Today I learned of yet another SIGNIFICANT difference in complying with EPA’s RMP vs. OSHA’s PSM. Yes old dogs can learn new tricks and I am betting that I may not be the only old dog “out of compliance” with 68.200! We have been assisting a company with a US EPA RMP inspection and in doing so I have had the pleasure of working with a very sharp attorney. As we were working through some documentation items he/she indicated that 68.200 required that the facilities maintain their SOP annual certifications for 5 years. This was a new one on me, as I always applied 68.200 to my OCA supporting documentation, but never to my annual certifications of SOPs. I found our today how WRONG I have been!! At my former facilities we would have been able to produce this evidence as far back as 1992 as we always had our procedures in a control document management system; but we did this NOT because of 68.200, but rather that is the way you manage critical administrative controls! So I challenged the attorney and US EPA resources about this assertion that 68.200 applied to SOP annual certifications and this is what I learned today… and yes this old dog has his tail between his legs tonight!
First here is 68.200
§ 68.200 Recordkeeping.
The owner or operator shall maintain records supporting the implementation of this part for five years unless otherwise provided in subpart D of this part.
NOTE: Subpart D is Program 3 Prevention Plan items.
You may be like me (or you may be much smarter than I) and may have read this requirement hundreds of times. I know I have and each time I was under the WRONG impression that it applied ONLY to the Off-Site Consequence Analyzes (OCA). Those who work with process safety items daily know all the time frames that come with PSM/RMP. We know that the Operating Procedures (SOPs) must be annually certified, but did you also know that 68.200 requires the documentation of the annual certification of said operating procedures for RMP covered process(s) to be maintain on-hand for five (5) years?
Go ahead, pick yourself up off the floor, and dust yourself off, as I too fell out of my chair when I confirmed this with the EPCRA/RMP Compliance Office and one of the main RMP professionals at US EPA. You can see his e-mail response below. Not to digress too far off the topic, but in my small mind this is just crazy. I was raised in process safety by true process safety professionals who knew that SOP validation was a critical path in applying administrative controls to high risk processes. They also taught me to ALWAYS second guess a facilities ability to validate their SOPs to a level that administrative controls should be used as a “safe guard” in a PHA. Basically, if a facility wanted to use “procedures and training” as a safe guard in a PHA, they would have to demonstrate to the facilitator that their SOPs were up-to-date AND all the personnel who utilized these SOPs had been trained AND their knowledge verified! I was taught to first look at the past two audits to see if there were issues found with the SOP accuracy and thoroughness and if the last two (2) audits did not find issue then I was to take a sample of the high risk procedures (e.g. loading/unloading, Emergency Shutdown, etc.) and walk them down with a trained operator as my tour guide.
So as you can see I am a stickler for SOP accuracy and such I have NEVER subscribed to the practice of having a single “certifying document” for all my SOPs. In my professional opinion, and 20+ years of process safety experience, that is just too easy to pencil whip such a critical function in process safety. We also had our SOPs in a very tightly controlled “document control system” much like our ISO Quality Procedures. We had these SOPs in our Work Order System so that a certain number would come up for their annual review each week and by the end of the 12 months we had ALL of them reviewed and certified and the process started all over again. In fact this practice was one of our “process safety metrics” that we tracked closely and used as an indicator of how well each unit was managing their process safety management systems. Each SOP would go through a desk-top audit, a field walk-down, and a supervisor would approve it with his/her signature. Certain SOPs were even escalated to the unit manager and safety manager for approval. The Safety Team would audit this SOP annual validation process by selecting a couple of SOPs each month and we would walk them down to ensure everyone was being “honest” in their review and any deficiencies that we found were harshly handled! After all if a person from outside the unit can randomly pick an SOP, spend less than 30 minutes walking it down, and find multiple errors then someone is not doing their job!
So in my world, 68.200 adds a massive paper work burden to my already heavily loaded paper management system. The last specialty chemical plant I was at, we had 12 covered processes, of which 7 also fell under RMP Program 3. Each of these processes would have a minimum of 100 or so procedures, with several having close to 300 procedures (and these were NOT one page procedures!). So imagine my dismay when I did the math in my head… 7 processes with at least 100 SOPs would be a minimum of 700 procedures that get certified annually. 68.200 now requires me to keep these old “certified” procedures for five years, meaning that I now have to maintain at least 3,500 documents to comply with 68.200!!! Of course now that one-page certification letter is looking better and better; but it just kills me to think of all the plants that we have found horrendous SOPs but they had a signature letter saying they were “certified”; as you can imagine it can become rather contentious during our audits when we refuse to accept a pencil whipped one page letter for the certification process!!! But damn it, it makes sense now just to appease EPA! I mean this inspector did NOT walk down the first SOP, never interviewed the first operator, but cited the facility because the SOPs did not have a “certifying” signature and we could not show five years of annual certification signatures. I am 110% certain, had this facility been able to slide five (5) one-page letters with a manager’s signature across the table, the inspector would have looked at the five dates on the letters and moved on; instead, the facility gets cited and he wants little to do with understanding how thorough their review and approval process works.
So for the sake of TRUE process safety I encourage you to implement a robust review and certification process for not ONLY your operating procedures, but also your maintenance procedures and safe work practices. If we really wish to lay claim to the use of “administrative controls” within our process safety management systems we MUST FIRST ensure they are accurate and up-to-date BEFORE we train to them. Then we have to ENFORCE them! Too many facilities lay claim to “administrative controls” only to have their own personnel and contractors mock the procedures or the practice of following said procedures. Even if 68.200 requires us to maintain mounds and mounds of our annual certification documentation for five years, I say let’s prop up our hometown office furniture store and start buying some filing cabinets and do what we have to maintain a robust document management system. It may take us to our knees from time to time, but these process hazards are just too great to be shortcutting such a critical function.
From: “Belke, Jim”
Subject: RE: 40 CFR Part 68.200
Date: May 16, 2014 at 3:14:51 PM EDT
To: Bryan Haywood
Hi Bryan,
Yes, 68.200 applies to annual operating procedures certifications. I do not think that it necessarily equates to generating the number of documents in your example, although it might, depending on the complexity of the facility. The reason I say not necessarily is that we sometimes see procedure certifications that are done on a signature/date page appended to each procedure – so for procedures that don’t change year over year, the next annual certification is added to the appropriate signature page, but no new document is generated. But I take your point that RMP/PSM compliance can involve generation and retention of significant documentation. For document management generally, we increasingly see operating procedures and other associated RMP documents managed electronically, and even for large facilities with numerous procedures, drawings, maintenance records, etc., storing a large number of documents electronically requires a relatively small amount of electronic memory.
Jim Belke
EPA