Chemical Safety Board Chair Rafael Moure-Eraso told lawmakers at a recent joint Senate committee hearing that "more must be done" to modernize chemical plant safety regulations, particularly in the area of process safety management. He argued before members of the labor and environmental panels probing an interagency effort to tackle plant safety concerns after the West, TX, fertilizer plant blast of 2013, that PSM regulations "have undergone no substantive improvements" since their inception in the 1990s. "Moreover other existing OSHA standards governing explosives like ammonium nitrate, flammable and combustible liquids, and hot work are even older, dating from the early 1970’s, and are based on fire code guidance from the 1960’s."
