Emergency response
A drum that failed, a load turned away, a container that will not hold until Monday. Call and you will reach a person who can start moving it, not a queue.
First, and before us
If anyone is hurt, if there is a fire, or if material has reached a drain, a watercourse or the ground outside containment, call 911 and your own emergency procedure first. We are not a first responder and we will tell you the same thing on the phone.
Once you call
One call, to a person rather than a queue. We take the details, tell you plainly whether this is something we can move and how fast, and start work on it from that call. If people or the building are at risk, that is 911 first — we handle everything after the situation is stable.
Nothing moves until we know what it is, because material shipped blind gets turned away at the receiving end and you have two problems instead of one. Where there is no label and no safety data sheet, we establish it — sometimes from analysis, more often from where it came from and what was running at the time.
In an emergency the question is not which outlet is best, it is which one will accept this material today. We know the difference and we go after the second. That is the call we make, not one we hand back to you with options.
We book the carrier, raise the paperwork and get the material off your site. You are not ringing round for a truck or working out which forms a receiving facility wants before it will open the gate.
The record gets built as the material moves rather than reconstructed the following week, which is when it usually falls apart. If there is a finding to answer or a report to file afterwards, we have what it needs and we will help you answer it.
The usual reasons
Not an exhaustive list. If it is urgent and it is a material you need gone, call us and we will tell you straight away whether we can move it.
Have this ready
If you do not have all of it, call anyway. We would rather start with half the picture now than wait an hour for the rest of it.
Questions
No, and be wary of any waste company that says it is. Fire, injury and an uncontrolled release are 911 and your own site procedure — those people are trained for it and we are not. We handle what comes next, which is the part nobody else wants: identifying the material, finding somewhere that will take it, moving it, and producing the paperwork.
It depends on the material, where you are and what the receiving facility needs before it will accept the load. We will tell you on the first call what is actually achievable rather than agreeing to a time and revising it tomorrow. If we cannot do it in the window you need, we will say so on that call.
That is normal and it is our problem to solve, not a reason for you to hold off calling. Most of the time we work it out from where it came from and what was running; occasionally it needs a sample tested in a lab. Either way that is the first thing we do.
No. Most emergency calls come from operations we have never worked with, usually on the worst day they have had in a while. There is no account to set up first and no requirement to move anything else to us afterwards.
If it is urgent, pick up the phone. A person answers and we start on it from that call.