The Gap Between Knowing and Doing: TREEO’s First In-Person 8-Hour HAZWOPER Refresher
For years, one piece of feedback kept showing up after every HAZWOPER refresher: students wanted more practice. Not more slides, not more discussion, but a chance to actually run through the moves before they’re ever needed for real.
The week of July 23, TREEO hosted our first-ever in-person 8-Hour HAZWOPER Refresher, and it looked nothing like a typical refresher. Students suited up and worked a full decontamination (decon) scenario as a team.
What Changed
There’s a real difference between knowing a procedure and actually being able to run it with a team counting on you. The 8-hour refresher has traditionally lived on the “knowing” side: a review, a discussion, a box checked for the year. Useful, but not quite the same as being in the suit.
The Safety & Health team saw an opportunity to close that gap, and they took it. From Safety & Health Instructor Cindy Mercado’s perspective, running the refresher right at the tail end of the 40-hour course just makes sense: it gives everyone a chance to review core concepts together, and it lets returning students share their own experiences and insights with the newer participants, making the whole room a little more collaborative and engaged.
The revised schedule is designed to build confidence step by step. Instead of packing everything into a few days, students have multiple chances to learn, practice, and apply what they’ve learned before heading into a final exercise.
On Day 3, the 24-hour students join the 40-hour class. On Day 4, the 8-hour refresher students join the group. The day includes an interactive review of key topics and ends with a hands-on decontamination (decon) exercise. It’s always one of the best parts of the course. Experienced workers share stories and lessons from the field, while newer students gain practical experience setting up and working through the decon line. Everyone learns from each other.
By Day 5, it’s time to put it all into action. The 24-hour and 40-hour students work together in a realistic emergency response scenario. They identify hazards, make decisions as a team, respond to changing conditions, and move personnel through the decontamination line. Dressed in full PPE, the team works through the entire exercise just as they would on a real world. And just when they think everything is going according to plan, we introduce an unexpected challenge. It’s a little hectic, just like the real world, and it gives students the chance to think. “Watching everything come together is one of the most rewarding parts of the week”, Cindy said.
Bill Dempsey co-taught Thursday and Friday, putting his freshly earned CIT designation to work. Thursday also brought in guest speaker Daniel Velez, a former firefighter, paramedic, and bomb squad technician, who gave students a perspective on hazardous materials response that you just don’t get from a textbook.
Inside the Scenario
Friday’s exercise put the team in the middle of a realistic response at a commercial warehouse: a chemical had spilled from a damaged container, an employee had been exposed and was already being decontaminated, and the building had been evacuated as a precaution. With limited information to go on, students had to size up the situation, make good calls, and apply what they’d spent the week learning. Cindy said the group made smart, confident decisions throughout, and handled an unexpected twist in the scenario with real poise.
One moment stood out to Cindy in particular: the student serving as Public Information Officer was hit with a tough, unexpected question from “the press”, and handled it with real composure, staying calm and communicating clearly under pressure. That’s the kind of moment that’s hard to fake, and exactly why the hands-on format matters.
Students walked away with a lot to say about it. Course evaluations were full of comments like “the stories that were incorporated made the class more interesting,” and more than one student made a point of connecting the real-life scenarios to the material itself, praising “the topics covered in conjunction with instructor real life scenarios.” One review summed up the whole point of the week in a single line: “in-person class is always better than online.”
Looking Ahead
This is the direction HAZWOPER training at TREEO is headed: more doing, more practicing, more real scenarios. View upcoming HAZWOPER courses here: Environmental Safety and Hazard Control Courses
It was a great week, and an even better group of students. We’re proud of how everyone showed up, adapted, and got it done.