Reading through the opening comments from OSHA and EPA at this weeks Senate Committee hearing discussing Executive Order 13650 – Improving Chemical Facility Safety and Security offered us some very interesting insights as to what OSHA and EPA are doing and planning in their efforts to improve process safety. Here are some of those that I found most interesting.
- In order to improve data sharing among federal departments and agencies used to identify potentially noncompliant facilities, the
EPA and DHS adopted new procedures to identify facilities that, based on their required filings, could possess threshold levels of CFATS Chemicals of Interest but have not yet filed required Top-Screen information with DHS or a required Risk Management Plan (RMP) with EPA. - The EPA’s Facility Registry Service (FRS) integrates facility data from nearly 90 different federal and state systems, allowing users to compare facilities between systems, including chemical data and compliance history. The FRS has been updated to include facilities that complete a DHS Top-Screen submission for CFATS, which allows federal departments and agencies to identify:
- facilities that are covered by multiple federal regulatory entities, and
- potentially non-compliant facilities often referred to as outliers.
- The EPA’s Substance Registry Services (SRS) assists facilities housing chemical substances to determine their regulatory requirements by providing information about chemical substances tracked or regulated by the EPA or other sources. The SRS has been updated to include CFATS and Process Safety Management (PSM)- covered substances, which allows facilities to be informed about potential regulatory coverage under PSM and CFATS in addition to other EPA regulatory programs.
- EPA received over 100,000 comments from their RFI that ended on October 29,2014.
- OSHA will utilize the National Advisory Committee on Occupational Safety and Health (NACOSH) to assist with the development of a proposed standard on Emergency Preparedness and Response. A working group – likely composed of 16 subject matter experts representing a broad range of stakeholders – will be established under NACOSH to gather information, including public input, and to review and amend the draft regulatory text proposed by OSHA. The working group will report back to NACOSH, which will make its recommendations to OSHA.
- OSHA will consider rulemaking options to prevent ammonium nitrate hazards more effectively through either amending the PSM standard or the Explosives and Blasting Agents standard. If they decide that the PSM standard is the most appropriate regulation to address ammonium nitrate hazards, they will consider addressing these hazards through one of the following options:
- covering reactive chemical hazards under the PSM standard, or
- adding ammonium nitrate specifically to the PSM Appendix A highly hazardous chemicals list.
- OSHA intends to clarify confusing and misunderstood policies. For instance, the PSM standard has an exemption for retail facilities. However, the standard itself does not define “retail facilities” and early interpretations define a retail facility in a vague manner that has proven very difficult to understand and apply. OSHA is considering a revision of the current interpretation of “retail facilities” to reflect more accurately the original intent of the exemption as expressed in the preamble to the final rule.
- OSHA is considering:
- revision of the current interpretation of chemical concentrations to more clearly describe what the PSM standard covers and to align the standard with established best practices and the EPA’s Risk Management Program (RMP) concentration criteria, making the two regulatory programs more consistent.
- clarifying the PSM standard to incorporate lessons learned from enforcement, incident investigation, and advancements in industry practices, for example, root cause analysis, process safety metrics, enhanced employee involvement, third-party audits, and emergency response practices.
- adding substances or classes of substances to the PSM Appendix A highly hazardous chemicals list and providing more expedient methods for future updates. They have not stated what chemical will be added.
- expanding coverage and requirements for reactive chemical hazards, which have resulted in many incidents. They are looking at different options and considering other models such as that implemented by the State of New Jersey.
- DHS and EPA initiated a process to compare the CFATS “Top Screen’ database and the RMP database to determine if the CFATS database included facilities that should have also reported under the RMP chemical accident prevention program. As a result of this effort, the EPA contacted hundreds of facilities to request information and visited some facilities to help determine whether the facility
meets criteria to implement a risk management program requiring submittal of a risk management plan. Following this extensive review, only 13 non-filing facilities were identified, indicating that the vast majority of covered facilities are reporting under the RMP program. - covering oil and gas drilling and servicing work explicitly.
- requiring analysis of safer technology and alternatives, in coordination with EPA’s activities under the RMP (a combination of risk reduction analysis and hierarchy of control techniques that are currently industry best practices).
- requiring coordination between chemical facilities and emergency responders to ensure that emergency responders know how to use chemical information to safely respond to accidental releases, possibly in cluding exercises and drills.
- strengthening the OSH Act’s civil monetary penalties and indexing them for inflation. In addition to increased civil monetary penalties, the criminal penalty provisions of the OSH Act should be strengthened to provide a credible deterrent in order to achieve greater compliance with workplace safety and health standards.