Parkland County Fire Services

NFPA 470 Hazardous Materials Operations

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Please Note - There is a substantial amount of reading and self-study required by students to be successful in this course. The NFPA 470 Operations provincial certification exam is one of the more challenging exams that you will complete during your fire service career, with exam rewrites and failures being quite common on this course. Please start on your pre-reading early and ensure you are allowing yourself a significant amount of study time ahead of the Provincial Certification Exam.

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NFPA defines the role of Operations personnel as those who respond to hazardous materials/WMD incidents for the purpose of implementing or supporting actions to protect nearby people, the environment, or property from the effects of a release.

Examination

The NFPA 470 Operations examination is 50 questions. All questions have the same value. Candidates have 120 minutes to complete the exam. Use of the Emergency Response Guidebook is permitted.

Skills Evaluation

Candidates will be evaluated using at least one dangerous goods transportation scenario AND at least one dangerous goods facility scenario. At least two of these scenarios must include the release and control of a product.

Resources

The following resources were used to develop the NFPA 470 Hazardous Materials Operations exam and evaluation materials:

• Essentials of Fire Fighting, Seventh Edition, IFSTA, 2018 (Chapters 2, 18, 19, 24, 25, and 26)
• 2020 Emergency Response Guidebook
• Information on dangerous goods from the Transport Canada website, including but not limited to information on CANUTEC and Emergency Response Assistance Plans (ERAPs) https://tc.canada.ca/en/dangerous-goods
• Information on Safety Data Sheets (SDS) from CCOHS website (Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety) https://www.ccohs.ca/oshanswers/chemicals/whmis_ghs/sds.html

Prerequisites:

1. NFPA 470/472/1072 Hazardous Materials Awareness,
2. NFPA 1001 Firefighter Level 1.

Overview:

Student will learn to identify the general shapes of typical dangerous goods containers. Given three examples each of liquid, gas and solid dangerous goods, collect hazard and response information using material safety data sheets (MSDS), CHEMTREC/CANUTED/SETIQ and contacts with the shipper/manufacturer.

You will learn to:

• predict the likely behaviour of a material and its container given an incident involving a single dangerous good
• estimate the potential harm within the endangered area at a dangerous good incident
• describe the first responders' response objective for each problem when given scenarios involving facility or transportation dangerous goods incidents
• establish and enforce scene control, including control zones, emergency decontamination and communications
• initiate the incident management system (IMS) specified in the local emergency response plan and standard operating procedures
• demonstrate the ability to use personal protective equipment; and perform defensive control actions set out in the plan
• evaluate the status of the defensive actions they take to accomplish established response objectives
• communicate the status of the planned response to the incident commander and other response personnel.