're having problems with and what will happen is if there's any kind of stress on that battery You overcharge it, you drop it on a hard surface, it's damaged in some way. There's a very high propensity of that lithium ion battery catching on fire. And they often, they don't even have to have an external ignition source. They will just spontaneously combust.

And so it's already resulted, this problem has already resulted in numerous deaths across our country. probably the the most highly publicized one was in new york city where there was a shop that rented these rechargeable electric bicycles and it was on the bottom floor of a multi-story building there were apartments above it and one night while no one was at the store and it was completely unguarded some of those electric bikes simply caught on fire on their own nobody set them on fire it wasn't an arson the bikes just caught on fire and it caught the whole building on fire and people couldn't get out and they actually died and so these lithium ion batteries are a real issue the problem is they're a class nine and let that sink in again this is not a technical course but a class nine hazmat doesn't have to have placards so we've got tons and tons of these things going up down the highway in the back of trucks with no placards on them and we've already had some changes to the marking and labeling requirements by PHMSA.

So any of y'all that received any kind of rechargeable device at Christmas for a Christmas present, you probably saw a little sticker on there that looks like batteries, but one of them is burning. That's the lithium-ion battery label or the lithium-ion battery marking. There's a move right now within PHMSA to come out with a placard specifically for lithium ion batteries. That will be a phenomenal change.

Again, in my 40 years of past, I've never seen PHMSA come out with a placard dedicated to one product, not a class of products, but one product, lithium ion batteries. The issue and what they're wrestling with right now between PHMSA, the Pipeline Hashteral Safety Administration, and FMCSA, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, is because this is a class nine. If you placard it, what are we going to do about the hazmat endorsement on a truck driver CDL? So all of that's still being worked out.

But do not be surprised if you see some regulatory changes this year or next year, 2026, 2027, dealing with, excuse me, lithium ion batteries. So if you're thinking about hazmat, I'm fixing to wrap up. what are some suggestions what are some best practices i have to offer to you well number one if you decide to mess with hazmat know what you're doing and and that you would sit and say duh well that that ought to be true for anything but all of us everybody listening this podcast and the one broadcasting at me we've all been guilty of learning certain things by experience or by experiment you know i mean we learned to ride a bicycle by getting on it and falling down We learn to do various things by trying it and messing up over and over and over.

You can't do that in the hazmat world. You don't get any makeovers. You know, you don't get any mulligans for those of y'all that play golf. We've got to do it right the first time and every time.

So if you're going to mess with hazmat, make sure you know what you're doing. The second thing, and this is the thing I see most often as a failure on audits, is train your employees. That's your drivers, your shop personnel, if you have hazmat trailers and they work on them, your safety team, dispatchers that are going to dispatch hazmat loads. Training is the number one cited hazmat violation on audits.

Okay. So, hazmat training is a biggie. And the fines for failing to train hazmat are enormous and they accumulate by the day, by the employee. so make sure if you're going to get involved in hazmat that you do the the regulatory required training for hazardous material and the third thing i would encourage you to do is uh invite whoever your safety professional is and oftentimes that somebody works for your insurance company some of you have consultants that work for you invite them in to do a mock audit for you and tell them hey i want you to see how i'm doing on hazmat so uh that will give you kind of a a baseline of where you are in terms of regulatory compliance in the hazmat world.

So anyway, I'm going to wrap up now, and I want to thank you for your time. And again, just think about the kind of the current environment in terms of the regulatory, operational, and even the personal use of these various hazardous materials. They're important to every one of us. None of us could function in our day-to-day lives the way we currently are without hazardous materials in our world.

They're involved in everything. Plastics, your vehicles, the gasoline that powers your vehicle, the battery that powers your vehicle. If you have an EV, your laptop, your cell phone, hazmat is an integral part of every one of our worlds. but for those of us in the trucking industry and those of us in the ag industry and those of us in the safety profession we've got to be at the very top of our game when it comes to dealing with hazmat and so i'll leave you with that and i thank you for joining me on this episode of driving the line and remember we're the podcast that's always in the pursuit of safety and And speaking for myself and my colleagues, Jim and Barry, we will see you next time on Driving the Line.

That's all the time we have for this edition of Driving the Line, The Pursuit of Safety. We hope you enjoyed our discussion and thank you for listening. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Driving the Line, The Pursuit of Safety on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, or any other app you're using. You can also follow Marshall Clinton Agency on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.

Until the next time, thanks again for listening. Drive safely, everyone.