CSB Publishes Reactive Hazards Study 60-day ICR Notice

Today, the Chemical Safety Board published a 60-day information collection request (ICR) notice in the Federal Register (88 FR 43270-43271) for “Reactive Hazard Study Survey of Industry Practices”. This ICR supports a survey that will be used in a study conducted for the CSB by the Federal Research Division (FRD) of the Library of Congress. The study will be a follow-up to the 2002 CSB report on Improving Reactive Hazard Management.

The CSB expects that the researchers will contact 15 facilities and 9 other stakeholders to participate in the study. They expect that the survey will take three hours to complete. A copy of the draft survey protocol along with the proposed questions can be found here. This will be a one-time, voluntary data collection.

The CSB is soliciting public comments on the ICR. The notice does not provide specific information about submitting comments, but it does provide a unique email address as a point of contact for the program (reactives@csb.gov). Comments could be sent there. Deadline for comments is September 5^th, 2023.

CSB Announces Meeting – 4-20-16

Today the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB) published a meeting notice in the Federal Register (81 FR 21533-21534) for a public meeting in Washington, DC on April 20^th, 2016. The meeting will also be shared via a conference line.

This is a business meeting rather than an incident review meeting. Items on the agenda include:

• The status of open investigations;

• An update on audits from the Office of the Inspector General;

• Financial and organizational updates;

• A review of the agency's action plan; and

• A calendared notation item related to recommendations 2001-01-H-R9 and 2001-01-H-R10 from the 2002 study on Improving Reactive Hazard Management.

Both of the recommendations that will be evaluated/approved are recommendations made to the American Chemistry Council. They revolve around:

• Developing and implementing a program for reporting reactive incidents that includes the sharing of relevant safety knowledge and lessons learned; and

• Work with NIST in developing and implementing a publicly available database for reactive hazard test information.

There will be a public comment period provided at the meeting and written comments may be submitted for the record.

OMB Receives ANPRM for OSHA PSM Revision

Yesterday the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) announced that it had received an advanced notice of proposed rulemaking from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for possible modifications of its Process Safety Management (PSM) program.

According to the Spring 2013 Unified agenda this potential rulemaking could include:

• Clarifying the PSM exemption for atmospheric storage tanks;

• Expanding coverage and requirements for reactivity hazards;

• Expanding the scope of paragraph (j) to cover the mechanical integrity of any safety-critical equipment;

• Expanding the scope of paragraph (l) to require greater organizational management of change from employers; and

• Updating §§1910.106 and 1910.107 based on the latest consensus standards. 

While this ANPRM would appear to be in response to requirement in the President’s Chemical Safety and Security Executive Order (EO 13650) to determine if the “PSM can and should be expanded to address additional regulated substances and types of hazards” {6(c)}, it was placed on the Spring Unified Agenda before July 4^th, well before the EO was published.

At this point there is no telling just what changes are being considered. Even when this ANPRM is published it will be more about getting feedback from industry and the public about what types of things should be considered in the rulemaking. There will be no actual language for the potential changes included in this initial document of the rulemaking process.

With the complexity of the issues and the controversies surrounding them, this rulemaking could take quite some time. The ANPRM, however, should move fairly quickly through the review process at OMB. We might see the ANPRM published before Thanksgiving or certainly before Christmas.

It will be interesting to see how long it will take the EPA to initiate a similar rulemaking process for their Risk Management Program. There was nothing in the Spring Unified Agenda to indicate that such a rulemaking was already in progress when the EO was published.