Michael Nolan

Hazmat Incident Reporting

I recently had the opportunity to work with the Data Liberation Project on a web scraping project. The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, a division of the U.S. Department of Transportation, regularly publishes hazmat incident reports. However, data for each incident is not saved to a collected source for easy access.

DLP went ahead and made a scraper to collect that incident data into a single set of csv files that can be found through this project description page. I was able to contribute to the project by building a script that regularly updates and publishes an RSS feed of all incidents. A separate feed for each U.S. state is also available. All feeds can be found here in the project’s github repo.