A hazardous material you are carrying causes an incident, and the general public is evacuated for one hour or more. What notice does federal regulation require, and who owes it?

Explanation

Each person in physical possession of the hazardous material must give notice by telephone to the National Response Center as soon as practical and no later than 12 hours after the incident, and an evacuation of the general public for one hour or more is one of the listed triggers for that call. The duty is placed on whoever physically has the material, which on the road means the driver rather than an office somewhere, and the notice has to carry specific content including the reporter's identity and contact number, the date, time and location, the extent of any injury, the class or division, proper shipping name and quantity where that is known, and whether a continuing danger to life exists at the scene. The telephone call does not discharge the paperwork: each person making it must also make the detailed written report the following section requires. The wrong options each remove the call or misplace it, substituting a written report on a 30-day clock, routing the notice to the state police and gating it behind a reportable quantity, or narrowing the triggers to death and hospitalization and so missing the evacuation criterion entirely. Reportable-quantity reporting is a real duty but not one of this section's triggers: it comes from a separate Environmental Protection Agency rule that the section's own note points at, and it does not decide whether this telephone notice is owed.

Source: 49 CFR 171.15