Facing competing calls from industry and environmental justice advocates over how to strengthen plant safety, the Environmental Protection Agency is preparing an advance notice of proposed rulemaking in order to take comment on whether or how to revise its accidental release prevention program, a move that suggests any changes to the program are likely a long way off.
OSHA chief David Michaels put two related regulatory concerns -- a pending rule to tighten controls on crystalline silica dust and the agency's worry about antiquated chemical permissible exposure limits -- at the centerpiece of a push on Friday (April 25) for tougher OSHA protections ahead of Workers Memorial Day, April 28, sounding alarms about what he calls a host of “silent killers” rampant in the workplace.
OSHA standards officials are considering adding new layers of chemical safety oversight to the agency's decades-old rule requiring users of risky chemical processes to develop and put in place “management-system” practices, a concept that could engender opposition down the line as industry argues the performance-based elements of the rule, which already set it apart from most OSHA regulations, have been shown to work.
The chemical industry is likely to push back against new signals by OSHA that regulators may explore revising the process safety management (PSM) standard governing safety requirements in potentially dangerous chemical uses to cover all reactivity hazards, an issue borne out by probes into accidents over the years and which has emerged as a key concern after a massive fertilizer plant explosion in Texas last year.
Federal officials engaged in probing chemical disasters pressured OSHA chief David Michaels and other Obama administration officials in a White House meeting after the West, TX, fertilizer plant explosion to embrace the use of inherently safer technologies (IST) where possible and to revisit a range of longstanding OSHA process safety management (PSM) requirements, and continue to push for tougher regulatory policies, the U.S. Chemical Safety Board chairman told Inside OSHA Online in an interview Tuesday.
The industry coalition American Chemistry Council (ACC) is challenging New Jersey's model chemical facility safety program, arguing in comments to the Environmental Protection Agency that the state incorrectly labels facilities' routine safety upgrades as shifts to inherently safer technologies (IST) and fails to account for changes that shift risks to other parts of production processes -- a dispute that occurs as OSHA comes under increasing pressure to embrace IST.
OSHA is making the case for a much stricter standard on respirable crystalline silica by forming an alliance with several groups of occupational health experts in the Atlanta region -- a partnership designed to provide construction employers and workers with guidance and training to prevent overexposure to the toxic dust generated in some building activities.
U.S. Chemical Safety Board (CSB) investigators are set to release preliminary findings from their probe into last year's disastrous explosion of a fertilizer processing plant in West, TX, potentially teeing up recommendations to OSHA on how safety regulators could tighten up federal rules covering such facilities.
Government chemical safety experts are pressuring OSHA to get rid of key exemptions applying to the oil and gas sector in the agency's process safety management (PSM) standard in response to what they call high rates of injuries and fatalities throughout the industry, after an earlier dispute over covering those work sites ended in industry's favor.
Safety and health activists, in pressing for a new OSHA rule cutting down on worker exposures to crystalline silica dust across the spectrum of both large and small U.S. businesses, have tapped into a long-simmering source of grievance with the federal regulatory process: that agencies often rely heavily on the Small Business Administration's (SBA) expansive view of what constitutes a small entity and as a result over-estimate rules' impact on small businesses.