First, confirm you are on the right form. DA Form 1971-2 carries the official title CHEMICAL DATA SHEET - MONITORING OR SURVEY, and you use it to chemical data sheet - monitoring or survey. Second, check the edition: the copy offered here is dated 03/01/2017 and its publication status is ACTIVE. Third, size up the job — 1 page(s) and about 115 entry fields, so you can decide whether to fill it now or set aside time.
Next, find out whether you are the one who fills it. In most cases you complete the entries yourself, and an administrator in your unit reviews what you wrote before it moves on. If you are the administrator, you will be working from what the individual gives you. Either way, T2COM owns the form and ATP 3-11.37 tells you when to raise it and where it goes afterward, so read the directive first if your situation is not routine.
Start at the top of the page and work down. The heading blocks come first: write your name as it appears on your official records, then your identification number, then your unit or organisation, then the date you are preparing the form. Do not skip ahead to the interesting parts and come back — these heading entries are how your form is found in the file afterwards, and a form filed under a misspelled name is a form nobody can locate.
Once you reach the body of the form, move between fields with the tab key rather than the mouse; it follows the order the form was built in and you are less likely to skip a box. Click check boxes and option buttons directly. When you meet a group of options where only one can apply, notice that selecting a second one clears the first — that is intended, not a fault. Watch your longer answers as you type them. A single-line field does not wrap, so text that runs past the edge stays visible on screen and then prints cut off. When you see that happening, stop and move the text to the remarks area or a continuation instead of squeezing it in. If a field does not apply to you, mark it rather than leaving it empty; a blank space tells the reviewer nothing about whether you considered the question or missed it.
Sign at the end and not before. Use ink or the electronic method your office accepts; whatever the state of the entries, an unsigned form is still a draft. When a reviewer, approver or witness has to sign as well, collect those signatures in printed block order and make sure each one is dated the day it was applied, not the day you started. Then read the form through once from the beginning. Three faults account for most rejections: a required field left blank, an identification number with two digits swapped, and a date whose day and month are reversed. Add a fourth if you began from an old working copy — data left over from the last time will travel forward untouched.
Read the Privacy Act statement when it appears on the page, before you fill in the personal details it covers. It sets out the authority for collecting the information, the purpose behind it, the routine uses it may be put to, and whether your disclosure is required or voluntary. Then keep in mind what you have created — a completed copy carries personal data, and you handle and store it under the rules that apply to such records.
Download the form
Then choose a file to download. What you will see offered is PDF, XFDL, and the only question you need to answer is whether you are typing or writing. Type, and you want the fillable pdf, where the entry areas respond to your keyboard. Write, and you want the printable pdf, which you print empty and complete with a pen. The layout does not change between them, so pick whichever fits how you plan to work today.
Then take care with how you open what you downloaded. Your browser will happily display a pdf, and for reading that is enough — but for typing it is not, because some in-browser viewers accept keystrokes and then throw them away when the tab closes. Put the file somewhere on disk, open it in a proper reader, type into one field and save, and confirm the text is still there when you reopen. If you picked up the xfdl copy, get the IBM Lotus Forms Viewer before you go any further, because nothing else will open the file.
One last point before you move on: every format is free. No registration stands between you and the file, and what you download is the published form, unaltered.
What the form asks for
- Agent_Detected
- Agent_Detected1
- Agent_Detected10
- Agent_Detected11
- Agent_Detected12
- Agent_Detected13
- Agent_Detected2
- Agent_Detected3
- Agent_Detected4
- Agent_Detected5
- Agent_Detected6
- Agent_Detected7
- Agent_Detected8
- Agent_Detected9
- Alarm
- Alarm1
- Alarm10
- Alarm11
- Alarm12
- Alarm13
- Alarm2
- Alarm3
- Alarm4
- Alarm5
Now send it on. Follow the routing in the prescribing directive, which will point you to a named office, to your unit administrative channel, or to your own file. Take a copy before you release it. From there the record follows the retention schedule for the series, and neither you nor the receiving clerk shortens or extends that on local judgement.
If you find you need a second form to go with this one, look by series and number. Forms in the DA series that share a proponent or a prescribing directive are often used together, and any form named on the face of this one normally goes forward with it. Gather continuation sheets, cover sheets and transmittal documents before you submit, not after somebody asks for them.
Before you reuse a saved copy, look at the edition date printed on it. The proponent revises the form from time to time, and your stored file will not tell you when that happens — you compare its date against the current edition yourself. If a revision has come out since you last filed one of these, leave the earlier submission alone; the change does not reach backwards.
Read this before you go. The file you download is a reproduction of a published Department of the Army document, offered as it was published. We are an independent site with no connection to the Department of the Army and no authority to issue anything, and we make no statement about whether your completed form will be accepted anywhere. Treat what you read here as information, not legal advice. Take real questions — about an entry, a requirement, or your eligibility — to T2COM or to your servicing administrative office.
Questions and answers
- What is DA Form 1971-2?
- CHEMICAL DATA SHEET - MONITORING OR SURVEY
- Which edition is current?
- 03/01/2017
- Who is responsible for this form?
- T2COM
- In which formats can it be downloaded?
- PDF, XFDL, PDF
Publisher notes
- --REPLACED DA FORM 1971-2-R, 09/01/1986--